I make my living as an SEO and yes Google searches can be manipulated by
Internal linking
Contextual keyword references
External linking
Social linking
Social engagement
But yes external link building is by far the heaviest weight because of the barrier to entry, to get someone to link to your site is based on the assumption you created something so high value it was the ideal reference, but as we know every website on the planet is for sale and for the right price you can buy the right links from domains, or run link building campaigns that help you secure a competitive domain valuation in google's eyes that gives you ranking ability
Let's say we do have a LN-ranking factor that could be stored in an LSAT or something like and had a weighting for everyones own biases
So a piece of content could have a weighting on
Internal linking
Contextual keyword references
External linking
Social linking
Social engagement
as a baseline, I don't think throwing it out completely is a good idea, there is some merit to the system, it should just be re-weighted with secondary data
Lets say we had economic factors like:
Unique wallets that engaged with domain
Unique wallets that engaged with page
Number of wallets that tipped
Amount tipped
Number of recurring payments to domain
Number of paywall interactions
A conversion rate of paywall to wallets
Scroll depth payment %
Return rate of unique wallets to content or domain
Average spend on content/domain
Overlaying this information with the standard google metrics can give you a much deeper understanding of the value of a piece of content.
Lets say there are 2 pages, both 2000 words each both have the same amount of links and shares, but one is an indepth researched article, the other is listicle, they might have the same time on site, bounce rate and to google they are both simliar, but when you overlay the economic data you can see that the rich piece gets far more real engagement and therefore should be ranked higher.
I agree it's been bastardised through the years, as fiat dilutes all products and is due for an upgrade, I just don't see how a site with superior ranking eats market share because normies don't know they're getting bad results, they take it on face value this is what results should be and yes you do get brand biased searches as mentioned in the post but this is not the norm.
As an SEO I use multiple search engines all the time to compare resutls, but a normie is not going to do that, if lets say the wallet is now a chrome extension like alby and can prompt users to adopt the additional metrics to update search results that could be a jumping off point since you're not moving them off google.
I use tools like ahrefs that do that, so I can view location biased searches when i work for clients in different regions, and think this could be a cool solution that could even be useed to feed data into having a stand alone search engine too like Ahrefs has with Yep.com
I definitely agree that ValueRank is just one useful signal (albeit a very valuable one). There should be dozens of experiments mashing up this signal with other data to create the ideal search engine (and there might be multiple winners depending on user preference).
What do you mean by "Scroll depth payment %"?
Yes I agree that it will be very hard to break Google's powerful network effects. But the beachhead of Hacker News type users is up for the taking. As the online vanguard, they will end up setting a lot of future trends based on the recommendations and integrations they make (so an API is likely very important).
What's more, I think "normies" can be brought over as well. There are several approaches that could work here:
As Google search results get worse over time, ValueRank gets better. Each person has some threshold where eventually they get fed up with bad info and are excited to find a better result elsewhere (perhaps shared by a friend). It won't happen overnight, but this has been steadily happening via word of mouth for privacy engines like DuckDuckGo.
The new search interface uses both a social graph and ValueRank, so people don't think of it as a search engine per se, but more of a discovery or recommendation engine fed by people they trust.
Users continue to use Google but are nudged toward better results via an online overlay like their Alby wallet (or some common browser extension)
People move to the new engine b/c they get paid to do so. Still need to figure out the exact economics of this, but I think it could work.
I had never heard of Ahrefs or Yep.com before. Thanks for the heads up! It looks like the answer could be something like Yep but with Lightning payments. Let me know if you end up experimenting with your own idea here :)
This is indeed a monster of an idea, and the refining of it should be tonnes of fun and learnings to come from it, if you just have a look at schema.org and look at all the site mark ups google doesn't support that site owners could use and that could be boosted with LN you'll see how brain melting this can be since each content type can be treated differently
Articles, recipes, events, podcasts, video, images, infographics, user-generated content can all be marked up and weighted to the persons perferences
Regarding scrolling it's become an important value measurement, its used in social media, people with longer scroll depth are more valuble as they provide more signal, people who go to googles page 2,3 are more valuable because they tend to me more indepth researchers, websites on angular/react front ends tend to use infinite scroll, native apps and PWAs are all built on the scrolling model and so depth is important as well as dwell time, these are all signals that could be used
In LN, the paywall could be configured to pay as far as you scroll, so instead of paying to unlock the total piece, I read the introduction and as I'm captivated I read on and the paywall releases more as you stream sats as if its an infinite scroll site
Since LN can also be added to RSS feeds, you can draw from things like Turbo pages which Yandex has, RSS readers like feedly, and apps you have a much broader data set that google only gets access to or really considers
Thanks for the feedback, I think you're on to something here, I like the idea of the migration approach for the normies, and seeding the sats via another revenue-generating business.
I am working on something that could feed into this initial idea, and provide an indicator for a certain niche of content. I am focusing on user-generated content/reviews not with the bitcoin manual but with my normie business, I am still trying to get my head around the downsides and gamification and how it's marginally better than the trust assumptions we have today with user-generated content and how we can make it better that what we already have
LN is a big part of that as I'm learning about what it can bring.
You've given me a lot to consider, will continue to refine the idea
This is a great post and overall thread, thanks for sharing and posting all of this.
"As the amount of online information grows exponentially, human attention is rapidly becoming the scarcest and most important resource in the world." Really interesting to think about ratios of our relatively stagnant and finite human seconds to infinitely replicable and more rapidly produced digital content.
Going to have to read through everything here a few extra times 🙏 - Stacker News bookmark :)
Max and I discussed this when it was still a draft. It immediately got me thinking. Mostly about how
trust is hard to decentralize
the incentives in a trustless system are hard to perfect, and
bootstrapping would have to be done in phases
Recording value transfer on Lightning is hard. It is intentionally designed to be private. You’d need to record “receipts” (ie records of satoshi depth as Max calls it) for value transfers and it’d have to be hard/expensive to fake such a receipt. If transferring money is cheap (or the benefit of transferring it exceeds the cost of transfer), people will transfer as much money as they have to to get the effect they want.
Thus, creating a receipt either has to be expensive or you need to determine whether users generate trustworthy receipts. Either is hard even in a centralized system, but (today at least) trust is particularly hard to do in a decentralized system.
Further, if we expect people to upvote content in search results, they’ll need to be incentivized to do so. The 1% rule, while typically applied to "engagers" in forums, could probably be applied to any intrinsically motivated activity, like the "givers" in these value for value contexts. To bootstrap a large community of givers then, it would probably help (and might even be necessary) to extrinsically motivate them.
How I’d begin building this today:
Start with a page rank-like search engine
Allow users to "tip" content in results sending part of the payment to
the site (using something like a meta tag with a lightning address in it)
the search engine
the higher the amount sent to the search engine the more "signal" or satoshi depth established by the tip (because it's a more "expensive" transfer)
Let the satoshi depth influence results
To bootstrap, reward tippers finding good results - somehow, someway
There's a ton to be figured out in the design obviously. What role does trust play? How to disincentivize whales from paying for higher results? But this is how I'd start. I agree with Max that there's likely something there.
I love this initial roadmap! If anyone is interested in experimenting with it please, let me know :)
My hunch is that roughly 1% of tipping users should be enough to generate signal. It will likely be a higher % if there are rewards beyond pure altruism.
I think you can generate user rewards via other income streams - e.g. a jobs board like Stacker News'. Or maybe a premium subscription with additional privacy or enterprise features? Or maybe tied to another revenue generating biz like @TheBTCManual described with Ahrefs and Yep.com?
And yes the trust model piece needs a lot of experimentation. Perhaps it's established with LSATs, DIDs, or could maybe even be tied into Nostr as someone mentioned to me this morning. Lots to explore there...
And why not make the whole thing community-based. Users could, for a certain cost, submit search results for certain search queries. Those would then be displayed to future users of the search engine. The users who submitted the search result could then be rewarded when someone clicks their search result or upvotes it. Needs thought how to make the whole thing sybil resistant though.
Maybe a hybrid of a page rank search engine and stacker.news? Each page (or domain) has paid upvotes and a discussion attached? If done at the level of domains it's easier to centralize upvotes, regardless of the search query, than at the page level
Btw: you can use site:reddit.com in the Google search to only get results from reddit. May be a bit more effective than using "reddit" which means the word "reddit" must appear in the result
How it could work in practice
How we break the network effect
About scrolling
Seeding the behavior
Web of trust indicators
site:reddit.comin the Google search to only get results from reddit. May be a bit more effective than using"reddit"which means the word "reddit" must appear in the result