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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#191

Post by leoh »

gbear605 wrote: post #137
leoh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much disagree with your premise * one does not need $200-300B ARR to run a search engine; and merely making a ton of money does not mean that the way that one has been making that money will continue forever * using Kagi, one realizes how much the web has been perverted, in my opinion, by the obsession with the ad model; there are many nice, novel things that Kagi could introduce which would reduce ad revenue…

> $10/month (honestly I would consider $20) with 100M paying users That would actually be $12B ARR, since that price is per month while ARR is usually per year.

Oops, yup, just came back to fix this; ha!

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#192

Post by idlehand »

Invictus0 wrote: post #109
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…

Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they r…

Looking at the global median income and coloring it with the mean revenue per user paints an incorrect picture. Advertisers are not paying even $35/yr for the attention of people making the global median wage.

US attention is the most valuable because it is the richest large nation and the largest rich nation.

European attention comes a distant second. Together they have 40% of the global GDP, but likely something like 60-70% of the consumption of non-essential goods in nominal terms. Accordingly, average advertiser cost per clock differs ~10x between the cheapest and most expensive groups of countries.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#194

Post by davemp »

nmstoker wrote: post #152
Calamitous wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another nice thing about Kagi is that you can eliminate domains from your search results. Obvious content farms are pretty easy to spot and remove.

Yes, eliminating and boosting favoured sites are both excellent feathers on Kagi

That should be a good signal for ranking algorithms as well with the subscription price disincentivizing bots.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#195

Post by jongjong »

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…

I just tried Kagi and was surprised that my open source project shows up in the results for relevant keywords. All the other search engines I tried bury it completely out of view no matter how specific the keywords are. It makes me wonder how many other indie projects like mine are excluded from mainstream search engine results.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#196

Post by aflag »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #135
Invictus0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they r…

what I find strange is that selling ads makes more money than selling service. Because at the end the people watching the ads are buying the stuff advertised so those who adverstise have more money for advertising…. So for it to be rentable people have to buy way more than the ad revenue google makes. If spending for google ads is 1% of bussines budget and budget has to be at least Revenue……..with 280 billion revenue…

If you show an ad for a car that costs $100k to 1000 users and a single user buys it (0.1%) you still sold a car for $100k. Let's say it costs $90k to make it. You could pay $5 per ad displayed and still made a profit. My point is, the people who actually buy the products are actually paying for the other people who can't afford it. So, the model doesn't rely on everyone buying a keyring from a car dealership, but on most people not buying anything, and a couple buying a car.

In a sense, that model is better at distributing income, because everyone gets a service and the people who can afford pay for everything. If everything was behind paywalls, people who can afford would have all the nice services and people who can't, will have nothing.

What's interesting is that "targeted ads" is a bit of a misnomer. It's more of an ads ranking, where the user is shown the ads they are most likely to buy. However, from the point of view of the car dealership, when they think targeted ads, they would like their ads to be shown only to people who will likely buy the car. No company would want their ads shown to someone with no disposable income, yet, they will be shown some ad.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#197

Post by dismantlethesun »

Invictus0 wrote: post #109
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…

Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user per year. There is no way that you can come close to that without doing ads; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they r…

Isn’t Google revenue from more than search?

They have a full business suite, App Store, hardware sales, fiber internet, wireless cell and internet, and a server rental division.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#199

Post by abnercoimbre »

treeman79 wrote: post #183
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's such a strange phenomenon. My well-paid tech friends scoff when I say I pay $9.99 (annually, not monthly) for my little podcast app [0]. Meanwhile they have YouTube Premium. I don't get it.

[0] https://pocketcasts.com/plus/

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#200

Post by davemp »

PaulHoule wrote: post #179
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn’t gaslight the web: Web directories died out because they go stale, fast, and require far more human curation than is economically viable. I remember Yahoo effectively deprecating their directory pages long before I heard of Google, back when I was using Dogpile and CompuServe.

I never saw a web directory that took a serious approach to using automation to curate the directory. It's probably more feasible than people think because it's a matter of classifying links up or down (relevant or not) which is a much more ontologically and mathematically tractable problem than learning a ranking function or trying to classify things into one of N>2 categories. I think the problem may more have been…

I consider Reddit to be a form of web directory in a way.
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