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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

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!!!

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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".

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).

> 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?

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.

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.

Not really, Copernicus' entire life and all his decades-long studies were paid for by the catholic church and his research was accepted by the Pope himself, even to the point of being taught at Catholic universities. Noone "persecuted" him in any way.

It only changed over a hundred years later due to the opposition from the Protestants that his books became banned.

Galileo/Copernicus wrote about Catholicism? If a ranking system treats your expertise in one area as being relevant to another it's not doing its job. Accepted, religion is a bit of a special case given the way it tends to encourage views on subjects as broad as "how the universe came into being" or "how to be a good person" (and those views are almost never "religion isn't your best guide"), but a good page ranking algorithm should still be able to only apply "expertise" rating when it applies specifically to terms in the search phrase.

> ranking mechanism that can take account of the expertise level of the author

I assure you that all major search engines use the author name of articles and blog posts and even posts of forums like HN for all kinds of purposes that end up influencing ranking. It's primarily for anti-spam (a user account with good content on one page probably has good content on another page), but is used to rank quality/expertise too.

They why do I get all kinds of SEO optimized results written by some low-wage content creator?

There can be a middle ground with mixing both random and trusted content. The problem with current search results is that SEO optimization and content marketing pretty much ruin search results with answers that score high on keywords but are actually low in value.

yeah... no. At least not in my opinion.

The mixing of random and "trusted" content is already what is being done with pagerank.

Truth is an agreement and trust is superficial. I know, I know there is truth in code, but that does not mean that the bigger concept aligns.

I mean damn, we went as far as defining math as the "universal truth" because its replicateable. I dont think anybody wanted to convert reality to numbers but here we are represeting them this way. But hey, if you can develop a mathematical formular why blogspost A about "how to setup your linux computer" is much more true that blogpost B im really all ears.

The parent seemed to suggest this was at an individual level, rather than everyone being forced to get information from some consensus trusted source.

There’s no need, with this idea, for you to have to get your info directly from the Vatican. You can decide you trust someone different.

and how are you going to set up those experts for "your search ai"?`

Because its really going to be different from the one your neighbour has.

How do you select turstworthy people on a new topic? Does every search start with "hmmm i found 6521 people blogging about this, please click on the trustworthy avatars you like"?

The concept you are trying to apply here, will just lead to your own bubble. Im not even going to go into detail of "orange men knows best" but this example alone should shock you.

No idea - it’s quite hard. I didn’t suggest the original idea and I’m not trying to apply the concept. I was merely pointing out that your argument was based on a false premise.

Now you’re arguing about implementation, which is different.

You find out about a person, evaluate them, and subscribe to their newsletter.

This isn't about getting quick answers.

It's interesting that people don't have the patients to vet or even start to question the veracity of their information sources. I think this part of the "how do you expert?" problem is the one that needs to be more carefully examined and solved. We can probably come up with 10 different ways for our algos and AIs to present "experts," but is everyone going to trust those methods? Not likely, so we fall back to the problem of "my expert is better than your expert" regardless of the talent pool or selection process. So, how do we solve that? Would people make better choices if the were given better options, or does human irrationality always win, in the end?

Well, my solution is not trying to solve humanities problem you know, it's just trying to solve my own problem. And I'm just guessing I'm not the only person who has this problem.

So how to vet people? Well, Paul Graham started a VC company and has seen a lot of startups, so my guess is that he knows a lot about the topic. More so than anyone who hasn't come close to any startup.

On (game) development, I would go for Carmack and the likes.

And of course just like PageRank, if they have vetted for certain people, those also get scored.

Does it lead to your own bubble? Of course! But if you're going to get a religious person to dump his own religion in favor for another, good luck to you. But that's not the kind of problem that I want or need to solve.

I just want reliable information. And I get to decide what "reliable" is. If you're a flat-earther, you can vet any crazy person you wish. I don't care, because it won't affect me at all.

You do realize this is more or less how PageRank worked? Seed of trustworthy domains and who they link to propagates the trustworthiness. This is a take on the idea where it'd be people (not really, still a source) and chain onwards.

I had a similar idea (also, please take it) for online comment systems. Seed of people and who they invite is who they vouch for. The new invitees get to invite more etc. Now, and keep OPs suggestion in mind as well, that's the easy part - here's where it needs to go... If someone messes up, account gets banned and upchain (two levels let's say) gets a notice. Upchain gets one more notice and the whole chain's banned. One notice clears out in half a year or so. Two never. Yellow/red cards for the teams on the internet. One's always at fault, but whole team suffers and is responsible.

What incentivises me to be active and commit time and energy to the site knowing that at any time I could be permabanned by the behaviour of someone two levels away whom I've never even heard of? That's worse than Twitter banning you for some rule break, that's Twitter banning you for someone else's rule break.

You might say that would make you think thrice about inviting people, and yes it would - what incentivises anyone to invite anyone, ever? What makes your system different from a small group of friends making a private invite-only Discord/IRC channel/etc. and keeping it exclusive right now?

Especially wealthy VCs like PG who seem to have decided that because they can throw money around they truly are expert in everything.

This is a classic trait of narcissists.

That's why I explicitly said "about a certain topic". I have no clue if he knows something about raising kids.

I trust PG for knowledge about startups. That's it.

I agree.

I’ve come to realize that the people that “wrote the book” on a particular subject aren’t necessarily experts, they’re just the person who happened to be motivated to write a book on the subject.

Learning about a subject or an event comes from hearing many voices, across a broad spectrum of perspectives and opinions.

Then you can form your own conclusions out of all the possible truths.

Exactly this. In germany we had a couple of scandals where somebody became a bestseller author by buying his own books and gifting them to everybody he meets in bulk. So he basically paid for his sales himself and was of course also able to claim a tax benefit for it.

Truth is not a democratic process and very hard to verify just by using data.

> and that my friends is how the internet will die.

Not asking to rewrite the whole internet here, just an alternative search engine.

> The idea that someone reputeable is always right and and expert in his domain could not be further fetched from the truth.

The expert probably knows more than the non-expert. If you like to get your info from low-waged SEO writers, fine by me.

> 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".

The pope, and everyone that he trusts, seems like credible sources for Catholics, no? Maybe you can throw in some theologist you like (and therefore also this persons trusted connections), and you can have a pretty good catalogue of trusted searchable information.

I founded such a company in 2006, based on my master’s thesis open source project: http://getoutfoxed.com/nutshell

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.

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?

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.

You don't get to set neither the thresholds, nor crucially the people whose writings you'd like to see. At least not directly.

You do control who you follow on Twitter.

I want to do this for a review site.

>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.

So Webrings, then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

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.

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.

Feels like you could use the existing https cert that everyone already needs to have for this, no?

These certs are tied to a domain, not to a person.

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.

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.

> I think we need reputation mechanism.

Reddit.

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).

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

yey ID based internet ;)

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

That sounds like Twitter, but without the keys and signing.

But search on twitter is absolute garbage.

Oh, the golden age of search... did we appreciate it enough while it lasted? I surely didn't.

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.

You can always start with a clean slate and get the current PageRanked results of course.

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

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

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

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".

You just described twitter

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.

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.

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