Welcome to dkb's tech blog. Most of my stuff is about search engines, but I will be exploring other things soon.
Note: this blog has been moved to substack at dkb.blog.Sign up on substack for updates.
The internet is run by adtech right now, and all the biggest companies are thriving on that, and I think the sooner we get out of that, the better. It is certainly going to be hard, and I'm not against ads per-se, but I'm against ads everywhere, ads by default, ads making our lives crappier and more miserable.
We thought this was wrong. Search is a daily utility that all of us use. There needs to be alternate mechanisms for how we go about it. And so things like the ads-free and private model that Neeva is built on were consequences of this basic observation.
Most search engines are not independent search engines, and while they may provide some value, they are qualitatively different from what Brave Search is doing. Independence is not something directly actionable, but it’s a fundamental property.
DuckDuckGo and Bing are not true alternatives – they’re just worse versions of Google. The next Google can’t just be an input box that spits out links. We need new thinking to create something much better than what came before.
The websites at the top of Google are not the highest quality websites, but the ones that put the most effort into SEO. We need a ranking algorithm that cannot be easily gamed. This paper describes MarketRank, a ranking algorithm that is immune to SEO and simple to compute.
Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.
Reading a lot of books doesn’t make you a good reader. Two people can read the same book, and one of them can gain a totally new understanding of the world, while the other learns a few points they can regurgitate in conversations.
It also enables and feeds into curiosity. With abundant information at your fingertips, you could dive into a field you know absolutely nothing about, but seems interesting. If the information were not organized, you might not even know that this field existed.
You’re not going to be famous, but you might help one or two people. If even one person finds it useful, then that’s worth it, because one person matters a lot.
