Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Ads may suck, but simply charging for the same service isn't really innovative. Would I pay for a version of Google without ads? Probably not. Google already does this with YT; YouTube Premium[1] offers you YT experience without ads plus extra perks. And YouTube Premium has apparently more than 25 million subscribers in US alone[2] and 80 million subscribers globally[3]. My thinking is power users are ready to pay f…
I'm paying for YouTube Premium and you get YouTube Music for free + ad-free too. I've started paying because ads were annoying on my smart TV YT app and I already used YT Music.
The Age of PageRank Is Over
231–240 of 380 posts
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#232IMO 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.
>which is to create a human-curated whitelist-only search engine.
You might be interested in watching the series "Halt and Catch Fire".
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#233I'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 it for a few terms that Google found no relevant results for (related to Wasm/Rust); and holys*t there were many results from people (developers) who wrote in their blogs.
I'm a user now, and potentially a customer if I hit their free limit.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#234In a word, no. I’ve spent a lot of time on SEO over the past couple years, and inbound links still matter a lot to search rankings and traffic. This is clear evidence that PageRank still matters. From a more macro perspective, I’ll believe Google is failing when a competitor starts eating their lunch. What I see right now are a bunch of would-be competitors who want to eat their lunch, including this company. The blo…
I think they're more like trying to grab several of the crumbs that Google left behind. I don't think it's possible for a paid search engine to eat Google's lunch.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#235What an incredibly pointless and long ad disguised as a blog post.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#236I'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.
See if the founder’s side project Teclis [0] (non-commercial search) finds it. Kagi uses the project’s index in addition to Google and Bing.
[0]: https://teclis.com/
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#237IMO 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…
I like your idea of the search engine. It's what I miss from Google. At one time (2006?) we had the option to google search only forums and discussions, and that helped me get quality answers to my queries.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#238Earlier 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.
Always add the keyword 'forum' to your search terms. It filters out most of the crap.
"hackernews post, deeply knowledgeable, FAANG dayjob, startups with VC funding, increased conversion rates, trending on artstation"
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#239I'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…
I'm a little tired of the rhetoric about Netflix adding ads. It's only on an entry-level account that is subsidized from the normal pricing (IIUC, correct me if I'm wrong). You could argue that they've artificially inflated the price of the normal plan or that it's a slippery slope, but it's not like they've forced ads on the existing plans.
I think what's more interesting/concerning/insidious is hidden ad content like product placement. It's getting to the point where personalized product placement could be embedded in shows dynamically.
Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over
#240I just signed up and tried it a little bit and I like what I see so far. I find myself increasingly frustrated with Google search results for a particular use case: searching for documentation. For example, today's work had me thinking about Python's datetime and timedelta and I wanted a reference on what functions are available. With Google I am annoyed with results from geeksforgeeks.org and freecodecamp.com becaus…
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.
For me, #1 is the official documentation, #2 is a decent looking tutorial, #3 has a slightly better page on google, #4 is a clear kagi winner.
Neither of them offers bad results, but we are talking about google, it makes no sense to give example searches without saying what results you receive as Google is so heavily personalized.
Kagi does personalization, but it’s explicit. You yourself decide the region to search in (my default is international, though there are quick bangs to search in other regions), and you can up- or downrank domains, as well as block them completely.