Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marginalia_nu 1587 days ago
I have no insight in their search engine, but I do know it would hurt their ad revenue to surface results that have no ads. Lends itself to speculation. But it could just be some confluence of other factors, of course. They seem to aggressively favor recent content (I do the opposite).
2 comments
cosheaf 1587 days ago
Which is why I said it's an ouroboros eating its own tail. The scale it operates at and given that it's also an ad network guarantees that whatever results it finds will favor its own ad network. It doesn't even have to be intentional since all they're doing is optimizing some metrics and running ML algorithms. There is no single person that could be blamed for the deterioration of the results. There is no way around this conflict of interest and they will continue pushing the envelope to increase their own revenue at the expense of useful results for as long as possible.

If a site is hosting ads from the Google ad network and is barely above being spam then Google will prioritize it over other results in order to maintain its quarterly revenue predictions.

link
marginalia_nu 1587 days ago
That's a reasonable analysis. I do think Google has grown about as it can legitimately grow, which means the only way it can maintain an appearance of growth is by cannibalizing itself. The increasingly aggressive use of search ads are probably an example of this.
link
Firmwarrior 1587 days ago
When are you going to have a VC fork over $10,000,000 and start your empire??

I use your crazy search engine all the time, and it's fucking great. Last time I checked, though, you're getting like $30 a month from Patreon and that's it, haha.

You're too much of a well-adjusted normal human being, that's your problem. You need that touch of Zuckerwellian sociopathy to get to the next level

link
marginalia_nu 1587 days ago
Well I'm actually up to a $100 now, which is about twice my burn rate, so you might as well say I've broken even already. To the moon, baby.

To be serious, it's notoriously difficult to actually make a profit off search. I guess we'll see if Kagi will be able to eke out a market for itself, that may change things. Right now, I think investors will look at Bing and go "yikes".

Doesn't go to say I couldn't build a fantastic search engine with more resources than my current shoestring budget, the hard question remains: Why isn't this just a waste of money? Would take one hell of a sales pitch to gloss over that concern.

link