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The Age of PageRank Is Over

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#201

Post by dpkirchner »

ryandrake wrote: post #159
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches. Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.

"Do you want to learn about blogspam? If so, you are on the right page. You will learn about blogspam here. One of the most major things about blogspam is that it exists on the Internet. You just learned that blogspam exists on the Internet. In this way, you have become educated about blogspam. Now that you know about blogspam, we'll move on to the next topic: How to find blogspam. It's actually very easy to find blo…

This is also giving me Microsoft "independent advisor" vibes.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#202

Post by Gigachad »

herval wrote: post #187
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"

Reddit search is garbage. What people do is they search on google “headphones_model review reddit” on Google which shows them somewhat less fake information than the SEOd blog posts that would come up.

Sure maybe it would be good if Google prioritised these results by default but that would just result in reddit becoming more manipulated since whatever the default search shows will be gamed.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#203

Post by freediver »

lmeyerov wrote: post #158
freediver wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other options include going public or paying out dividends.

Going public is a qualified event for a SAFE to convert -- it is a financing -- but curious about the dividends SAFEs are often capped, so taking awhile doesn't matter so much, except maybe interest calcs

If a company is doing sustainably well, supposedly you could have a mutually agreeable mechanism to convert SAFEs to equity (at cap for example) and treat shaleholders with dividends.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#204

Post by danans »

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 never saw a web directory that took a serious approach to using automation to curate the directory.

That's what search indexes are. Automatically curated directories.

It's just that the UI to the index is natural language queries instead of clicks through a graph, because the latter isn't scalable to large corpuses.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#205

Post by PaulHoule »

davemp wrote: post #200
PaulHoule wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't use it though because I've got this disability that memes cause me extreme distress.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#206

Post by yarg »

rgbrgb wrote: post #36
yarg wrote: post #6

It has been for a long time. PageRank was never designed for adversarial scenarios. It reminds me of KPIs like lines of code - it's only useful if it cannot be manipulated. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

There's maybe a good argument there for blackbox (non-interpretable) ranking algos.

That looks a bit too much like 'security via obscurity' to suit my tastes.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#207

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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…

They're selling distribution. Why is it strange to you that distribution is valued so highly? In a lot of ways it's more valuable than a product.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#208

Post by ZephyrBlu »

dchuk wrote: post #175
smt88 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"a human-curated whitelist-only search engine" This is a good idea. Basically harkening back to the old internet directory days, combined with the powerful indexing tools we have now, and then use all the great language models and topic modeling tooling to make the querying great. Said another way: moderate and protect the index, instead of trying to clean up the results of queries. You'd need to monitor the whitelis…

> combined with the powerful indexing tools we have now

What powerful indexing tools exist today? I have little context on the search domain but it's very interesting.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#209

Post by mikepurvis »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #199
treeman79 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

See I haven't even made it there. I'm in a household that subscribes to Netflix, Prime, Disney, Spotify, and several Twitch streamers, yet I'm enough of a cheapskate that I somehow still slum it with free-tier Youtube and Castbox.

At least I throw my preferred YouTubers a few bucks a month on Patreon, but that feels different since I'm paying them more or less directly for the work they do, rather than buying myself a marginally better experience from Google.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#210

Post by gnramires »

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 believe it's a responsibility of organizations themselves to orient this way, and for customers to be vigilant about this orientation. Does your search engine have weird incentives to exploit you? Change search engine :)

----

I have an idea (more here[1]) that the next addition to our civilization should be a distributed system to evaluate, reward and compensate externalities. Open source software is a great example. It's free, it has massive benefits to users and for people reusing it for all sorts of projects, it's public. Yet we still can't find a great way to fund it. There are donations, and maybe that's all we need in some sufficiently enlightened society, but I think we should be addressing those more directly. And clearly there are technologies which generate friction and other social costs, that could be (differentially) quantified and prices. The same goes for pollution and a miriad of issues.

Laws can help here, but laws tend to lack softness and specificity in my opinion, and laws are strictly punitive. If you're generating a negative externality, and the legal system is well designed, maybe you'll have to compensante for it. But that relies on quick lawmaking and judges evaluating something they're not specialists at. And there's no dual for punishment (actually compensation and reeducation), there's no intrinsic reward system. There are prizes and grants, and I'm sure they generate immense value for what they are, but they're still very unsystematic and unreliable, I think.

I dream of a system where if you generate value for society, you will be recognized and make a comfortable living off it; if you need investment, you will also be supported. (I call this idea Elementalism; I'm not sure it's original)

I think we need to be a little more open to careful, thoughtful changes to our social-economic system that can improve things.

While Elementalism isn't a formal part of our system, each of us can do our part and give directly to what we understand needs the most. This is the core idea of Effective Altruism which I also extend to donating to Open Source (which I believe can be effective[2])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043752

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/comments/v7ma0d/w...

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