The Age of PageRank Is Over

I&#x27;ve been using Kagi the last few months. I&#x27;ve never had a reason to complain about its search results - they seem to work plenty well enough day to day that I don&#x27;t really &#x27;notice&#x27; them. Like most, I now search reflexively, as an extension of the mind, so I only &#x27;notice&#x27; search when it&#x27;s bad.<p>What really excites me is that is that I&#x27;m paying them. That sounds odd, but seriously. It&#x27;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&#x27;t help thinking about every keypress being logged to optimize sales pitches at me. I just don&#x27;t feel that with Kagi, because I&#x27;m paying them.<p>Sure, they might be logging every keypress (I don&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s a priveleged position to be in, and the economic argument isn&#x27;t watertight, but in the &quot;search as a brain extension&quot; 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?

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&#x27;s work had me thinking about Python&#x27;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.<p>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.

IMO this article misses the biggest issue with search engines today. It&#x27;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&#x27;re fighting a losing battle from the start.<p>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&#x27;d argue the opposite since you&#x27;re much more likely to serve SEO spam.<p>That was my motivation to start hacking around on CrowdView (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crew-rho.vercel.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crew-rho.vercel.app</a>), 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 &quot;what does a real, genuine human think about this think?&quot;

It has been for a long time.<p>PageRank was never designed for adversarial scenarios.<p>It reminds me of KPIs like lines of code - it&#x27;s only useful if it cannot be manipulated.<p>&quot;When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Goodhart%27s_law</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve been using kagi exclusively for the last 3 months. I pay $30 because I feel it&#x27;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&#x27;m working on. This, along with switching to mastodon, means that I almost never encounter ads anymore. I honestly feel like I got my &quot;internet&quot; back. I didn&#x27;t realize how much the google search suggestions would taint my day to day.<p>I whole heartedly recommend kagi. My favourite feature is the &quot;blast from the past&quot; that shows results that are not online anymore, but links to web.archive.org.

You can&#x27;t compare the good faith web from 1996, which consisted of a bunch of nerds blogging, to today&#x27;s web. Everything of any importance in our society moved online, and much of it needs monetization. And since on average users won&#x27;t pay a cent for anything, ads it is. We very much have a role in this outcome ourselves.<p>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&#x2F;political influence.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;t really see that, it didn&#x27;t happen. From her point of view, Google Search works extremely well and is close to magic.<p>The point being, Google doesn&#x27;t give a shit that you don&#x27;t get the best answer for your query on JavaScript closures. Nobody searches for that, and those that do, block ads.

&gt; 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!<p>Actually Google is already doing this. Results are personalized and contextual. It can&#x27;t really know what I feel like eating this evening because I don&#x27;t, but it can guess.<p>I applaud the author for trying, but I don&#x27;t see an alternative to PageRank being proposed. How exactly is Kagi proposing to rank results?<p>And no, I don&#x27;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&#x27;ve yet to see anyone do a better job than Google.<p>Google is far more than PageRank. Its an AI ranking model that has the largest training dataset (queries and clicks).<p>Ads may suck, but simply charging for the same service isn&#x27;t really innovative. Would I pay for a version of Google without ads? Probably not. But that&#x27;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.

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.

I find myself still using Google for searching the web a lot, however, maybe 2% is the classical website search.<p>It’s mostly to find an image, a video, a location on maps, etc.<p>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.<p>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.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s sounding is more like &quot;The Age of Search Advertisement is Over&quot;, so why not use that as a title?<p>By the way, I&#x27;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.

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<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trec.nist.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trec.nist.gov&#x2F;</a><p>but it takes a huge amount of training&#x2F;test data to do it and takes a lot of computational work after you&#x27;ve got that data. What TREC revealed is that most of the things that would obviously improve search relevance don&#x27;t, and it took 5 whole years of 20 teams working on it before a useful discovery was made.<p>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&#x27;t come to the conclusion that you didn&#x27;t like any of the other 19 things they showed you.<p>TikTok shows you exactly one thing at a time so the opinion that they capture is meaningful.<p>It reminds me of one of the first &quot;learning to rank&quot; 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.<p>Really marking up judgements for all the results that turn up and using &quot;pooling&quot; 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 &quot;semantic search&quot; engine he built but can&#x27;t tell you if the results are any better than any other search engine.

The people who used to make niche sites that helped people and linked to other sites moved to youtube.<p>Plenty of excellent youtube channels that 10 years ago would&#x27;ve been websites.<p>I don&#x27;t really have a problem with this, all things change.

&gt; 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, <i>you will volunteer your data</i>, knowing its incentives align with yours.<p>This is true IFF this software is open source and running on my own server. Hard to see how this can happen.

Oh, it&#x27;s an ad.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;podium&#x2F;ses2006.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;podium&#x2F;ses2006.html</a>

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.

This is marketing. That&#x27;s all it is. It may as well be called &quot;Search engine alternative to Google declares Google&#x27;s secret sauce is dying&quot;.<p>This reminds me of posts from 10 years ago where &quot;the future of search of social&quot; (this post says &quot;user-centric&quot; 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.<p>But here&#x27;s the interesting part: certain ideas are sticky just people want them to be true. The core one here is that &quot;search is broken&quot; or even the lesser &quot;Google is getting worse&quot;. It&#x27;s one many on HN like to push. I don&#x27;t think theres any quantitative empirical evidence of this. It&#x27;s people wanting it to be true and you&#x27;ll see it on every thread about DDG (as one notable example).<p>Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of &quot;Google killers&quot; who seem to have all fallen into different versions of this trap.

&gt;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!<p>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&#x27;s AI model and replace ad based search with subscription based search. My point is don&#x27;t do what Google is doing, think differently.

The author quotes Page and Brin&#x27;s original paper:<p>&gt; “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].<p>A search for cellular phone now returns a page of links to plans, and one link to Wikipedia.

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&#x27;t understand why funding through direct sales will give a better product than funding through advertising:<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>For businesses I think this effect is only driven by competition regardless of revenue model.

What a completely disconnected-from-reality article.<p>There are so many ways to use Google to obtain the information you&#x27;re looking for, and so many people do it literally on a minute-to-minute basis that it&#x27;s flat absurd to call that ineffective.<p>It&#x27;s <i>trivially</i> easy to learn something by typing a question into Google; maybe when writing an article try gut checking it against obvious observed reality first.<p>I simply cannot fathom a noble reason why the author would decide to publish this.<p>Edit: Oh wait I found it; the author is Vladimir Prelovac, CEO, Kagi Inc. What does Kagi Inc. do? I&#x27;ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I bet you guess it in one try...

Unrelated to this from the pricing page[1] of Kagi:<p>&gt; It costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.<p>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.<p>There team&#x27;s plan seems to quite expensive considering we are so used to free (ad supported) search.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;pricing</a>

&quot;We Are Building A Web Where The Default Is Social&quot; -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2010<p>He then described how people will first do their usual _web searches_ via FB search bar. To my knowledge, that didn&#x27;t happen. And he has since pivoted to &quot;the future is private&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;zuckerbergs-buildin-web-default-social&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;zuckerbergs-buildin-web-de...</a>

Hot take. As long as ads are clearly indicated, and non-promoted results are easily accessible and usable, I don&#x27;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.

I think this article is missing the point that the technology of a solution is different from its intrinsic motivations.<p>PageRank could have been fine if the intrinsic motivations were to educate, enlighten, and help people.<p>Just because a search technology is wrapped up to look like a personalized AI doesn&#x27;t mean it is immune to the same intrinsic motivations.<p>Who is to say that Google won&#x27;t release a &#x27;Personalized Search AI&#x27; that is free for the user and it continues to follow the same motivations that their PageRank solution does.<p>I think custom AI&#x27;s tuned for each person will be the defining technical foundation for the next few decades, but I&#x27;m extremely concerned that the fundamental business drivers that compete for sales, view time, and divisiveness will not be resolved.<p>Nothing will stop an authoritarian government, an ad driven company, an entertainment company, or a political research company from giving out &#x27;free&#x27; personal AI&#x27;s.<p>If the history of the Internet has anything to teach us then it is this:<p>The free ones will always be more successful than the paid ones.

I&#x27;ve always wondered why Google doesn&#x27;t have some way to provide an explicit signal from the users like favorite&#x2F;bookmark or explicitly like&#x2F;dislike a search result.<p>It&#x27;s often pretty fustrating to try and find something you know you&#x27;ve seen before but don&#x27;t remember quite the name of or exact keywords.

&gt; 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.<p>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 &quot;$8&#x2F;m for half the ads&quot; 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.

Honestly not sure if search engines are the future at all, at least for commercialisable content.<p>More and more I find myself searching through moderated social media like Reddit or Facebook Groups&#x2F;Marketplace for product recommendations or local services.<p>Gave Kagi a go, but it seemed to be even worse than Google for what I tried.

I wonder how Kagi’s crawler gets around the Cloudflare protection that many sites are using today.

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.<p>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)<p>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&#x2F; Google Analytics, Chrome browser telemetry and all their other web bugs.

I&#x27;ve been a beta user but the 10$&#x2F;month price tag is too steep for me.<p>That being said, I&#x27;m beginning to think that <i>having</i> a price tag as entry barrier is a good thing for a search engine.<p>One of the reasons for Google&#x27;s downfall is that they had to cater to dumb and easily controllable masses.<p>Also, the aggressive SEO that made the search results so bad made economical sense as soon as those masses flocked at the platform.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve used Kagi as my primary search engine since they went live and I&#x27;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.

PageRank was all Larry Page. The cited article was about the search engine.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US6285999B1&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;patents.google.com&#x2F;patent&#x2F;US6285999B1&#x2F;en</a>

Technically the title is correct since Google has deprecated PageRank for years. But it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;m still not sure what it is trying to achieve by bringing PageRank to the table. If you substitute &quot;PageRank&quot; with &quot;Google&quot; then it actually makes more sense though.

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&#x27;t think PageRank will go away.<p>Two improvements that I&#x27;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.)

Post states that Google search is getting worse, &quot;...the quality of search started to deteriorate&quot;, and links to this article to justify the claim:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dkb.io&#x2F;post&#x2F;google-search-is-dying" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dkb.io&#x2F;post&#x2F;google-search-is-dying</a><p>Big discussion here and on Reddit when that article was posted. It doesn&#x27;t set out to say Google search is worse&#x2F;getting worse, but that people don&#x27;t trust its results as much as human generated content (thus appending &#x27;Reddit&#x27; to queries).

If Kagi gets popular it would have the same problems as Google today has. They’re unavoidable.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve been using Kagi on and off for the last few months. I often forget about it since I can&#x27;t set it as my default browser in Safari.<p>But in general, especially when looking for specific phrases or trying to find discussions related to a topic, it&#x27;s working extremely well. Whenever I used it, I was happy with it, and the search result quality was better than in Google.<p>It&#x27;s good to note though that iirc Kagi does actually use commercial search services by Google&#x2F;Microsoft behind the scenes, in addition to their own custom components.

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

Can you share some insight on how&#x2F;if Kagi is different from Neeva[1] in its approach?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neeva.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neeva.com&#x2F;</a>

Can the technology behind GPT-3 be used to find relevant articles given a query?<p>E.g. instead of training it to generate sentences given a prompt, train it to generate URLs given a query (?)

Google doesn&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kdd.org&#x2F;kdd2016&#x2F;papers&#x2F;files&#x2F;adf0361-yinA.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kdd.org&#x2F;kdd2016&#x2F;papers&#x2F;files&#x2F;adf0361-yinA.pdf</a>

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&#x27;t doing much work these days with Google. Larry is in Fiji and hasn&#x27;t been heard from much in the last two years.<p>IMHO, Yandex feels like the old Google. It returns lots of small sites for most searches and does way better on controversial topics.

&quot;With the inevitable advancement of our civilization&quot;<p>unless advancement is understood as necessarily attendant upon linear time unspooling, it is no ways inevitable

Kagi is indeed a great search engine. Why oh why can&#x27;t it just be an option on the Safari search engine preference panel? Maybe the login.

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.<p>Instead they are going the other way. Sad.

This begs the question:<p>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?<p>My own biased use case is that I started following a whole bunch of designers on Instagram to get new design news.

Been a paying customer since sometime last spring and am very happy with Kagi. I give it two big thumbs-up.

The OP over-reaches in that PageRank is just a small ingredient in Google&#x27;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 &gt;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.<p>&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;t a successful business for quite some time. Eventually, they adopted (some people would say &quot;stole&quot; - there was a lawsuit) Yahoo!-owned Overture&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;small&quot; 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&#x27;t afford to reinvent the wheel because you don&#x27;t know the scientific literature&#x2F;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!<p>In summary, I think there never was an &quot;age of PageRank&quot;. 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&#x27;t much of a priority at the moment, hard to say (they are (too?) big now).<p>Edit: Here, I&#x27;ve interviewed Shadi Saleh, the architect of Syria&#x27;s search engine (if you think it&#x27;s impossible to get up and running with a small team): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;irsg.bcs.org&#x2F;informer&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;syrias-first-web-search-engine-an-interview-with-shadi-saleh-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;irsg.bcs.org&#x2F;informer&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;syrias-first-web-searc...</a>

Still see SEO spam beating quality websites.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;faq#Where-are-your-results-coming-from</a><p>&quot;Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well&quot;<p>Lol okay

I don&#x27;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.

The blog post credits Google founders for PageRank but probably the credit should go to Baidu instead.<p>Check the history section: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PageRank" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PageRank</a>

I will always remember a commercial wherein some shitty marketing company promised to hack Google&#x27;s algorithm and get you on the first page.<p>So what destroyed the relative purity of search engines and the early web? Money. How do we solve it? Money apparently.<p>Yeah good luck with that.

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.

Purely anecdotal, but as a matter of fact yesterday I spent 15 minutes searching for a web site on google (I couldn&#x27;t remember the domain name), threw up my hands, went to duckduckgo, and nailed it on the first try.

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.

&gt;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<p>What an optimistic perspective.

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.<p>I’ll stick with DuckDuckGo, thank you.

&gt; it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches.[0]<p>I am genuinely curious how did <i>Kagi</i> arrive at this cost.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;pricing</a>

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

What an incredibly pointless and long ad disguised as a blog post.

Is there a way to provide feedback to Kagi that a link isn&#x27;t relevant in their search? Searching &quot;us election results&quot; for example gives me the results from 2020.

Why would you create a search engine that looks exactly like every other search engine? And further, specifically Google.<p>Why would you not take the chance to completely reimage search into something way better than the absolute random crap we have today?<p>Whatever the next web discovery engine looks like, it&#x27;ll look and feel entirely different.<p>It won&#x27;t be the equivalent of someone saying, &quot;Hey Facebook is bad, look at MY social network!&quot; and it being the exact same layout and user experience as Facebook, with different margins, padding, fonts and colors.<p>Whatever comes next, it&#x27;ll be like comparing Twitter to Facebook, or TikTok to Instagram.<p>As the kids used to say, this ain&#x27;t it, chief.

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.

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.

Something I&#x27;ve always wondered about:<p>How about personalized pagerank search that assigns any URL I&#x27;ve bookmarked a high value for E?<p>Is there a reason no one has done this yet?

Is there a search engine that just omits pages with surveillance tracking scripts? Could it be done?<p>Then you can check google or a mainstream engine when needed.

So is Kagi a stand alone search engine or is it like every other Google alternative that just pays Bing for API use?

Off-topic rant: Why is it so hard in 2022 to go from your blog to your main page?

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!

FYI the &quot;subscribe to kagi&quot; button links to kagi.com, not to the subscription page.

<i>The age of orcs has begun</i>

I love Kagi! Been paying for the past 3 months.

Is this a clone of bearblog (is bearblog a clone of this) or do they share an open source?<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m dumb. Please do not reply or I will Sylvia Plath myself.

&gt; Over the years, the web deteriorated to the state it is in now - a highly destructive force.<p>You can’t be serious with a claim like this

Reject modernity, embrace tradition: we&#x27;re going back to user curated indexes like it&#x27;s the 90s!<p>Time to join a web ring.

it amuses me greatly that 30 years in to the great commercialized internet experiment, we still don&#x27;t have durable mechanisms for publishing, spam filtering, identification, reputation, moderation and discovery.

Too bad Kagi shows Amazon shopping results, from what I hear that&#x27;s a horrible company for its own employees.<p>Otherwise I might have given it a shot.

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&#x27;s surprising CEO of a search engine company just woke up to this. The future of search is AI model-as-index infrastructure.