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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

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Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#361

Post by einpoklum »

matai_kolila wrote: post #11

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article. There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it's flat absurd to call that ineffective. It's trivially easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first. I simply c…

> There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you're looking for

Especially if you're looking for Google users' private information, and you're a business partner of Google's.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#362

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

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…

> It's only on an entry-level account

for now....

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#363

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

stellalo wrote: post #176
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #113

The blog post credits Google founders for PageRank but probably the credit should go to Baidu instead. Check the history section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

The history section mentions the work of Baidu’s founder as somewhat related to PageRank in that it scores based on links. Work of others are also mentioned in the same section as “influential” for the development of PageRank. If we just trace back bibliographic references to decide on the inventor of PageRank, it will probably be Archimedes.

Yeah if Archimedes built a competing search engine that uses link ranking algorithms sure.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#364

Post by ZephyrBlu »

dchuk wrote: post #353
smt88 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but it sounds like they mean that building and quickly searching an index has been democratized. You can now use any number of FOSS projects or SaaS offerings to do that, depending on how big you want the index to be and how much you want to spend.

That’s right. Back when google was coming to be, building a search index was basically computer science/grad school research territory. Now there’s tons of good starting points that you can throw money and hardware to scale quite a bit to at least prove out a product concept.

Which starting points are those? I'm familiar with some open source search engines, but not open source solutions for crawling and updating a search index of the web.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#365

Post by birdyrooster »

> As some websites became more prominent thanks to their page rank ... > their publishers also realized they could monetize the traffic > they started receiving.

This is a non-sequitur. Publishers could monetize their traffic without PageRank, it is not a necessary condition for the publishers to realize they could monetize the traffic. This thesis statement is the crux of the rest of their argument, which makes the rest of this not make any sense.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#366

Post by dorgo »

rgbrgb wrote: post #74
ketzo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean blackbox in the sense that I can't explain how it works or look under the hood and understand it. Many machine learning models you want to be explainable for UX or debugging (e.g. Netflix's "because you watched X"). This is a rare case where it's better if you can't figure out how it produced a result. Instead, you want to throw queries and user behavior into a blackbox algo and have it tell you a result then…

>(did the user come back and ask the same question? did they click the top result and leave or did they have to come back and click through many more?).

What stops me from writing a bot to simulate that behaviour for my website (or websites of my competitors) ?

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#367

Post by matheusmoreira »

wardedVibe wrote: post #290
matheusmoreira wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads The reason they advertise is because they can. It doesn't matter how much money they're making now, they can always make more by advertising. Paying money just makes your attention more valuable. The only way to stop them is to make it impossible or illegal to advertise. Blocking ads everywhere and making no exceptions.

When google started, they were having difficulty staying solvent until they added ads, even though they had a better product than the other search engines. Its a space that's ill-suited to market solutions.

If their solution to insolvency is advertising, then let them be insolvent. We're not gonna keep enabling this behavior.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#368

Post by akrymski »

low_tech_love wrote: post #54
akrymski wrote: post #37

> The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive. Ask it for a good coffee maker, and it’ll recommend choices within your budget from your favorite brands with only your best interests in mind. The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so! Actually…

I think the point is precisely that PageRank is not being used anymore.

Oh but it most likely does use PR. Where do you think they get the results from? Are they scraping the web themselves? I highly doubt it. Results probably come from Bing.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#369

Post by akrymski »

mrkramer wrote: post #73
akrymski wrote: post #37

> The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive. Ask it for a good coffee maker, and it’ll recommend choices within your budget from your favorite brands with only your best interests in mind. The search will be personal and contextual and excitingly so! Actually…

>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…

YouTube ads are much much worse interstitial style ads that won't let you see the video until you watch an ad. That's why Netflix does well too. I don't think it's a relevant comparison.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#370

Post by fillipvt »

PaulHoule wrote: post #170

Most search engines suck because people find it too hard to do the work of tuning the parameters. There is a methodology to do that https://trec.nist.gov/ but it takes a huge amount of training/test data to do it and takes a lot of computational work after you've got that data. What TREC revealed is that most of the things that would obviously improve search relevance don't, and it took 5 whole years of 20 teams work…

Any link to the tiktok article?
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