1233 sats \ 3 replies \ @TheBTCManual 8 Sep 2022 \ on: How to Disrupt Google bitcoin
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.

How it could work in practice
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.

How we break the network effect
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
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271 sats \ 2 replies \ @MaxAWebster OP 8 Sep 2022
Great post, thanks!
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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Users continue to use Google but are nudged toward better results via an online overlay like their Alby wallet (or some common browser extension)
  4. 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 :)
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580 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 9 Sep 2022
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
About scrolling
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
Seeding the behavior
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.
Web of trust indicators
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
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @MaxAWebster OP 9 Sep 2022
Amazing! Let's chat soon :)
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