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The Age of PageRank Is Over

blog.kagi.com

371–380 of 380 posts

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The market is “content”. Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite. > This is probably due to the characteristic that producing goods (decent original content) This goes back to YouTu…

> Netflix competes with YouTube content producers, TikTok and it even said that one of its biggest competitors is Fortnite. It competes with these for screen time , not for content. Meanwhile Disney owns how much content (movies, series and related IP)?

Very little as a percentage of all the professional content that’s in the world.

And the value of IP without execution capability is overrated. Warner also has iconic content. But Disney has been able to make successful movies out of its 3rd tier IP while Warner has struggled with its first tier.

Sony isn’t doing too well with most of its Marvel content except Spider-Man and that’s produced by Disney.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is severe rose colored glasses. Netscape was always a horrible application and crash prone on every operating system it ran on. There were geek wars back in the day bragging about how well our operating systems handle Netscape crashes - classic MacOS failed miserably.

IE was a much better browser. Especially the Mac version that when it was introduced, was the most CSS compliant browser that existed.

Netscape starting over from scratch was cited as “Things you should never do” in an article written by Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow cofounder) two decades ago.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#373

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.

"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…

That’s funny. Is that how pages go up in rank? Make many references to the same word and make circular arguments?!

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#375
post #115

This is marketing. That's all it is. It may as well be called "Search engine alternative to Google declares Google's secret sauce is dying". This reminds me of posts from 10 years ago where "the future of search of social" (this post says "user-centric" instead). Even Google feared that outcome (given the then-meteoric rise of Facebook; oh how the turns have tabled). Personally I find the musings in this post to bord…

But Google search results ARE not satisfactory. The existence of Q&A forums in the age when information is broadly online (and thus is accessible to Google) indicates a need that is not answered by Google.

Google's algorithm may be the best out there, but it still falls short of what is needed. Anecdotally, I often find it fails to conduct word-sense disambiguation, handle negation or answer edge case. My general impression is that Google's algorithm focuses on topical similarity (pages that talk about the query's topic) rather than answering the query.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not really about Netflix. The point is merely that "just because you pay them, doesn't mean you're not also a product to them". Companies love nothing more than to charge both ends of a deal. Take Spotify as another example. I pay them, along with 188 million other people. Does that mean they won't turn around and ask artists, record companies and rights-owning conglomerates for money (or rebates) for putting th…

What you say is true.

However, for sure that will get out eventually.

If that happens, I would then look at other search engines as well.

Most people wouldn't once they get used to doing it one way, so that's all to the good for Kagi. But people like me wouldn't then use it, which is what life is about - your own personal choices.

I prefer to pay for services because at least there is a slight chance that they will follow their business plan.

But nothing stays the same for forever. As a consumer, we must also change to the changing environment. I'm completely weened off Google, for quite a while now, for example. I'm paying for everything that I use. But it is so little as to be laughable. For example, I use tutanota for my email, first account is free and subsequent ones are $1/month. Big whoop. $12 per year for private emails. I have a number of emails through them because I segregate all my emails - one for just friends, one for business, one for education, etc.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#377
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.

> Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search has a non zero cost. With other search engines, advertisers cover this cost. But it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.

.0125 per search. The teams rate is twice that.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#378

I was curious and went to their Pricing page. Their link to pledging "5% of its profits" to supporting non-profit organizations for a more humane internet leads to a dead AWS page

Oops.. The correct link should be https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html

A bit late in my response, but thank you for this. It's really cool to see Fairplay included in here. They are doing great work

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a strange phenomenon. My well-paid tech friends scoff when I say I pay $9.99 (annually, not monthly) for my little podcast app [0]. Meanwhile they have YouTube Premium. I don't get it. [0] https://pocketcasts.com/plus/

See I haven't even made it there. I'm in a household that subscribes to Netflix, Prime, Disney, Spotify, and several Twitch streamers, yet I'm enough of a cheapskate that I somehow still slum it with free-tier Youtube and Castbox. At least I throw my preferred YouTubers a few bucks a month on Patreon, but that feels different since I'm paying them more or less directly for the work they do, rather than buying myself…

Yeah, just pirate the content from the streaming services & pay people directly where you can.

Re: The Age of PageRank Is Over

#380

There is a simple test to see if a search engine acts in your interest: Seach for “pornhub” with any NSFW filter off. Kagi fails to list the obvious result. I’ll stick with DuckDuckGo, thank you.

I tried, the first result is Pornhub. What are you expecting?
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