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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#211

Post by kogok89 »

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"

This says more about a shift in the way of consuming content, and the quality of the content than the search results quality/algorithm itself. People are tired of fluff and want direct quick answers; Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, etc, all provide that.

People don't want to search for a bread recipe, click to see it and be forced to scroll through 3 folds of ads and the history of bread in eastern europe, to get to the list of ingredients.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#212

Post by mikepurvis »

lesuorac wrote: post #39
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…

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…

"This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads"

I think another factor is the paradox that the user who has enough money to be willing to pay to not see another ad is exactly the most valuable user to advertisers— they've pre-qualified themselves on multiple axes.

So there is always going to be an enormous moral hazard here with the ad-driven-freemium model— always a temptation to run an occasional high-value ad to the paying users, or to disguise the ad as a "recommendation" or position it instead as a "sponsorship", or whatever else. Other than users reacting swiftly and decisively against this kind of thing, it's hard to know how else to keep companies away from it.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#213

Post by photochemsyn »

kogok89 wrote: post #211
herval wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

This says more about a shift in the way of consuming content, and the quality of the content than the search results quality/algorithm itself. People are tired of fluff and want direct quick answers; Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, etc, all provide that. People don't want to search for a bread recipe, click to see it and be forced to scroll through 3 folds of ads and the history of bread in eastern europe, to get to the l…

Physical cookbooks are still quite nice to have around for this reason.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#214

Post by calrain »

I think this article is missing the point that the technology of a solution is different from its intrinsic motivations.

PageRank could have been fine if the intrinsic motivations were to educate, enlighten, and help people.

Just because a search technology is wrapped up to look like a personalized AI doesn't mean it is immune to the same intrinsic motivations.

Who is to say that Google won't release a 'Personalized Search AI' that is free for the user and it continues to follow the same motivations that their PageRank solution does.

I think custom AI's tuned for each person will be the defining technical foundation for the next few decades, but I'm extremely concerned that the fundamental business drivers that compete for sales, view time, and divisiveness will not be resolved.

Nothing will stop an authoritarian government, an ad driven company, an entertainment company, or a political research company from giving out 'free' personal AI's.

If the history of the Internet has anything to teach us then it is this:

The free ones will always be more successful than the paid ones.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#215

Post by irsagent »

g_p wrote: post #160
x62Bh7948f wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using orion for a while, but sometimes with a couple of YouTube tabs open the bottom of my M1 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably hot.

There was a recent bug fixed, specifically on YouTube, due to ad-blocking causing a constant loop fetching and reloading an icon or something to that end, I believe - it was fixed in a recent release. I suspect that was what you were seeing, and if so, updating should have addressed it.

https://browser.kagi.com/updates/orion-release-notes.html

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#216

Post by ipaddr »

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…

"At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use"

240 searches cost them over $10.00. They will need to find additional revenue or reduce costs to even reach a break even point.

They will have to raise prices or make you pay per search or sell your data or better yet all three.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#217

Post by narrator »

To me it looks like they broke search to only return mainstream stuff for any search with any connection to an official narrative. Pagerank is the opposite of that. That could be why Sergei and Larry aren't doing much work these days with Google. Larry is in Fiji and hasn't been heard from much in the last two years.

IMHO, Yandex feels like the old Google. It returns lots of small sites for most searches and does way better on controversial topics.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#218

Post by PaulHoule »

danans wrote: post #204
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 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.

No, I think a modern directory would be a set of topics in an ontology with links. If I had to seed one I would suck all the external links out of Wikipedia, impose some organizing structures (probably overlapping trees or dags) and then build a set of classifiers for nested topic relevance, spaminess, etc.

There are certain sites which have a landing page for every topic in some set of topics, you could add a lot of links quickly if you built rules for importing links from particular sites. Adding 10 sites a day with 1000 links each would be very possible, in 100 days you could build out a million links.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#219

Post by PaulHoule »

ketzo wrote: post #50
rgbrgb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How would you really blackbox a search ranking, though? A website owner can always just search for themselves, and see how their ranking changes. When there’s so much money at stake, people will go to great lengths to reverse-engineer the things that put them higher in the page, no matter how you try to hide the levers that make the rankings work.

Google has a big bag of tricks to gaslight webmasters, they even have patents that describe some of them.

One form of personalization that they applied early on is move results you click on a lot up in your results you can’t trust the serps you see at all.

They also inject a lot of arbitrariness and randomness to make it impossible to make small changes to your site to incrementally improve it the way you would improve an advertising campaign. One reason the web seems so frozen is that if you have a successful site and make major changes to the layout, titles, link structure, etc. you will possibly trigger the ‘chaos monkey’ and wreck your ranking and it may never recover.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#220

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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