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 :)
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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Amazing! Let's chat soon :)
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