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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#181

Post by t0bia_s »

libraryatnight wrote: post #161
cardanome wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am very willing to pay money for a user-centric search engine the requirement to do so directly conflicts with the greatest must-have feature that I need from one: Anonymity. Now the issues is not just privacy but making sure it does NOT optimize search results based on prior searches or other facts it knows about me. Now the big problem is that one would think delivering the exact search results that I am lo…

It sounds like you use the internet way different than me. I can't remember the last time I searched something where the end result wasn't mostly objective. Documentation, directions, tour information, movie times, programming questions, patch notes. Maybe seek contrary views out in the world. The internet is a terrible place to form a world view and to really communicate in general.

Agree, however we are already in trap of algorithms. Look how few years of using social networks spread ideologies that would be laughable back then, ie "there is more than two genders" or "earth is flat".

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#182

Post by widdershins »

twobitshifter wrote: post #163
lesuorac wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't make enough money otherwise. Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does otherwise you stop being able…

The sad truth is on average advertisers will pay more for your attention than you’ll pay not to have ads. So people continually complain about YouTube ads but ignore their option to pay to have them removed.

I pay for YouTube too. Between that and Kagi search, it's ~$20 per month. Which seems crazy in today's environment of 'everything free'. But seriously, I use these both all day for both work and play, but I only watch an hour of Netflix a day. So which is really more valuable?

I agree that on the whole, people will continue to go for the free option, but I'm just glad that some options are appearing to pay, which rebalances the incentives a bit.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#183

Post by treeman79 »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #174
fleddr wrote: post #168

You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves. Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, s…

I, for one, look actively for services I can pay for.

Year ago I had a realization. I make solid money. My spare time is very limited. Why am I spending hours trying to save 20 dollars.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#184

Post by fn-mote »

gumby wrote: post #82

Seemed like a perfect opportunity for Apple -- they could give their customers an actually useful search engine subsidized by their hardware sales. At the same time they could starve google and bling of the user data provided by customers using search in safari or siri. Instead they are going the other way. Sad.

Comparing Apple Maps and Google Maps, I don't have much hope of this working out the way you imagine it.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#185

Post by danuker »

fardo wrote: post #165
widdershins wrote: post #18

I've been using Kagi the last few months. I've never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don't really 'notice' them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only 'notice' search when it's bad. What really excites me is that is that I'm paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It's incredibly refreshing to know th…

>It's incredibly refreshing to know that the company providing my search results has an incentive to make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. It still might be a better alternative in the short term, but the moment growth starts to peak, companies follow where the incentives lead…

Also smartphones and smart TVs.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#186

Post by marginalia_nu »

fleddr wrote: post #168

You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves. Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, s…

> Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence.

While this sounds true, I think it actually needs motivation.

As far as I can tell, this type of analysis typically bases itself on only a few examples.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#187

Post by herval »

fleddr wrote: post #168

You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves. Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, s…

What makes you assume non-techies aren't feeling like the quality of results is lower? Plenty of people moving their search needs to reddit, tiktok, even pinterest seems to indicate that it _does_ affect them - they just don't articulate it as "the google algorithm yada yada"

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#188

Post by int_19h »

gretch wrote: post #84
pkoird wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, you can't really search youtube as efficiently as you can texts. That's the only downside for me, sieving through tens of videos just to find something that might be in the middle that's releavant to what i'm searching.

That’s true but there’s also a steep positive benefit in information density and fidelity. Compare written instructions for e.g. fixing a car vs a video of a person showing you how to do it. Latter is much more helpful

It really depends on the task, and the best approach is often to combine written instructions with a video.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#190

Post by nagonago »

smt88 wrote: post #164
kbyatnal wrote: post #145

IMO this article misses the biggest issue with search engines today. It's less about any ranking algorithm (like PageRank), but rather the root cause is with indexing. No matter how much you fine tune your ranking system, if your index is filled with SEO junk and blogspam, you're fighting a losing battle from the start. For some reason, a lot of these search engines like to brag about the number of documents in their…

For a long time, I've been considering a different solution to the problem, which is to create a human-curated whitelist-only search engine. I do think your idea is great and something with a lot of value for many use cases. The only issue is that it won't surface certain things like restaurant contact info and Wikipedia that people often need to be a top result.

I like this idea in theory, but I think it would be difficult to scale up enough to be useful.

Who would be the curators? If you open up curation to volunteers, it could be gamed by bad actors. However if you have too small a team, the results will be limited and biased. For example, favoring the English-speaking or tech-sphere web while ignoring large sections of the web with which the curators are unfamiliar.

Perhaps machine learning could help with scale - start with a human curated dataset, then train a model on it. However that could end up getting gamed too.

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