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The Age of PageRank Is Over

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#331

Post by probablypower »

pjc50 wrote: post #328
ryandrake wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 killed the blogosphere, and will kill any decentralized system that becomes popular unless they can do something extremely clever. Instead of a dark forest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest ) think of the outer internet as a fake forest. If you wander off the beaten path - the same dozen sites that everyone uses and complains about - you wander into an endless, trackless zone of fakes all of which…

Thanks for the fun analogy. It is right on the money.

Made me imagine the invention of the internet as the big bang, and that now we are watching the expansion of e-space as all the useful bodies rush away from one another and the light-years of space between them is filled by a vacuum of usefulness.

Maybe one day the search for intelligent life in space will be easier than the search for intelligent life on the internet.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#332

Post by bryanrasmussen »

eskaytwo wrote: post #301
scarface74 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I real wish that HN wannabe lawyers would stop throwing *poly words around with no legal justification. In the streaming space in the US there is: Netflix, Disney+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video, HBO/Discovery, Paramount Plus, Peacock, STARZ, and a few other players. There is no “opoly” in streaming video.

That’s still a small number of players dominating the market. That’s the definition of an Oligopoly, and the Disney/HBO offerings very much fall into that. They certainly have the ability to uniformly raise prices (tacit collusion) with no viable competition to enter the market and fill the gap (as even the vast sums others have thrown into it have shown how hard it is to produce good original content). This is proba…

>The original post that you questioned was related to vertical integration - you could effectively find and replace it to “so you’re saying producers of operating systems shouldn’t be able to make their own web browser?”

I think time has shown MS was correct in making their own browser, but of course incorrect in all the corrupt tactics they used to make their browser succeed over Netscape's.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#333

Post by probablypower »

kbyatnal wrote: post #145

IMO 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…

Not to be rude, as I appreciate the motivation behind your work, but your post ironically followed SEO junk format:

1. Enter the discussion on a human level

2. Hook onto existing context

3. Argue issues with existing context

4. Present your own software as a solution to these issues

It is like a date that only wants to offer MLM business opportunities, or a long-form joke that ends with a disappointing "better nate than lever" punchline.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#334

Post by mjburgess »

probablypower wrote: post #333
kbyatnal wrote: post #145

IMO 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…

Not to be rude, as I appreciate the motivation behind your work, but your post ironically followed SEO junk format: 1. Enter the discussion on a human level 2. Hook onto existing context 3. Argue issues with existing context 4. Present your own software as a solution to these issues It is like a date that only wants to offer MLM business opportunities, or a long-form joke that ends with a disappointing "better nate t…

In general scams work because the form works, and should work, but the content is an illusion.

You could equally say everyone's following Aristotle's Rhetoric.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#335

Post by Gareth321 »

andyfleming wrote: post #239
fardo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 li…

1. Increase the price of the normal plans.

2. Create a new plan at the price of the old plan. With ads.

I'm sorry, but pretending that they're not adding ads to their "regular" pricing plan is semantic at best. This isn't something they dreamed up overnight. They've been planning this for years and increasing their prices accordingly.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#336

Post by fredgrott »

This begs the question:

Given Some social media platforms are moving towards some embrace of AI feeds, could those platforms retain their 2nd search engines role such as Youtube, Instagram, etc?

My own biased use case is that I started following a whole bunch of designers on Instagram to get new design news.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#337

Post by larksimian »

nagonago wrote: post #190
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.

I like this idea in theory, but I think it would be difficult to scale up enough to be useful. Who would be the curators? If you open up curation to volunteers, it could be gamed by bad actors. However if you have too small a team, the results will be limited and biased. For example, favoring the English-speaking or tech-sphere web while ignoring large sections of the web with which the curators are unfamiliar. Perha…

I think curation by paying users could work. At least it would make manipulation quite expensive.

Let people downvote/upvote search results as an extra strong signal on top of monitoring what they choose to click on in the result list.

Also let people block domains from searches and provide some discoverability of commonly blocked domains.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#338

Post by sph »

crocwrestler wrote: post #309
D_Alex wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cable television and netflix have made it quite clear that payment does not mean “no ads”, it just means “no ads, yet”. 'It's better to be a millionaire hero than a billionaire asshole' (Ben Elton, Gridlock ) Of course at $10/month even a 1% share of the search engine market would make the company worth billions.

Perhaps, but the millionaire hero will likely be outcompeted by the billionaire "asshole"

If the only metric of success is yearly revenue, yes.

If that is the only metric, the best business model is to extract as much money out of your user, while simultaneously offering less for the same amount of money, until you reach the asymptotic ideal of 100% profit.

If you were to start a company, would you be willing to do that? Would you choose profit over everything else? Some would, but not everybody.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#339

Post by amelius »

ALittleLight wrote: post #70
amelius wrote: post #20

Can the technology behind GPT-3 be used to find relevant articles given a query? E.g. instead of training it to generate sentences given a prompt, train it to generate URLs given a query (?)

I would hope that GPT-4 or 5 will obviate the need for this entirely. Just ask the LLM your questions and it will answer.

I wonder how they will fight SEO, though...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#340

Post by syntaxfree »

t0bia_s wrote: post #177
twobitshifter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad truth is on average advertisers will pay more for your attention than you’ll pay not to have ads. So people continually complain about YouTube ads but ignore their option to pay to have them removed.

Why wasting money on "feature" that can be done with same result for free? uBlock, NextDNS, pihole, etc. No-one is asking for ads by default, ever.

With YouTube premium you can listen to videos on the iPhone with the app in second plane or even with the phone locked.

Yeah, I should use a hacked rooted Android yadda yadda. But I just spent a week hacking and hawking for my life in an ICU, and I certainly didn’t want sanity-saving podcasts to shut down whilst on an hour-long stay at the breathing machine. Life is short.

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