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The Age of PageRank Is Over

• aimor 4y ago
  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.
  • jchw 4y ago
    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_through_advertisements 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        > 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 4y ago
        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.
      • thewebcount 4y ago
        If they don't make the website provide value to me, I will stop paying them. If things are popping up that are irrelevant to my search, that's not helping me. If it's not helping me, I stop paying, and they feel a hit. It's probably not a big deal if a single person does it, but if enough people do it, then they either change to get those people back (or replace them with new customers), or they go out of business.
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    Doing things requires hardware, which uses electricity and needs software which costs man hours.
  • shafyy 4y ago
    > 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?
    • candiodari 4y ago
      I hate this argument. It is economic dogma ... and it's bullshit. Why? Bread in Jerusalem: the law of demand and supply doesn't exist for the vast majority of goods. Jerusalem is a city like any other. Everybody has food. You can buy bread there. And while the city has big problems, not many people are starving (not quite zero, but which city can say that). Economic theory dictates that bread would follow the law of supply and demand. Is that so? Let's say the price of bread halves. Will tomorrow see more bread sales in Jerusalem? Here's the critical piece of evidence: NO, it won't. It won't even shift from one kind to a fancier kind of bread. Let's say the price doubles. Same thing. We're in a ZERO price elasticity regime. Sure there are prices where supply and demand would work, but we're far away from those prices. But it gets worse. Let's look at supply. Bread is incredibly cheap to make. There is at least a 80% or so margin on bread (it's quite expensive, or profitable on the other side, if you look at it from a COGS perspective). Let's say the price of bread doubles (you could argue it has, many times even). Will more bread be produced in Jerusalem? NO. Again there are prices where we'd see supply tightly tied to prices, but we're very far away from those prices. BOTH on the supply and demand side we see ZERO price elasticity. If you look up in your economics book you will not find this situation, and even in academia people aren't exactly comfortable discussing it. Price elasticity is ZERO for bread, both on the demand and the supply side, if you belong to the economists that at least split that up. So what makes the difference? You can make a good living selling bread, but you can't attract customers using prices ... nor can you change your profits much by playing with prices (in fact the very act of trying out prices will lose you a lot of customers). So something else needs to make a difference. What determines which bread you buy? Google does (and Facebook, and ...) And this applies not just to bread. This applies to the vast majority of foods. One of the big complaints in European countries these days is that entire economies are running headfirst into this problem. Even labour! People can't change jobs (supply of labor is regulated by employer demands, or outright regulated with laws) and employers can't change the pool of labor by much by raising wages. Unless you're exceptional or outside of the norm (yes, programmers are, so this is the wrong forum to make that particular argument), you cannot change your income much by providing more labor! Given "no skills" labor even the difference between working and not working ... is not very large and dropping. This, obviously, enables FANG companies to extract the profits of normal businesses. They can choose who gets the profits of many products, and demand a growing share of the profits ...
  • thethirdone 4y ago
    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.
  • Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    Do you think that running servers, writing code, maintaining systems happens for free? How else is the service supposed to fund itself?
• WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  > 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 https://kagi.com/pricing
  • ALittleLight 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
• aabaker99 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • booleandilemma 4y ago
      I searched for that (without the quotes) and this was the 2nd result: https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-tutorial/postgresql-cte/ https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-tutorial/postg... The first result was the official documentation. What else are you expecting?
      • projektfu 4y ago
        Google search always gives lousy results, except when you have complained about it, in which case people who check your work always get optimal results. /s
      • dylan604 4y ago
        I see this from time to time myself where someone points out how bad the results are, but different results for me when trying the example. However, there are certain other things that I have searched for myself that absolutely resulted in crap results from SEO/blogspam type of results. So I know 100% it happens. What I'm wondering is how much of your recognized fingerprint influences the results? What causes results to be different from user to user using the same search query?
• strix_varius 4y ago
  FYI the "subscribe to kagi" button links to kagi.com, not to the subscription page.
• c7b 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You can set as the default search engine with a Safari extension
• SevenNation 4y ago
  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.
• harryvederci 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Kagi gives you the option of blocking results from any particular domain, if you like.
• larve 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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)?
    • NhanH 4y ago
      If you don’t mind piping data through cloudflare, you can use cloudflare access + tunnel and a self hosted photo app of your choice (I use photo structure). Cloudflare access will handle auth and can use family members’ gmail or popular emails for authentication. It will also do https for you. If you want the data encrypted from cloudflare, I’d probably install tailscale on family members’s machine and do ACL. Friends are gonna be challenging
    • larve 4y ago
      We just use whatsapp / dropbox / adobe bridge / icloud. Pretty transient, but in a way that's fine. My father is a photographer and makes a lot books, so we have tangible artefacts.
• leobg 4y ago
  I wonder how Kagi’s crawler gets around the Cloudflare protection that many sites are using today.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
• Minor49er 4y ago
  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
  • freediver 4y ago
    Oops.. The correct link should be https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/donations.html
    • Minor49er 4y ago
      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
• gumby 4y ago
  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.
  • fn-mote 4y ago
    Comparing Apple Maps and Google Maps, I don't have much hope of this working out the way you imagine it.
    • gumby 4y ago
      Apple maps started out poorly but these days I prefer it to google maps.
• Beltiras 4y ago
  Been a paying customer since sometime last spring and am very happy with Kagi. I give it two big thumbs-up.
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  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.
  • thfuran 4y ago
    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.
    • Semaphor 4y ago
      Yeah, the devs stated again and again, that they don’t plan or expect to be a mainstream search engine.
  • twelve40 4y ago
    maybe I'm slow today, but I didn't get from their long rant what did they replace page rank with? I get it, ads suck, SEO spam sucks, PR is gameable, serving the user is noble. But, how did they solve the actual problem of ranking the search results?
• nharada 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    There is a 'send feedback' link at the top right on desktop
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  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.
• julienb_sea 4y ago
  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.
  • thfuran 4y ago
    The problem with ads isn't that they're present on screen (though that can get annoying), it's that their presence causes a fundamental misalignment of incentives. A paid service without ads is primarily incentivized to provide value to the customer. An entirely ad supported service is incentivized to provide value to advertisers first, potentially to the detriment of the users, and to users only to the extent that it brings in more ad money.
• entwife 4y ago
  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.)
  • mrkramer 4y ago
    >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. You are correct but in the scientific community there are no armies of spammers who persistently try to outperform other scientists by writing fake research papers and spamming citations. There are cases of fraud here and there but not at the scale of the Internet or to be exact the World Wide Web(WWW). >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) Google probably already does this but exactly how nobody knows because of their blackbox algorithm policy. Speaking about this suggestion; it depends on what you search query is....you need to assign specific weight values to certain referrers in relation to search queries from X,Y,Z categories.
• KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
  • stellalo 4y ago
    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.
    • KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
      Yeah if Archimedes built a competing search engine that uses link ranking algorithms sure.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  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 border on nonsencial. But here's the interesting part: certain ideas are sticky just people want them to be true. The core one here is that "search is broken" or even the lesser "Google is getting worse". It's one many on HN like to push. I don't think theres any quantitative empirical evidence of this. It's people wanting it to be true and you'll see it on every thread about DDG (as one notable example). Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of "Google killers" who seem to have all fallen into different versions of this trap.
  • noogle 4y ago
    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.
• ineptech 4y ago
  > In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours. This is true IFF this software is open source and running on my own server. Hard to see how this can happen.
• soared 4y ago
  > Over the years, the web deteriorated to the state it is in now - a highly destructive force. You can’t be serious with a claim like this
• MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  I will always remember a commercial wherein some shitty marketing company promised to hack Google's algorithm and get you on the first page. So what destroyed the relative purity of search engines and the early web? Money. How do we solve it? Money apparently. Yeah good luck with that.
• mrkramer 4y ago
  >In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. Instead of being scared to share information with it, you will volunteer your data, knowing its incentives align with yours. 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! This is exactly what Google is trying to do....unsuccessfully. I doubt you will have the scale to outperform Google if you try to replicate Google's AI model and replace ad based search with subscription based search. My point is don't do what Google is doing, think differently.
  • freediver 4y ago
    The difference is Google is trying to do this with the data extracted/mined/tracked from the user (pulled), while the model proposed in the article is based on users volunteering their data to the search engine (push) because incentives are aligned and they trust it. A sbtle difference, but the latter can produce vastly better outcomes as the quality of the data would be presumably much higher. (auther here)
    • mrkramer 4y ago
      You said >In the future, instead of everyone sharing the same search engine, you’ll have your completely individual, personalized Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. This is what Google is doing under the hood and they have the upper hand because they collect absolutely everything about the user. Yea there is a lot of noise but their advantage is enormous because theoretically the more they know about you the better search results you will get. I respect the policy of letting users decide what data they want to hand in(volunteering their data) but I don't see how this can scale in the long term because users most probably don't even know what they know and they don't know what exactly they want.
      • 4y ago
• jaimex2 4y ago
  So is Kagi a stand alone search engine or is it like every other Google alternative that just pays Bing for API use?
• andirk 4y ago
  "We Are Building A Web Where The Default Is Social" -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2010 He then described how people will first do their usual _web searches_ via FB search bar. To my knowledge, that didn't happen. And he has since pivoted to "the future is private". [0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin-web-default-social/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin-web-de...
• kbyatnal 4y ago
  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 index, which never made sense to me. Maybe it was true in the past, but on the modern web, larger index !== better results. In fact, I'd argue the opposite since you're much more likely to serve SEO spam. That was my motivation to start hacking around on CrowdView (https://crew-rho.vercel.app https://crew-rho.vercel.app), a search engine specifically for forums and discussion content (e.g. forums, discords, twitter, reddit, etc). It has a curated index (today, curated by yours truly) to remove SEO junk and help you figure out "what does a real, genuine human think about this think?"
  • _aavaa_ 4y ago
    On Kagi you as an individual can up rank and down rank websites (even hiding them entirely). They can conceivably use this information to do the same thing, curare the results and change their ordering
  • smt88 4y ago
    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.
    • kbyatnal 4y ago
      yup totally agree, but I think it's nearly impossible to compete with Google and make something much better for certain types of queries (e.g. factual info, location queries, etc). They have too much data and too much of a head start. The best way to compete with them IMO is to choose a slice of queries that they perform very poorly at (like non-SEO spam results) and build something 10x better. But that brings up the challenge of getting users to remember to come back to your search engine. It's tricky for sure, with no clear answer. But for the first time in a long time, I sense that we're approaching a tipping point for Google's dominance over the web.
• Animats 4y ago
  Oh, it's an ad. Since Google turned to the dark side on August 9, 2006[1], ranking by links weight has been hopeless. But the alternatives are not much better. [1] https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html https://www.google.com/press/podium/ses2006.html
• fleddr 4y ago
  You can't compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today's web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won't pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves. Even in a hypothetical situation where ads would no longer be the driving force of algorithms, something else will. As soon as something gets large enough, it will be gamed. If not for commercial reasons, it might be cultural/political influence. I will end by reminding ourselves that us techies should spend some more time with ordinary folks. I agree with everybody here that Google Search has been getting worse and worse for years now, especially for our niche searches. It's a mistake though to think that this is widely experienced as such. My mum looks up an unknown ingredient in a recipe and within a second sees a picture of it. That means it works. All kinds of personal data might be shared in the process but since you can't really see that, it didn't happen. From her point of view, Google Search works extremely well and is close to magic. The point being, Google doesn't give a shit that you don't get the best answer for your query on JavaScript closures. Nobody searches for that, and those that do, block ads.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
    I, for one, look actively for services I can pay for.
    • treeman79 4y ago
      Year ago I had a realization. I make solid money. My spare time is very limited. Why am I spending hours trying to save 20 dollars.
      • abnercoimbre 4y ago
        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/ https://pocketcasts.com/plus/
• tren 4y ago
  I've used Kagi as my primary search engine since they went live and I've been extremely pleased so far. Funnily enough, I only use !g now when I want to get Google Shopping results (for price comparison) or look at product reviews.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  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/ 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 working on it before a useful discovery was made. There was an article about TikTok that revealed just how wrongheaded the viewpoint of the current web is. As much as Google fetishizes data, the data collected by sites like YouTube is useless because they offer you too many things to click on so you click around like a chicken with its head cut off. There are maybe 5 things that you like out of 20 that they show you, but which one you click on is random so the signal is mostly noise and worst of all they can't come to the conclusion that you didn't like any of the other 19 things they showed you. TikTok shows you exactly one thing at a time so the opinion that they capture is meaningful. It reminds me of one of the first "learning to rank" papers where I talked the management at the CU Library to let the Thorsten Joachims group run our search engine and we realized just how poor of a signal you get from search engine usage and how challenging it is to feed it back to improve your results. Really marking up judgements for all the results that turn up and using "pooling" to add new results to the original set when your search engine is essential to make really better search. Otherwise you can be just another one of those guys who posts to Medium about the "semantic search" engine he built but can't tell you if the results are any better than any other search engine.
  • fillipvt 4y ago
    Any link to the tiktok article?
• lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  >In the future, it is likely that if the current mainstream search engines want to survive, they will have to go back to their roots, dismissing ads as their primary business model What an optimistic perspective.
• p3rls 4y ago
  Still see SEO spam beating quality websites. https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from https://kagi.com/faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from "Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well" Lol okay
• guggalugalug 4y ago
  "With the inevitable advancement of our civilization" unless advancement is understood as necessarily attendant upon linear time unspooling, it is no ways inevitable
• calrain 4y ago
  I think this article is missing the point that the technology of a solution is different from its intrinsic motivations. PageRank could have been fine if the intrinsic motivations were to educate, enlighten, and help people. Just because a search technology is wrapped up to look like a personalized AI doesn't mean it is immune to the same intrinsic motivations. Who is to say that Google won't release a 'Personalized Search AI' that is free for the user and it continues to follow the same motivations that their PageRank solution does. I think custom AI's tuned for each person will be the defining technical foundation for the next few decades, but I'm extremely concerned that the fundamental business drivers that compete for sales, view time, and divisiveness will not be resolved. Nothing will stop an authoritarian government, an ad driven company, an entertainment company, or a political research company from giving out 'free' personal AI's. If the history of the Internet has anything to teach us then it is this: The free ones will always be more successful than the paid ones.
• narrator 4y ago
  To me it looks like they broke search to only return mainstream stuff for any search with any connection to an official narrative. Pagerank is the opposite of that. That could be why Sergei and Larry aren't doing much work these days with Google. Larry is in Fiji and hasn't been heard from much in the last two years. IMHO, Yandex feels like the old Google. It returns lots of small sites for most searches and does way better on controversial topics.
• normalocity 4y ago
  What an incredibly pointless and long ad disguised as a blog post.
• ac130kz 4y ago
  Google is not using raw PageRank anymore, they use some sort of machine learning, which is overly optimized based on flawed abusable SEO techniques and probably user count, rather than actual value and authenticity.
• ETH_start 4y ago
  I don't understand why advertising-based revenue models are bad for consumers. The most profitable ads are those that are the most relevant to the consumer. It leads to advertisements that are most likely to provide commercial information that the consumer finds valuable.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  The way iOS search is done by Kagi is a little creepy. You have to load an extension and allow it the ability to inspect everything. It then intercepts searches and redirects the browser to Kagi. I’m sure it’s what’s necessary to add a search in iOS, but still a sad compromise. Regardless the search results from Kagi seem much less SEO spammy which is nice!
  • freediver 4y ago
    Safari does not allow custom search engines, and this is the only way possible, also used by any other search engine with an iOS Safari extension. Besides, Kagi Safari iOS extension is full open source: https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS https://github.com/kagisearch/Kagi-Search-for-Safari-iOS
• metadaemon 4y ago
  I love Kagi! Been paying for the past 3 months.
• orangesite 4y ago
  Something I've always wondered about: How about personalized pagerank search that assigns any URL I've bookmarked a high value for E? Is there a reason no one has done this yet?
• bothra90 4y ago
  Can you share some insight on how/if Kagi is different from Neeva[1] in its approach? [1] https://neeva.com/ https://neeva.com/
• pritambarhate 4y ago
  Unrelated to this from the pricing page[1] of Kagi: > It costs us about $1 to process 80 searches. This caught me by surprise. It would be good to know if this is pure hardware and bandwidth cost, or if they are factoring in all the costs associated with running a business. I wonder if costs for Google are also on the same level. There team's plan seems to quite expensive considering we are so used to free (ad supported) search. [1]: https://kagi.com/pricing https://kagi.com/pricing
• summerlight 4y ago
  Technically the title is correct since Google has deprecated PageRank for years. But it doesn't looks like the point of this article since it uses the majority of its texts on criticizing ad supported search business model in favor of subscription models which PageRank has no business at all. You can use PageRank (or not) regardless of the business model right? I'm still not sure what it is trying to achieve by bringing PageRank to the table. If you substitute "PageRank" with "Google" then it actually makes more sense though.
• infimum 4y ago
  Their pricing page says that it costs them around 1$ to serve 80 searches. I really wonder how they arrive at that number. That seems shockingly expensive somehow.
• totorovirus 4y ago
  Google doesn't use page rank anymore. They have a signal called navboost which is the strongest signal in ranking and retrieval. And that idea originates from Yahoo paper in which they revealed the gems of search engine algorithms: https://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/papers/files/adf0361-yinA.pdf https://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/papers/files/adf0361-yinA.pdf
• sushiburps 4y ago
  Post states that Google search is getting worse, "...the quality of search started to deteriorate", and links to this article to justify the claim: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying Big discussion here and on Reddit when that article was posted. It doesn't set out to say Google search is worse/getting worse, but that people don't trust its results as much as human generated content (thus appending 'Reddit' to queries).
• fredgrott 4y ago
  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.
• JesseMReeves 4y ago
  I've been a beta user but the 10$/month price tag is too steep for me. That being said, I'm beginning to think that having a price tag as entry barrier is a good thing for a search engine. One of the reasons for Google's downfall is that they had to cater to dumb and easily controllable masses. Also, the aggressive SEO that made the search results so bad made economical sense as soon as those masses flocked at the platform. Kagi may only stay this good if it does not become too popular. I hope the developers think about the fact that their best strategy might be focusing on their current sizeable niche market of nerds and intellectually curious people.
• 838405050 4y ago
  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.
  • louthy 4y ago
    I tried, the first result is Pornhub. What are you expecting?
• birdyrooster 4y ago
  > 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.
• vagab0nd 4y ago
  Off-topic rant: Why is it so hard in 2022 to go from your blog to your main page?
• beckingz 4y ago
  Reject modernity, embrace tradition: we're going back to user curated indexes like it's the 90s! Time to join a web ring.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • andirk 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkExchange
  • artificial 4y ago
    StumbleUpon!
  • lesuorac 4y ago
    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).
• candyman 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Cool but why do I need to do a login to even give it a test drive? Immediate turn off.
    • MarcellusDrum 4y ago
      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 4y ago
  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.
• yarg 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    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)
    • wolpoli 4y ago
      Indeed, after Google, links slowly disappeared and no one could really "surf" the web anymore.
    • DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
      Google didn’t gaslight the web: Web directories died out because they go stale, fast, and require far more human curation than is economically viable. I remember Yahoo effectively deprecating their directory pages long before I heard of Google, back when I was using Dogpile and CompuServe.
      • PaulHoule 4y ago
        I never saw a web directory that took a serious approach to using automation to curate the directory. It's probably more feasible than people think because it's a matter of classifying links up or down (relevant or not) which is a much more ontologically and mathematically tractable problem than learning a ranking function or trying to classify things into one of N>2 categories. I think the problem may more have been the lack of a sustainable revenue model. Getting volunteers to curate the directory is particularly destructive because the people who most want to volunteer either (1) want to promote something or (2) want to get paid so somebody else can promote something.
• AussieWog93 4y ago
  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.
  • c7b 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    This feels like a consequence of a centralized, gardened web, not because Reddit / FB are inherently superior experiences.
  • notatoad 4y ago
    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.
• sytelus 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  The age of orcs has begun
• andromeduck 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
    • andromeduck 4y ago
      Yeah I think a browser frame button like "favorite" is what is needed. Ideal would probably be face/eye tracking to check attention/response but thats way too creepy to work.
      • andirk 4y ago
        Brave browser uses "attention" as the main factor. It's currently used for their paying the content creators and charging for ads, but with their new search engine [0] it may be a factor there too. [0] https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/
• matai_kolila 4y ago
  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...
  • jaimex2 4y ago
    Which part is disconnected from reality? Google is a horrible search engine, you routinely have to hack it to get searches not linking to the centralised web. The first 5 results are ads, followed by Youtube links or a Quora/Reddit on the topic. If you used the web 20 years ago you know what a good search engine was like.
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    > 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.
  • dr-detroit 4y ago
  • artificial 4y ago
    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.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
• ballenf 4y ago
  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.
  • freediver 4y ago
    Yes, Kagi has that option (it is called non-commercial lens). It also shows number of ads/trackers for search results.
• irsagent 4y ago
  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.
  • x62Bh7948f 4y ago
    I’ve been using orion for a while, but sometimes with a couple of YouTube tabs open the bottom of my M1 MacBook Air gets uncomfortably hot.
    • g_p 4y ago
      There was a recent bug fixed, specifically on YouTube, due to ad-blocking causing a constant loop fetching and reloading an icon or something to that end, I believe - it was fixed in a recent release. I suspect that was what you were seeing, and if so, updating should have addressed it.
      • irsagent 4y ago
        https://browser.kagi.com/updates/orion-release-notes.html https://browser.kagi.com/updates/orion-release-notes.html
• widdershins 4y ago
  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?
  • lobocinza 4y ago
    I'm worried that I need to be logged-in and expose my CC to use such service. Nonetheless most of us use Google Search in a similar way.
  • sergimas15 4y ago
    awesome
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    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; the median global income is less than 4000 international dollars per year. So naturally, there is a strong pressure for companies to pivot to ads once they run out of other ideas to grow the business.
    • leoh 4y ago
• amelius 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    • amelius 4y ago
      I wonder how they will fight SEO, though...
• ispo 4y ago
  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.
• dageshi 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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
      • int_19h 4y ago
        It really depends on the task, and the best approach is often to combine written instructions with a video.
      • nottorp 4y ago
        That's when the video solves your problem. But how do you find the video that solves your problem? You can't skim through it quickly like you can with text.
• endisneigh 4y ago
  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.
• a-dub 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  PageRank was all Larry Page. The cited article was about the search engine. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6285999B1/en
  • an1sotropy 4y ago
    As other comments have noted, PageRank didn't come out of a vacuum; some history is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#History
• s3000 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
• akrymski 4y ago
  > 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.
  • low_tech_love 4y ago
    I think the point is precisely that PageRank is not being used anymore.
    • akrymski 4y ago
      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.
  • mrkramer 4y ago
    >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 https://www.youtube.com/premium [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-subscribers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1261865/youtube-premium-... [3] https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-80-million-lyor-cohen/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-8...
• andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
  • freediver 4y ago
    Simply because you need to get the basing things right like the correct infrastructure and it is a safer bet, specially when you are bootstrapped. The article lays out the vision for the future of the search that Kagi wants to build.
• jll29 4y ago
  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-search-engine-an-interview-with-shadi-saleh-2/ https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2019/07/syrias-first-web-searc...
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• cube2222 4y ago
  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.
  • ryandvm 4y ago
    > 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.
  • unstatusthequo 4y ago
    They have a Safari extension. Have at it!
    • TehShrike 4y ago
      Safari mobile too: https://kagi.com/faq#How-do-I-set-Kagi-as-my-default-search-engine https://kagi.com/faq#How-do-I-set-Kagi-as-my-default-search-...