6 ms·

I think Google PageRank has lost the SEO battle. My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain pe

I think Google PageRank has lost the SEO battle. My proposed solution: People sign their articles with a key, and I specify for which topics I trust certain people. I trust Paul Graham on the topic 'startups', so anything that he writes on the topic is considered a high pagerank for me. Paul can also trust other people on the 'startup' topic, and so they will automatically be ranked high on my pagerank (for that topic!). When I do a search, it takes into account the people that I trust on certain topics. Please steal my idea and make millions!!!

panosfilianos 4y ago
How does discovery work in this case (i.e. how do you find Paul Graham in the first place)?
- nihilius 4y ago
  Cause Paul tagged his trusted people. Sounds like everybody knows everybody around two corners like on LinkedIn. This could create another form of SEO Tag Spam.
  - jhoelzel 4y ago
    yey ID based internet ;)
- kolinko 4y ago
  People mentioning other people, friends telling you about stuff. For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
  - gobfood 4y ago
    That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.
    - ant6n 4y ago
      But search on twitter is absolute garbage.
  - soco 4y ago
    Oh, the golden age of search... did we appreciate it enough while it lasted? I surely didn't.
- alpaca128 4y ago
  I assume just like you'd find Paul Graham today, but by specifying him as trustworthy all his content would be ranked higher in searches.
- koonsolo 4y ago
  You can always start with a clean slate and get the current PageRanked results of course.
jhoelzel 4y ago
and that my friends is how the internet will die. Exactly like this. The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth. Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following? The GP's point was purely that currently there's no automated search result ranking mechanism that can take account of the expertise level of the author. It seems like a reasonable enough idea to me (though not without difficulties).
  - peepeepoopoo2 4y ago
    > Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following? Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - reaperducer 4y ago
      Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason? Only on the internet, where history can be distilled into a single-sentence quip. In real life the truth is more complicated, but doesn't fit into a tweet.
      - peepeepoopoo2 4y ago
        Please point out the factually incorrect part instead of being broadly dismissive. The catholic church was only able to persecute Galileo and Copernicus in the first place because they were the only "trusted" source of information in their era, exactly as the GP comment is proposing to bring back to the present day.
fenomas 4y ago
I've always wished there was a social network that applied some sort of "I am interested in [person] by [amount]%" premise, but recursively. E.g., suppose I tell the network that I'm 80% interested in William Gibson, and I set my "see posts by" threshold to 60%. I would then see all posts from William Gibson, as well as any posts from people he's at least 75% interested in. And of course I'd also see posts from more distant connections, if the chain multiplies out to more than my view threshold. Have any networks ever done something like this before? Or with "interest" swapped for "trust" or some other stat?
- toyg 4y ago
  You don't understand: this is already done by social networks, behind the scenes. You just don't get to set those thresholds. They make money by tweaking those thresholds so that you'll be interested in what their paying customers (advertisers) actually want you to be interested in. Giving you back the power to change that, would be the end of their business model.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    You don't get to set neither the thresholds, nor crucially the people whose writings you'd like to see. At least not directly.
    - andreigheorghe 4y ago
      You do control who you follow on Twitter.
- aembleton 4y ago
  I want to do this for a review site.
- macspoofing 4y ago
  >I've always wished there was a social network that applied some sort of "I am interested in [person] by [amount]%" premise, but recursively. That's how they all worked in principle. The "problem" for FB, Twitter, YouTube (and others) is that some people trust Alex Jones and since the 2016 election we've been in a moral panic around misinformation (Russian or otherwise). Our big idea right now is making sure that tech conglomerates choose for us the people we should trust.
palata 4y ago
Sounds a bit like PGP :D. Also that's not very far from sharing RSS feeds with friends. "I like this blog, so I add it to my feeds" is a way of "trusting" someone. But the reality is that people can't be bothered to use RSS, generally.
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
password1 4y ago
This would quickly trap you in yet another filter bubble, just one of your own creation. Dangerous idea. One of the core principles of the internet should be the ability to discover and encounter information and opinions that you aren't even aware could exist (serendipity?). If user start to limit all their searches to just a handful of websites and their peers it can have a really bad filtering effect. Besides, do not think about the problem as a techie with a long list of trusted internet personalities. Think about it as a normal user that barely gets technology. The most common outcome would be that they setup once these search sources with some random familiar sounding names (probably news outlet they trust) and never touch them again. It feels it could be a highly exploitable system.
- virtual_void 4y ago
  People are already trapped in a filter bubble. In general people do not seem open to ideas that do not confirm what they already believe. I don’t see how this differs. I’m also not sure that i agree with your idea that the core principal of the internet should be in any way related to what information one might discover. The internet and the web provide means to disseminate and access information (amongst much else) but I don’t see how it should have anything to do with what you discover.
bluecalm 4y ago
I agree. I think we need reputation mechanism. From restaurant and Amazon reviews through travel recommendations to written content. I want to read what reputable people have to say or people similar to me or people without history of spamming nonsense. Current system is too easily gamed. If it means we need to sign everything with real name/ID let's be it. There is a place for anonymous Internet but life is too short to go through piles of trash every day to try to find a nugget. At least allow others who already found it to sign on "I found out and it's interesting" promise.
- nuker 4y ago
  > I think we need reputation mechanism. Reddit.
  - bluecalm 4y ago
    Upvotes/downvotes are too easily gamed as the weights are are the same no matter who you are (thus a bot farm can promote any post/opinion).
nonethewiser 4y ago
But this is still terrible for discovery. Probably even worse. Because it relies on you knowing about something first.
- Nathanba 4y ago
  not necessarily, I would also profit from the people that Paul Graham himself has added as trusted sources
wanderingstan 4y ago
I founded such a company in 2006, based on my master’s thesis open source project: http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46 http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46 We raised several million dollars and ran for several years before we had to pivot. At least then, people weren’t too interested in having to select trusted experts. However, this was the golden era of Google so it was hard to see the need. It began as a Firefox plugin and had a lot of buzz for a time in those early Web 2.0 days.
kubota 4y ago
This is very interesting. I wonder if it would turn the "visible to you" internet into an echo chamber though.
stingraycharles 4y ago
The problem with this idea is that it’s way too much effort for the average individual to curate their search this way. And if the results are bad, I don’t know whether it’s my search query, the way I curated things, or your search algorithm.
- qwertox 4y ago
  This could get fixed via an extension which contains a list of those authors you trust and then read extract the key from the article in order to verify it. It's not like you have to do this with every article you read, but for those where you do care about the integrity of the information, you'd have this extra support.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Feels like you could use the existing https cert that everyone already needs to have for this, no?
    - qwertox 4y ago
      These certs are tied to a domain, not to a person.
- notahacker 4y ago
  This. Outsourcing the credibility assessment to the link graph was the whole point of PageRank, because most people wouldn't know where to start with whitelisting sources for their query (and if they did, a general web search engine wouldn't be where they started). If I want pg's opinion on startups, I go to his blog. If I want to find a venue near me, or the web presence for a company somebody has mentioned, or a description of a particular phenomenon I'm not familiar with, or whether a particular error message has been seen by other people, or where to buy something, or some information on a place in a foreign country or what Foo means, I don't want to start off by specifying who I trust to provide this information. And even if I did, I suspect I'd be disappointed by how little information Paul Graham, my favourite YouTubers and the Pope had to offer on any of these subjects.
edpichler 4y ago
I liked the idea. RSS does that is some way.
entropy47 4y ago
I spend a lot of time worrying (probably correctly) that product managers don't add any value in big tech, and then I read an idea like this - novel, clever, and basically guaranteed to die after seven months with 80 users - and I think yep, my role in the team is to argue against the brilliant but ultimately doomed Proper Solution To The Problem. I look forward to seeing this on /r/agedlikemilk in 2 years when KonsoloSearch buys Google.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lonelyasacloud 4y ago
Wondering if we'll end up with users buying/renting and training their own individual instances of a ChatGPT-a-like model paying for the sources of their (models) training data? Expensive at the moment but is one way to solve source payment problem and as an end outcome seems preferrable to being being beholden to Trump, Biden, Pope, BBC, Fox, Musk, Xi, Putin or whatever flavoured bots for our "truth".
trumbitta2 4y ago
So Webrings, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
phillipburch 4y ago
You just described twitter
geysersam 4y ago
They didn't loose the battle. They capitulated without even trying. God knows why. I can't imagine they actually think ruining their own product increases their revenue. It'd be trivial for them to remove/derank 99% of spam by manually reviewing search results (still at negligible cost) possibly letting users flag results for them for guidance. Example: Is a page copying lots of text from stack overflow? Then it's probably spam! Don't show it on the first page of the search results!
- tonmoy 4y ago
  How do we know it is the page that copied from SO and not the other way around? If they let users flag, SEO people will figure out how to flag themselves for their benefits
  - geysersam 4y ago
    That's where the manual review comes in. Is it reasonable to assume a seo spam site has produced content stack overflow content, that stack overflow then copied to their page? No.

panosfilianos 4y ago

How does discovery work in this case (i.e. how do you find Paul Graham in the first place)?

nihilius 4y ago
Cause Paul tagged his trusted people. Sounds like everybody knows everybody around two corners like on LinkedIn. This could create another form of SEO Tag Spam.
- jhoelzel 4y ago
  yey ID based internet ;)
kolinko 4y ago
People mentioning other people, friends telling you about stuff. For me, personally, it’s been a long time since Google pointed me to new platforms or new writers. It is dominated by big outlets and seo articles now, and good mostly for finding basic factual info - not for finding individual writers or nlogs any more
- gobfood 4y ago
  That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    But search on twitter is absolute garbage.
- soco 4y ago
  Oh, the golden age of search... did we appreciate it enough while it lasted? I surely didn't.
alpaca128 4y ago
I assume just like you'd find Paul Graham today, but by specifying him as trustworthy all his content would be ranked higher in searches.
koonsolo 4y ago
You can always start with a clean slate and get the current PageRanked results of course.

jhoelzel 4y ago

and that my friends is how the internet will die. Exactly like this. The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth. Just read the following sentence and tell me what you think about it: "oh yeah i get all my information about my religion directly from the pope in the vatican, because we decided EONS ago that he is the source for this kind of stuff".

wizofaus 4y ago
Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following? The GP's point was purely that currently there's no automated search result ranking mechanism that can take account of the expertise level of the author. It seems like a reasonable enough idea to me (though not without difficulties).
- peepeepoopoo2 4y ago
  > Why wouldn't a Catholic consider anything written about their religion by the Pope to be more important/reputable than by some random stranger who happens to have a cult following? Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Weren't Galileo and Copernicus famously persecuted because of exactly that reason? Only on the internet, where history can be distilled into a single-sentence quip. In real life the truth is more complicated, but doesn't fit into a tweet.
    - peepeepoopoo2 4y ago
      Please point out the factually incorrect part instead of being broadly dismissive. The catholic church was only able to persecute Galileo and Copernicus in the first place because they were the only "trusted" source of information in their era, exactly as the GP comment is proposing to bring back to the present day.

fenomas 4y ago

I've always wished there was a social network that applied some sort of "I am interested in [person] by [amount]%" premise, but recursively. E.g., suppose I tell the network that I'm 80% interested in William Gibson, and I set my "see posts by" threshold to 60%. I would then see all posts from William Gibson, as well as any posts from people he's at least 75% interested in. And of course I'd also see posts from more distant connections, if the chain multiplies out to more than my view threshold. Have any networks ever done something like this before? Or with "interest" swapped for "trust" or some other stat?

toyg 4y ago
You don't understand: this is already done by social networks, behind the scenes. You just don't get to set those thresholds. They make money by tweaking those thresholds so that you'll be interested in what their paying customers (advertisers) actually want you to be interested in. Giving you back the power to change that, would be the end of their business model.
- feanaro 4y ago
  You don't get to set neither the thresholds, nor crucially the people whose writings you'd like to see. At least not directly.
  - andreigheorghe 4y ago
    You do control who you follow on Twitter.
aembleton 4y ago
I want to do this for a review site.
macspoofing 4y ago
>I've always wished there was a social network that applied some sort of "I am interested in [person] by [amount]%" premise, but recursively. That's how they all worked in principle. The "problem" for FB, Twitter, YouTube (and others) is that some people trust Alex Jones and since the 2016 election we've been in a moral panic around misinformation (Russian or otherwise). Our big idea right now is making sure that tech conglomerates choose for us the people we should trust.

palata 4y ago

Sounds a bit like PGP :D. Also that's not very far from sharing RSS feeds with friends. "I like this blog, so I add it to my feeds" is a way of "trusting" someone. But the reality is that people can't be bothered to use RSS, generally.

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

password1 4y ago

This would quickly trap you in yet another filter bubble, just one of your own creation. Dangerous idea. One of the core principles of the internet should be the ability to discover and encounter information and opinions that you aren't even aware could exist (serendipity?). If user start to limit all their searches to just a handful of websites and their peers it can have a really bad filtering effect. Besides, do not think about the problem as a techie with a long list of trusted internet personalities. Think about it as a normal user that barely gets technology. The most common outcome would be that they setup once these search sources with some random familiar sounding names (probably news outlet they trust) and never touch them again. It feels it could be a highly exploitable system.

virtual_void 4y ago
People are already trapped in a filter bubble. In general people do not seem open to ideas that do not confirm what they already believe. I don’t see how this differs. I’m also not sure that i agree with your idea that the core principal of the internet should be in any way related to what information one might discover. The internet and the web provide means to disseminate and access information (amongst much else) but I don’t see how it should have anything to do with what you discover.

bluecalm 4y ago

I agree. I think we need reputation mechanism. From restaurant and Amazon reviews through travel recommendations to written content. I want to read what reputable people have to say or people similar to me or people without history of spamming nonsense. Current system is too easily gamed. If it means we need to sign everything with real name/ID let's be it. There is a place for anonymous Internet but life is too short to go through piles of trash every day to try to find a nugget. At least allow others who already found it to sign on "I found out and it's interesting" promise.

nuker 4y ago
> I think we need reputation mechanism. Reddit.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Upvotes/downvotes are too easily gamed as the weights are are the same no matter who you are (thus a bot farm can promote any post/opinion).

nonethewiser 4y ago

But this is still terrible for discovery. Probably even worse. Because it relies on you knowing about something first.

Nathanba 4y ago
not necessarily, I would also profit from the people that Paul Graham himself has added as trusted sources

wanderingstan 4y ago

I founded such a company in 2006, based on my master’s thesis open source project: http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46 http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46 We raised several million dollars and ran for several years before we had to pivot. At least then, people weren’t too interested in having to select trusted experts. However, this was the golden era of Google so it was hard to see the need. It began as a Firefox plugin and had a lot of buzz for a time in those early Web 2.0 days.

kubota 4y ago

This is very interesting. I wonder if it would turn the "visible to you" internet into an echo chamber though.

stingraycharles 4y ago

The problem with this idea is that it’s way too much effort for the average individual to curate their search this way. And if the results are bad, I don’t know whether it’s my search query, the way I curated things, or your search algorithm.

qwertox 4y ago
This could get fixed via an extension which contains a list of those authors you trust and then read extract the key from the article in order to verify it. It's not like you have to do this with every article you read, but for those where you do care about the integrity of the information, you'd have this extra support.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Feels like you could use the existing https cert that everyone already needs to have for this, no?
  - qwertox 4y ago
    These certs are tied to a domain, not to a person.
notahacker 4y ago
This. Outsourcing the credibility assessment to the link graph was the whole point of PageRank, because most people wouldn't know where to start with whitelisting sources for their query (and if they did, a general web search engine wouldn't be where they started). If I want pg's opinion on startups, I go to his blog. If I want to find a venue near me, or the web presence for a company somebody has mentioned, or a description of a particular phenomenon I'm not familiar with, or whether a particular error message has been seen by other people, or where to buy something, or some information on a place in a foreign country or what Foo means, I don't want to start off by specifying who I trust to provide this information. And even if I did, I suspect I'd be disappointed by how little information Paul Graham, my favourite YouTubers and the Pope had to offer on any of these subjects.

edpichler 4y ago

I liked the idea. RSS does that is some way.

entropy47 4y ago

I spend a lot of time worrying (probably correctly) that product managers don't add any value in big tech, and then I read an idea like this - novel, clever, and basically guaranteed to die after seven months with 80 users - and I think yep, my role in the team is to argue against the brilliant but ultimately doomed Proper Solution To The Problem. I look forward to seeing this on /r/agedlikemilk in 2 years when KonsoloSearch buys Google.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lonelyasacloud 4y ago

Wondering if we'll end up with users buying/renting and training their own individual instances of a ChatGPT-a-like model paying for the sources of their (models) training data? Expensive at the moment but is one way to solve source payment problem and as an end outcome seems preferrable to being being beholden to Trump, Biden, Pope, BBC, Fox, Musk, Xi, Putin or whatever flavoured bots for our "truth".

trumbitta2 4y ago

So Webrings, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

phillipburch 4y ago

You just described twitter

geysersam 4y ago

They didn't loose the battle. They capitulated without even trying. God knows why. I can't imagine they actually think ruining their own product increases their revenue. It'd be trivial for them to remove/derank 99% of spam by manually reviewing search results (still at negligible cost) possibly letting users flag results for them for guidance. Example: Is a page copying lots of text from stack overflow? Then it's probably spam! Don't show it on the first page of the search results!

tonmoy 4y ago
How do we know it is the page that copied from SO and not the other way around? If they let users flag, SEO people will figure out how to flag themselves for their benefits
- geysersam 4y ago
  That's where the manual review comes in. Is it reasonable to assume a seo spam site has produced content stack overflow content, that stack overflow then copied to their page? No.