[HN Gopher] The Age of PageRank Is Over
___________________________________________________________________
The Age of PageRank Is Over
Author : darthShadow
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-11-09 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kagi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kagi.com)
| irsagent wrote:
| I started using Kagi and Orion a while back and it has changed
| how I used the web. Both the products Kagi offers has only
| increased my productivity and removed the internet junk that I am
| used to seeing on the web. A note on Orion, the ability to use
| extensions from both Firefox and Chrome store is why it is
| admirable, the cherry is Mac integration and its similarity to
| safari with the tree-view tabs.
| widdershins wrote:
| 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
| that the company providing my search results has an incentive to
| make things better for _me_ and not a legion of advertisers. With
| Google I can't help thinking about every keypress being logged to
| optimize sales pitches at me. I just don't feel that with Kagi,
| because I'm paying them.
|
| Sure, they might be logging every keypress (I don't actually
| think they are, but you never can tell) but even if they were, I
| could be reasonably certain they were doing it to retain my
| subscription, which probably means making my search better, not
| selling me other stuff.
|
| It's a priveleged position to be in, and the economic argument
| isn't watertight, but in the "search as a brain extension" space
| it still _feels_ premium, because it creates trust. And that
| frees up brain space for other things - like where the hell was
| that article I was looking for?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Google's revenue is over 280B annualized from last quarter's
| numbers. Let's just assume that every person on earth is using
| Google at an equal rate. That's $35 worth of revenue per user
| per year. There is no way that you can come close to that
| without doing ads. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for
| companies to pivot to ads once they run out of other ideas to
| grow the business.
| knicholes wrote:
| Oh, but you CAN tell if they're sending those keypresses back
| to the mothership by monitoring the networking tab in your
| browser.
| tyingq wrote:
| Maybe. They can hold batches and smuggle them in various
| ways.
| knicholes wrote:
| If they have an auto-complete feature, the keypresses WILL
| be seen in not even in a smuggled way. They'll be directly
| in the URL to the search function!
| corobo wrote:
| You could probably hide that from anything but a deep
| dive by chucking the data through a websocket. Unless you
| see and recognise the initial socket connection you may
| miss it entirely.
| sergimas15 wrote:
| awesome
| lesuorac wrote:
| The economic argument not being watertight is the problem. This
| is why tech companies keep pivoting to ads, they just didn't
| make enough money otherwise.
|
| Afaik [1], there's about 5 employees and the revenue only
| covers server expenses while they're still trying to get more
| headcount. Not an expert on bootstrapping but I'm pretty sure
| you don't want to expand faster than your revenue does
| otherwise you stop being able to make all the decisions for the
| company.
|
| [1]: https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months
| BasilPH wrote:
| They mention that users can invest in them through SAFEs.
| This only makes sense if they plan an exit, either by selling
| or through an IPO, or am I missing something?
| [deleted]
| entwife wrote:
| I have always imagined PageRank to be modeled after how academic
| papers are judged. What cites that publication, and who that
| publication cites, are quite important information to put a
| publication in context. For the same reason, I don't think
| PageRank will go away.
|
| Two improvements that I'd like to see in search results are: (1)
| the ability to exclude particular domains from search results;
| and (2) the ability to over-weight certain referrers (i.e. a link
| from Encyclopedia Britannica is worth more than a link from
| Wikipedia, which is worth more than a link from MySpace.)
| beckingz wrote:
| Reject modernity, embrace tradition: we're going back to user
| curated indexes like it's the 90s!
|
| Time to join a web ring.
| [deleted]
| artificial wrote:
| StumbleUpon!
| lesuorac wrote:
| I do wonder how unique web searches really are. It'd definitely
| take some time to achieve a critical mass but I swear most of
| the stuff I want to look up I could do with an index although
| sites come and go so the larger your index gets the more upkeep
| it costs.
|
| I think the biggest issue is live news but I mean then just pay
| like 12 people to watch news/sports networks and you won't be
| that far behind. (Or just have an section of the index for live
| information and let users to go nfl/espn/oan/cnn).
| andirk wrote:
| My favorite was LinkExchange. An interesting little success
| story too [0]. We should also bring back the term "webmaster"
| so when people ask what you do, respond, "I'm a webmaster".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange
| amelius wrote:
| 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 (?)
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| harryvederci wrote:
| Too bad Kagi shows Amazon shopping results, from what I hear
| that's a horrible company for its own employees.
|
| Otherwise I might have given it a shot.
| valarauko wrote:
| Kagi gives you the option of blocking results from any
| particular domain, if you like.
| ispo wrote:
| This reads like this is the death of all network centrality
| algorithms, and no way, guys, no way. At most this application
| will somehow decline even if only for a while.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I've been using Kagi on and off for the last few months. I often
| forget about it since I can't set it as my default browser in
| Safari.
|
| But in general, especially when looking for specific phrases or
| trying to find discussions related to a topic, it's working
| extremely well. Whenever I used it, I was happy with it, and the
| search result quality was better than in Google.
|
| It's good to note though that iirc Kagi does actually use
| commercial search services by Google/Microsoft behind the scenes,
| in addition to their own custom components.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| They have a Safari extension. Have at it!
| TehShrike wrote:
| Safari mobile too: https://kagi.com/faq#How-do-I-set-Kagi-as-
| my-default-search-...
| ryandvm wrote:
| > since I can't set it as my default browser in Safari
|
| Wait, what? It boggles my mind that technologically inclined
| people continue to use this user-hostile, walled garden
| nonsense.
| dageshi wrote:
| The people who used to make niche sites that helped people and
| linked to other sites moved to youtube.
|
| Plenty of excellent youtube channels that 10 years ago would've
| been websites.
|
| I don't really have a problem with this, all things change.
| pkoird wrote:
| But then, you can't really search youtube as efficiently as you
| can texts. That's the only downside for me, sieving through
| tens of videos just to find something that might be in the
| middle that's releavant to what i'm searching.
| gretch wrote:
| That's true but there's also a steep positive benefit in
| information density and fidelity.
|
| Compare written instructions for e.g. fixing a car vs a video
| of a person showing you how to do it. Latter is much more
| helpful
| snowwrestler wrote:
| In 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 blog post is probably best understood
| as aspirational rather than descriptive.
|
| As a user of search, Google results are frustrating at times, but
| is that because "pagerank is over?" Or because it's an incredibly
| hard problem they're working on? Google does not have to be
| objectively perfect to keep succeeding, they just need to be
| better than other search engines.
| candyman wrote:
| It's about time. Google results are so full of promoted and
| sponsored content that you must use tricks to get past it. Even
| so most of the best things are no longer findable via Google even
| if you know what you are searching for!. I've been using Kagi for
| a few weeks now and really like the results. I signed up for a
| paid account to support their progress.
| boringg wrote:
| Cool but why do I need to do a login to even give it a test
| drive? Immediate turn off.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| Because they only allow 50 searches per month in their free
| tier. You can check how the UI looks using the "Example
| search results" area in the home page.
| krm01 wrote:
| I find myself still using Google for searching the web a lot,
| however, maybe 2% is the classical website search.
|
| It's mostly to find an image, a video, a location on maps, etc.
|
| I wonder if Google could turn things around by rethinking the
| search experience. They're still the fastest first stop on your
| journey to find something on the web. But the behavior has
| changed dramatically that a change in their UX alone could really
| make a big impact. Maybe moreso than just an algorithm change.
|
| I once redesigned the search experience of a large global
| ecommerce company. The UX changes alone grew their revenue quite
| a substantially and reduced customer complaints.
| larve wrote:
| I've been using kagi exclusively for the last 3 months. I pay $30
| because I feel it's worth it and I can afford it. While I tried
| to use duckduckgo, I found myself reverting to google on every
| other search. With kagi, I never had to, and I have built myself
| a set of useful filters based on what project I'm working on.
| This, along with switching to mastodon, means that I almost never
| encounter ads anymore. I honestly feel like I got my "internet"
| back. I didn't realize how much the google search suggestions
| would taint my day to day.
|
| I whole heartedly recommend kagi. My favourite feature is the
| "blast from the past" that shows results that are not online
| anymore, but links to web.archive.org.
| jitix wrote:
| Congrats! I've recently started the journey towards more
| decentralization and kagi seems to be the next logical fit. So
| far I've self hosted backups with s3 replication and next cloud
| over tailscale has been amazing but I'm still trying to figure
| out social media.
|
| How does the workflow look like for sharing an album of pics
| with friends and family (who are on traditional social media
| platforms)?
| endisneigh wrote:
| If Kagi gets popular it would have the same problems as Google
| today has. They're unavoidable.
|
| You can mitigate it with curation, but then you're bound to
| niches and bias, which is true with automation as well. No
| victory here.
| leobg wrote:
| I wonder how Kagi's crawler gets around the Cloudflare protection
| that many sites are using today.
| yarg wrote:
| It has been for a long time.
|
| PageRank was never designed for adversarial scenarios.
|
| It reminds me of KPIs like lines of code - it's only useful if it
| cannot be manipulated.
|
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| drc500free wrote:
| I'd say rather that it wasn't designed for modern adversarial
| scenarios. Google won the search engine wars because PageRank
| did better in the late 90s adversarial environment, where every
| page was packed with white-on-white keywords. It was
| significantly harder to create a counterfeit influence graph
| than to keyword spam with hidden text elements.
|
| That all seems pretty quaint these days, but even worms and
| viruses at the time were versions of "my goodness, who would
| ever write a script that emails itself to your address book, or
| copies itself across the network to all the other unsecured PCs
| with passwordless full hard drive access?"
| rgbrgb wrote:
| There's maybe a good argument there for blackbox (non-
| interpretable) ranking algos.
| ketzo wrote:
| 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.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| 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 give it
| feedback on whether the result was good (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?). I think this is kind of how google
| works now, though results are frequently meh. Millions of
| backlinks will get you noticed but your ranking will just
| keep dropping if users don't appear to find your content
| useful (e.g. they hit the back button a lot and keep
| searching).
| leobg wrote:
| Personalized results. If you Google yourself, you just see
| what you see. But you can never know what others will see.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Personalized results. If you Google yourself, you just
| see what you see. But you can never know what others will
| see.
|
| That just turns it into a statistical problem.
|
| I don't think you can escape the problem of a search
| engine being used as an oracle.
| pornel wrote:
| Ranking has many many signals, which are mixed in non-
| linear ways, and are dampened and vary over time. You
| only get low-resolution low-frequency sampling of the
| result.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Then you get SEO witchcraft consultants who charge an arm and
| a leg for what they _promise_ is a secret but oh-so-good
| method of improving page rank.
| rgbrgb wrote:
| The current state of the world!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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)
| a-dub wrote:
| it amuses me greatly that 30 years in to the great commercialized
| internet experiment, we still don't have durable mechanisms for
| publishing, spam filtering, identification, reputation,
| moderation and discovery.
| kerblang wrote:
| Purely anecdotal, but as a matter of fact yesterday I spent 15
| minutes searching for a web site on google (I couldn't remember
| the domain name), threw up my hands, went to duckduckgo, and
| nailed it on the first try.
| CalChris wrote:
| PageRank was all Larry Page. The cited article was about the
| search engine.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en
| s3000 wrote:
| The article suggests that search engines will become a personal
| choice. I rather think that good search engines will become such
| a competitive advantage that companies will buy search engine
| access for their employees.
| pnemonic wrote:
| Is this a clone of bearblog (is bearblog a clone of this) or do
| they share an open source?
|
| EDIT: I'm dumb. Please do not reply or I will Sylvia Plath
| myself.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't think Google even uses PageRank anymore, do they? So, the
| title is correct, but not super meaningful. It sounded like the
| battle cry he's sounding is more like "The Age of Search
| Advertisement is Over", so why not use that as a title?
|
| By the way, I've been a satisfied Kagi customer since the day the
| beta ended, and I have nothing bad to say about the service.
| Okay, it would be nice if they remembered I like to view
| temperature in Fahrenheit, but whatever.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Honestly not sure if search engines are the future at all, at
| least for commercialisable content.
|
| More and more I find myself searching through moderated social
| media like Reddit or Facebook Groups/Marketplace for product
| recommendations or local services.
|
| Gave Kagi a go, but it seemed to be even worse than Google for
| what I tried.
| notatoad wrote:
| i think general purpose search engines will always have a
| place, but they're ultimately a tool you use for finding
| information, not necessarily a tool you should be expecting to
| make decisions for you.
|
| so many of the complaints about google search results seem to
| be along the lines of "i asked google what X i should purchase,
| and they served me an ad", whether that's a first-party ad on
| google or search results that are external ads. If you're only
| attempting to use a search engine to find facts, it's a much
| more satisfactory experience.
|
| search results for opinions are and have always been trash -
| they don't serve you the best opinion, or the most trustworthy,
| or the most well-reasoned. they serve you the opinion most
| relevant to your search terms. and that's probably not what you
| want.
| c7b wrote:
| Isn't FB marketplace just another search engine? It seems
| unlikely that the algorithm would be able to purely guess what
| you currently (actually) need.
|
| And moderated groups don't sound like a solution to the 'I have
| a concrete question that I want an answer for right now'
| problem either (unless you're thinking of massive live chats
| with many lurkers, which sounds more like the web of the past,
| tbh).
| drstewart wrote:
| This feels like a consequence of a centralized, gardened web,
| not because Reddit / FB are inherently superior experiences.
| nharada wrote:
| Is there a way to provide feedback to Kagi that a link isn't
| relevant in their search? Searching "us election results" for
| example gives me the results from 2020.
| bpbp-mango wrote:
| There is a 'send feedback' link at the top right on desktop
| aimor wrote:
| 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 globally, so you
| can decide if the investment will be worth it, like any other
| purchase you make. This will in turn incentivize these products
| to be even better, a positive feedback loop driven by entirely
| aligned incentives."
|
| For businesses I think this effect is only driven by competition
| regardless of revenue model.
| thethirdone wrote:
| If you want less middlemen on the web, you are probably not in
| favor of advertising. Price tags only involve a middle man of
| the payment processor. Advertisement involves ALL of the
| advertisers on the platform.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Doing things requires hardware, which uses electricity and
| needs software which costs man hours.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _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
| media today.
|
| > _Why does everything in the future-web have a price tag
| attached?_
|
| Because it uses real resources like humans and hardware that
| cost real money in the real world. You don't ask why you need
| to pay money to buy an apple at the grocery store, do you?
| jchw wrote:
| I hate to seem condescending, but the "why" is basically what
| the essay is about for the first 75%. The issue that
| advertisements have is that the incentives and desires of
| advertisers usually misaligns with users, sometimes greatly.
| It's not a concept that's particularly new; for example, take
| Wikipedia's reasoning for not accepting advertisements. (I'd
| like to ignore the unrelated issues with Wikipedia funding
| here, since it's not relevant to this particular point.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_th...
|
| I don't believe direct sales fixes everything. There's no
| single party whose ultimate wishes are fully aligned with
| what's best for everyone. I do think, however, that direct
| sales and donations are preferable to ads in this regard.
| aimor wrote:
| I could have been more clear: I don't understand why the non-
| advertising business's interest is aligned with that of the
| user. I follow the idea that advertising creates a conflict
| of interests, but I don't follow that not advertising aligns
| interests. The business is there to sell a product for the
| most profit. Making money by selling the product doesn't by
| itself give them an incentive to produce a better product.
| therealmocker wrote:
| _> Making money by selling the product doesn 't by itself
| give them an incentive to produce a better product._
|
| Selling more product / continued subscriptions is the
| incentive.
| jchw wrote:
| I don't entirely follow, though; the idea is that you want
| the people who pay you to be satisfied with what they're
| paying for so that they continue to do so, convince others
| to do so, and are willing to increase their spending. If
| that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a conflict of
| interest for advertisers in the first place.
|
| There's reasons that the incentive to keep the users
| satisfied may not be followed, but it's mostly tangential,
| and relates more to other forces than it does where the
| money comes from.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Do you think that running servers, writing code, maintaining
| systems happens for free? How else is the service supposed to
| fund itself?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| PageRank was never as important to Google as Google said it was,
| the idea of indexing keywords that appear in link text was much
| more important.
|
| It took years for peer-reviewed papers to show any benefit from
| PageRank at all, part of it is that a real relevance function has
| to balance the keyword x document influence vs the document
| influence and you don't come out ahead ranking an irrelevant
| document highly if it has a high page rank. (E.g. a popular
| document that is irrelevant is... irrelevant)
|
| If you believe the original paper, PageRank is simulating the
| density of a random walk over web pages and Google has been able
| to sample that density directly w/ Google Analytics, Chrome
| browser telemetry and all their other web bugs.
| akrymski wrote:
| > 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 Google is already doing this. Results are personalized
| and contextual. It can't really know what I feel like eating this
| evening because I don't, but it can guess.
|
| I applaud the author for trying, but I don't see an alternative
| to PageRank being proposed. How exactly is Kagi proposing to rank
| results?
|
| And no, I don't want an AI generated summary when I search for
| the best tutorial to do X. I want a list of tutorials. The
| question is how to rank that list, and I've yet to see anyone do
| a better job than Google.
|
| Google is far more than PageRank. Its an AI ranking model that
| has the largest training dataset (queries and clicks).
|
| 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. But that's just me - I actually like to know
| who is advertising for particular searches. A company with an ad
| budget to rank at the top of ads is probably more trustworthy
| than an anonymous website.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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 for ad-free experience and casual users
| probably not because they are not heavy users.
|
| >But that's just me - I actually like to know who is
| advertising for particular searches. A company with an ad
| budget to rank at the top of ads is probably more trustworthy
| than an anonymous website.
|
| A lot of spammers and fraudsters see advertising as their most
| effective gateway and tactic to scamming people so I wouldn't
| count on reliability and safety of all ads that you see.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/premium
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-
| premium-...
|
| [3] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-
| premium-8...
| three_seagrass wrote:
| That's no really relevant to Google or Kagi.
|
| YT Premium is a reaction to the infeasibility of subsidizing
| the extreme cost of hosting video streaming with ads alone.
| The scale of ads needed to cover hours of streaming video vs.
| ads to cover search results are magnitudes in difference, and
| people are more willing to pay to make those streaming ads
| disappear.
|
| Even so, with a paid option, the vast majority of YT users
| still use Youtube w/o the Premium subscription.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| I think the point is precisely that PageRank is not being used
| anymore.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.[0]
|
| I am genuinely curious how did _Kagi_ arrive at this cost.
|
| [0]: https://kagi.com/pricing
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I saw that too. Seems pretty high. I also think their plan of
| hoping future users search less on average is probably bad. I
| would want users to use my product more and I definitely
| wouldn't want to have an incentive to make users use it less.
| If the company is basically default dead unless usage drops...
| That seems really bad.
|
| If I were them I would be focusing on: How do we get to 8k
| searches for a dollar?
| leobg wrote:
| I'm guessing they're running NLP inference on some GPU server
| that costs X per day and can process Y pages. I would guess
| that it's the indexing that incurs the most of the costs, not
| the actual queries performed by the users - though I could be
| wrong.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Hot take. As long as ads are clearly indicated, and non-promoted
| results are easily accessible and usable, I don't have a problem
| with Google relying on ad funding for their main development
| efforts. The amount of behavior they have made accessible to
| anyone for free has produced an immense amount of qualitative
| societal value. IMO this far outweighs the annoyance of ads
| present on various search results.
| sytelus wrote:
| There are a lot of public articles stating that PageRank is no
| longer in top signals any of the mainstream search engines for
| more than a decade now. The patent already expired years ago and
| no one cared. It's surprising CEO of a search engine company just
| woke up to this. The future of search is AI model-as-index
| infrastructure.
| aerovistae wrote:
| _The age of orcs has begun_
| Minor49er wrote:
| 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
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Why would you create a search engine that looks exactly like
| every other search engine? And further, specifically Google.
|
| Why would you not take the chance to completely reimage search
| into something way better than the absolute random crap we have
| today?
|
| Whatever the next web discovery engine looks like, it'll look and
| feel entirely different.
|
| It won't be the equivalent of someone saying, "Hey Facebook is
| bad, look at MY social network!" and it being the exact same
| layout and user experience as Facebook, with different margins,
| padding, fonts and colors.
|
| Whatever comes next, it'll be like comparing Twitter to Facebook,
| or TikTok to Instagram.
|
| As the kids used to say, this ain't it, chief.
| valarauko wrote:
| At this stage, the chief complaint of most prospective users is
| the quality of search results from the market leader, rather
| than the layout or user experience. It's a 5-person company,
| and I'd rather they focus their efforts on the search
| algorithm.
| gumby wrote:
| Seemed like a perfect opportunity for Apple -- they could give
| their customers an actually useful search engine subsidized by
| their hardware sales. At the same time they could starve google
| and bling of the user data provided by customers using search in
| safari or siri.
|
| Instead they are going the other way. Sad.
| jll29 wrote:
| The OP over-reaches in that PageRank is just a small ingredient
| in Google's ranking, which covers many other components from
| TFIDF score to anchor text features and yes, PageRank. Naturally,
| Google used PageRank as a differentiator in its marketing, but
| technically. Bing has been known to use >150 features to score
| the relevance of a page, given a query, so one would expect
| Google to exploit a similar order of magnitude of evidence in its
| ranking.
|
| > Yet, despite being acutely aware of the dangers of ad-supported
| search, selling ads was adopted as the primary business model of
| the new search venture just a few years later.
|
| Google was successful as a superior search engine, pushing out
| AltaVista and similar, earlier alternative search engines and
| Yahoo!-style portals curated by humans. However, Google wasn't a
| successful business for quite some time. Eventually, they adopted
| (some people would say "stole" - there was a lawsuit)
| Yahoo!-owned Overture's ad model, which changed everything.
| Yahoo! owned Overture, and Overture had a critical patent. Yahoo!
| made one critical mistake: they settled the lawsuit for
| relatively little money. The rest is history.
|
| Now many people complain about decaying search result quality
| levels. That just means there is space for a new search engine,
| how exciting! The good news is it has never been easier and
| cheaper to start a full-text index of the Web and associated
| search. For about 50k (a Xoogler's estimate, not mine) you should
| be able to get going. Sites like Gigablast show it can even be
| done as a one-man show, which I would not recommend (to many
| complexities in "small" bits even HTML to plan text conversion,
| load balancing, incremental inverted index updating etc. - all
| requiring nowadays some specialist expertise in a game where you
| can't afford to reinvent the wheel because you don't know the
| scientific literature/state of the art). The one thing that is
| hard to get is initial user traffic. But I think HNers will be
| happy to give each new engine a try!
|
| In summary, I think there never was an "age of PageRank". But you
| may say Google Web search is past its prime. Perhaps Google could
| change that if they wanted - it may be that it isn't much of a
| priority at the moment, hard to say (they are (too?) big now).
|
| Edit: Here, I've interviewed Shadi Saleh, the architect of
| Syria's search engine (if you think it's impossible to get up and
| running with a small team):
| https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2019/07/syrias-first-web-searc...
| [deleted]
| aabaker99 wrote:
| I 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 because they are not
| reference materials and generally only cover some basic use
| cases. In Google, those two sites are in the top four results. In
| Kagi, they are not. Instead, there is a longer-form blog post
| from guru99.com, stack overflow, and the official Python
| documentation.
|
| Now, I will admit that for this particular query Kagi and Google
| results are pretty close. But my general experience is that when
| I search in Google I find that I have to look farther down the
| search results to look past the blogspam to find the
| authoritative reference.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| 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.
| adzm wrote:
| Maybe it's just me but search results for that were very
| helpful in my case. Official documentation, stack overflow
| questions, an informative blog about cte gotchas, all within
| the top half of results.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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?
| andromeduck wrote:
| I've always wondered why Google doesn't have some way to provide
| an explicit signal from the users like favorite/bookmark or
| explicitly like/dislike a search result.
|
| It's often pretty fustrating to try and find something you know
| you've seen before but don't remember quite the name of or exact
| keywords.
| andirk wrote:
| Google added some "plus" button when Google+ was pretending to
| be a thing. It made no sense though as how would someone know
| it's a good result before they visit it?
| matai_kolila wrote:
| 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 cannot fathom a noble reason why the author would decide
| to publish this.
|
| Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO,
| Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an exercise
| to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try...
| dr-detroit wrote:
| artificial wrote:
| Search peaked 10 years ago. There's lots of regression in
| Google Search. For example, you used to be able to search
| images by specific dimensions. You can do this today on Yandex.
| The quality of results and promotion of sponsored results, the
| scraping and displaying of site contents so users visit less
| (how is this legal btw?) Not respecting verbatim searches.
| matai_kolila wrote:
| That's not really what this article is about though, it's
| about how PageRank doesn't work anymore because advertising
| is at odds with returning valuable results, which is complete
| nonsense for a gigantic subset of the value that Google
| offers.
|
| Also it's written by a CEO of a competing search company.
| It's literally the very SEO he's railing against...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| About '08. Spam took over right after that. Used to go in
| waves of better/worse as they played cat-n-mouse with
| spammers, but they seemed to kinda give up right around then.
| barbazoo wrote:
| For me, almost everything that's not coding related, and that's
| after all the SO clones etc have been removed from the results,
| is SEO "optimized" at best and SEO spam at worst. Most websites
| that show up on Google follow the same recipe of headlines,
| quotes, stock images and repetitive content and annoying
| introduction paragraphs that place them at the top of the list.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| > Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac,
| CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I'll leave that as an
| exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try...
|
| Point taken. But it's not as though this was concealed. The top
| line of the page is "Tales from Kagi." The piece is hosted on
| blog.kagi.com. The author's signature at the end of the piece
| reads "CEO, Kagi Inc." The final line of the post is "I hope
| you join us [i.e., Kagi] on this journey."
| matai_kolila wrote:
| It just bothers me that this blatant SEO attempt is an
| article about how SEO ruined PageRank.
|
| Maybe it doesn't bother you, just thought it was worth
| calling out explicitly.
| SahAssar wrote:
| > blatant SEO attempt
|
| It is marketing and trying to influence the discourse, but
| I don't see how you can call it SEO.
| strix_varius wrote:
| FYI the "subscribe to kagi" button links to kagi.com, not to the
| subscription page.
| c7b wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It sounds all great and I agree that we should be prepared to pay
| for quality services instead of expecting everything to be free
| (so I will have a look at kagi). But this promise makes me
| skeptical: Twitter is apparently going to lose money on their
| "$8/m for half the ads" deal with US users because the ads make
| more money than that for them. Sure, paying for your services is
| going to mitigate the incentive problem, but it might not fully
| eliminate it. Of course, kagi has a reputation to lose with its
| users, so that is another line of defence, but I guess the best
| way to build such trust would be to be maximally transparent,
| even about the incentive structures.
| valarauko wrote:
| It's an easier sell than $20/month, for example, especially
| since the idea of paying for search is already a hard sell for
| most people. Even if Kagi eventually fails, it'll be an
| interesting experiment and finally gives all the people who
| repeat "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" an
| opportunity to put their ideology into action.
| CalChris wrote:
| Kagi is indeed a great search engine. Why oh why can't it just be
| an option on the Safari search engine preference panel? Maybe the
| login.
| valarauko wrote:
| You can set as the default search engine with a Safari
| extension
| SevenNation wrote:
| The author quotes Page and Brin's original paper:
|
| > "Currently, the predominant business model for commercial
| search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising
| business model do not always correspond to providing quality
| search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one
| of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular
| Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great
| detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a
| cell phone while driving. This search result came up first
| because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank
| algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web
| [Page, 98].
|
| A search for cellular phone now returns a page of links to plans,
| and one link to Wikipedia.
| ballenf wrote:
| Is there a search engine that just omits pages with surveillance
| tracking scripts? Could it be done?
|
| Then you can check google or a mainstream engine when needed.
| Beltiras wrote:
| Been a paying customer since sometime last spring and am very
| happy with Kagi. I give it two big thumbs-up.
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