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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

221–230 of 380 posts

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#221
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"

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.

If not priority, at least fix the actively-misleading results page. So many examples, choose your own adventure.

One that annoyed me today: on mobile, reddit search results will all say like "3 days ago" or "6 days ago" and then the actual link takes you to a six year old post.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would (and have) buy a cookbook on Amazon before sitting through recipe ads. It’s as bad as porn hub.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#223
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…

> People are tired of fluff and want direct quick answers;

When didn't people want "direct quick answers"? Google got popular because that's what it used to give you - the answer you want used to always be the first or second...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#224

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.

I searched for that (without the quotes) and this was the 2nd result: https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-tutorial/postg... The first result was the official documentation. What else are you expecting?

I see this from time to time myself where someone points out how bad the results are, but different results for me when trying the example. However, there are certain other things that I have searched for myself that absolutely resulted in crap results from SEO/blogspam type of results. So I know 100% it happens.

What I'm wondering is how much of your recognized fingerprint influences the results? What causes results to be different from user to user using the same search query?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#225
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"

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.

Personally, whenever I want to search anything about TV shows (particularly the most recent ep), games (particularly sticky ones like rimworld or factorio), I quite literally search directly on Reddit, bc the Google results are never relevant

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#226
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly how do you think Google (and Bing, and ...) work? They do start from known indexes, in particular wikipedia. Hell, Google even has internal papers where they claim they improved search quality by "wikipedia's" as a unit.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#227
post #79
post #51

Why does everything in the future-web have a price tag attached? If anything I want less business middlemen on the web period. I don't understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising: "And yes, the non-zero price point will mean you have to budget it with your other costs. But faster access to higher quality information will make you much more competitive global…

> I don't understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising The more the economic incentives of a business are aligned with the customer's interest, the better. Of course, it's not perfect, and business still might have an incentive to show ads on top of charging you, but it's certainly much better than having hugely misaligned incentives as with Google and social…

I hate this argument. It is economic dogma ... and it's bullshit. Why? Bread in Jerusalem: the law of demand and supply doesn't exist for the vast majority of goods.

Jerusalem is a city like any other. Everybody has food. You can buy bread there. And while the city has big problems, not many people are starving (not quite zero, but which city can say that). Economic theory dictates that bread would follow the law of supply and demand. Is that so?

Let's say the price of bread halves. Will tomorrow see more bread sales in Jerusalem? Here's the critical piece of evidence: NO, it won't. It won't even shift from one kind to a fancier kind of bread. Let's say the price doubles. Same thing. We're in a ZERO price elasticity regime. Sure there are prices where supply and demand would work, but we're far away from those prices. But it gets worse.

Let's look at supply. Bread is incredibly cheap to make. There is at least a 80% or so margin on bread (it's quite expensive, or profitable on the other side, if you look at it from a COGS perspective). Let's say the price of bread doubles (you could argue it has, many times even). Will more bread be produced in Jerusalem? NO. Again there are prices where we'd see supply tightly tied to prices, but we're very far away from those prices.

BOTH on the supply and demand side we see ZERO price elasticity. If you look up in your economics book you will not find this situation, and even in academia people aren't exactly comfortable discussing it. Price elasticity is ZERO for bread, both on the demand and the supply side, if you belong to the economists that at least split that up.

So what makes the difference? You can make a good living selling bread, but you can't attract customers using prices ... nor can you change your profits much by playing with prices (in fact the very act of trying out prices will lose you a lot of customers). So something else needs to make a difference. What determines which bread you buy? Google does (and Facebook, and ...)

And this applies not just to bread. This applies to the vast majority of foods. One of the big complaints in European countries these days is that entire economies are running headfirst into this problem. Even labour! People can't change jobs (supply of labor is regulated by employer demands, or outright regulated with laws) and employers can't change the pool of labor by much by raising wages. Unless you're exceptional or outside of the norm (yes, programmers are, so this is the wrong forum to make that particular argument), you cannot change your income much by providing more labor! Given "no skills" labor even the difference between working and not working ... is not very large and dropping.

This, obviously, enables FANG companies to extract the profits of normal businesses. They can choose who gets the profits of many products, and demand a growing share of the profits ...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#228
post #216

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.

I wonder how much the per-search cost is marginal cost vs. amortized fixed costs.

If their paying user base grows by 10x, do the searches drop from 4¢ each to 2¢ each?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#229
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 still want a search engine that highly ranks pages with no ads. Get us back to those 1990s days a bit more.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PageRank is gameable but harder to game than some of the competing algorithms (such as a straight link count.) The real consequence PageRank had was that it got web pages to stop linking to each other…. Google gaslighted people into removing the competition they could have had navigating from one page to another through links. (e.g. web directories)

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.

It's not quite the same as the web directories of old, but I find the links and content contained in the "Awesome [topic]" lists on GitHub to be a useful resource. The curation aspect is managed via pull requests just as any other open source project, although this doesn't make it immune from going stale.
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