IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam.
Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that do not even contain all the words in the query. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about other errors.
Someone1234 1471 days ago [-]
I'm just glad I'm not alone, sometimes I second guess if I am the problem.
Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results.
Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking, and gave you what you wanted instead of what you asked for. These days it is just page after page of auto-generated results, pages that don't contain anything relevant to your query, or just low quality results.
I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in Google's search, and I'm sure they're meeting some metric or another, but from my perspective things have gone seriously downhill to the point where I am looking elsewhere.
It used to be THE technical search engine de jure. Now it feels like a search engine you have to hack to get it to work well. Not a good place to be.
PS - I have read, in HN comments (so pure rumor) from self-proclaimed ex-Googlers, that Google's internal culture punishes people for improvements/maintenance to existing products, and that promotions come from developing new products/features. If even semi-accurate might go a long way to explaining why Google Search feels neglected aside from changes which seem to exist to improve their button line/promote sister products.
int_19h 1471 days ago [-]
The problem isn't just SEO, it's that Google itself aggressively rewrites queries to produce more results (which I suspect they want to do to show more "relevant" ads).
On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results, in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word, but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very specific query, and a very generic one.
Worse yet is that they try to do synonym substitution, but their algorithm has a ridiculously low bar for that. Like, you might be searching for "FreeBSD", and it will substitute that for "Linux", or even "Ubuntu". Or search for a specific firearm model, and it finds "gun".
Quoting keywords suppresses all of that, but synonyms are actually useful - if it did them accurately...
KMag 1471 days ago [-]
I left Google in 2010, so it's just a wild guess, but I suspect a big part of the issue is learn-to-rank is probably being trained on everyone's searches. I think it would probably do much better if they used the presence or absence of search operators as a simple heuristic to separate power user searches from common searches, and trained a separate ranking model on power user searches.
Maybe they're already doing this, but it sure acts like learn-to-rank is always ranking pages as if the query were very sloppy.
It's been a long time, and I certainly never read the code, but I vaguely remember a Google colleague mentioning something (before learn-to-rank) about a back-end query optimizer branch that would intentionally disable much of the query munging if there were any search operators in the query. There was some mention about using cookies / user account information to do the same if the same browser/user had used any search operators in the past N days, but I'm not sure if that was implemented or just being floated as a useful optimization.
lowdose 1471 days ago [-]
Google image search is also not searching for a duplicate but what object the ml recognized on the picture. For image search I switched to Yandex.
rathel 1471 days ago [-]
I wonder if this synonym substitution was their use case leading to invention of word2vec.
redwall_hp 1471 days ago [-]
I think it has to do with shifting expectations. All of us who use the Web seriously, and have been for years, want a full text search engine. The average user wants what Ask Jeeves promised to be: something that takes vaguely question-shaped queries and spits back a fast answer. Or a glorified URL bar to outsource memory and effort.
not2b 1471 days ago [-]
No, you don't want a full text search engine. If you think you do, you don't remember the pre-Google world. It was impossible to use the older search engines to find a reasonable explanation of a common topic, because to Alta Vista and other search engines of that era, every page that contained a given term was considered equal to every other page, and it would give you all of them in a random order. You could add lots of AND and OR to try to exclude what you didn't want, and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.
But when Google first came out, it was a shock. You could just search for something like "Linux", and the most authoritative sites all showed up on the first page.
userbinator 1471 days ago [-]
and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.
At least those search engines gave you that many results to go through... now Google gives you less than that, full of spam (despite the index probably containing far more), and you'll be in CAPTCHA hellban if you try harder to get to the rest.
miracle2k 1471 days ago [-]
A full text search with a good ranking is still a full text search. The point here is that Google used to do the job just fine, but no longer is.
kevin_thibedeau 1471 days ago [-]
AltaVista's killer feature was the NEAR operator.
jkaptur 1471 days ago [-]
Yeah, I'm sort of surprised that there isn't a semi-popular "web grep" tool for people who would rather use regex, some understandable ranking algorithm with knobs to tweak, etc.
Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.
zo1 1471 days ago [-]
Not just that, but the sheer scale of such an index. The size of the web now just makes anything small next to impossible without a lot of funding. And none of the existing search engines will probably allow you programmatic/data access to their index without a metric ton of cash
artificial 1471 days ago [-]
How is it that spiders/bots are able to "index" copyrighted content? Is it just one of those things where the ends justify the means or a holdover/tradition or some such?
kd5bjo 1471 days ago [-]
It’s some combination of fair use and raw data not being copyrightable. My understanding is that only the creative expression that’s copyrighted, and not the actual words. So, if you distill out all of the creativity into something that’s purely information about the work, you’re probably fine copyright-wise.
There’s a long tradition of compiling and publishing concordances, which are just indices of every place each word appears in the original text. They’re generally not useful without access to the original, so noboy seems to mind them very much. Google’s index is just a modern form of the same thing.
sefrost 1471 days ago [-]
I wonder how many pages would be worth indexing for such a tool though.
zo1 1471 days ago [-]
Probably a tiny subset. But the problem is finding that small subset!
nradov 1471 days ago [-]
Basically now we're back to forcing Google to work the way AltaVista did in 1997.
neotokio 1471 days ago [-]
I think there are few things to consider here,
1) Google CANNOT provide you with technical search, because choice of index/query filters is always limited (ie. Do I prefer exact matches over multiple matches?)
2) Google has shareholder & public responsibility. It means that service is adjusted (and it's 'algorithms') towards biggest type of queries performed.
All of this is a constant battle between precision and recall for given query. Adding to complexity, Google needs to account for
* Extraordinary amount of users using their search
* Extraordinary amount of data on webpages
* Importance of authority
In smaller search engines (ie. shop full-text search) you usually adjust towards one use case. This in itself is already hard.
Google does that for all possible use cases, for all possible queries while still fighting same precision/recall battle.
To be clear. I think google is terrible, but I also think that there is no other option for them at this point.
All of this became clear for me the moment I've got interested in build search and relevance engines.
MaxBarraclough 1471 days ago [-]
Presumably google are in an arms race with the spammers, like all search engines are.
Is there a superior alternative to Google?
wizzwizz4 1471 days ago [-]
DuckDuckGo does something fancy with smooshing together Google and Microsoft databases with their own to create a half-decent search engine.
Cliqz has hardly anything indexed at the moment, but it actually gets relevant results from those. (e.g. "zoom privacy" brings up the Zoom privacy policy first, then three news headlines from the last 12 hours, then a news article from yesterday, then an IT@Cornell guide for making Zoom meetings private, then some more news articles, some stuff about HIPPA…) I really like it, even if it isn't great for programming at the moment.
In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the number of pages that linked to a page meant something).
In the age of GMail beta, Google was my hero and I wanted to work for them. They were doing new things with the browser. First was Google Pack, which included necessary software like Firefox. Then Google introduced Chrome, which was even better.
Both began to descend. I don't know, they became slower and clunkier, as if they were designed by the denizens of any number of companies. Google had about 50,000 people at this point.
Recently, I can't stand even to read Google's documentation, because of its (1) bureaucratic wordiness, and (2) cluttered layout that reminds me of that video about Microsoft redesigning the iPod box. In the early 2000s, Google was a maverick. Nowadays, Google is hard to distinguish from any other corporate giant.
caspper69 1471 days ago [-]
To put things in perspective, Google was founded in 1998, making them 22 years old in September. The "Halloween Documents" were released in August 1998, when Microsoft was 23.
Google is indistinguishable from any other corporate giant because they now are any other corporate giant.
Did anyone seriously think an Ad company would go any other way? It's the scummiest of industries. It was always just a matter of time.
And now we've given (allowed, stood by, whatever) them ALL the data for >50% of our cellular users for the last 10+ years. I'm an Android user too. Oof.
I see the same issue on GitHub too. Recently searched for a Windows API call and neither Google nor DuckDuckGo nor GitHub returned any result.
Cloned a git repo where I thought I remembered seeing the function and 500 MB of downloading later grep confirms that I remembered correctly and that the exact keyword I had been searching for is present multiple times in the source code.
My hunch is that since coders use an ad blocker anyway, it's not financially viable to operate source code search on the public internet.
teraku 1471 days ago [-]
I had this exact thing happen to me yesterday.
I copied a function header from GitHub and searched in GitHub search for it to find the declaration. No results. Clonsed the repo, and clicked "Go to declaration" in my IDE bum "you have reached your destination".
Wtf?
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
Yeah, GitHub's search is next to useless to me because I can't trust it. I search for a string, maybe get some results, but I can't be confident that those are all the occurences of the string I searched for.
bostik 1471 days ago [-]
The SEO toxic sludge has become so pervasive that I can't trust any search these days. Here's an example from just last week.
I was searching for the official AWS security certificates (namely, for ISO27001), which AWS neatly publishes on their site. Even for something that specific, the real AWS certification page was at the bottom of the first Google result page. Everything above it was from various random consulting outfits, all trying to sell their "expertise".
When search terms for a company's official security certificate are poisoned with SEO, we know the well has been thoroughly poisoned.
Eridrus 1471 days ago [-]
Thanks for adding an actual example to this thread. I haven't personally noticed search get worse, so I appreciate it.
Anyway, I typed in your query " IS027001", and you're right, the AWS result is at the very bottom of the first page on mobile. But if you search "AWS IS027001" it's at the very top.
But IS027001 is not an AWS-specific thing, and the results above it are about the standard. It would seem equally bad to return AWS's product pages to somebody looking for information about the standard.
There's definitely an argument that there are too many results from random websites satisfying the "general information about this standard" intent and it would be good if google could guess what everyone wanted simultaneously, but the query is pretty ambiguous...
non-entity 1471 days ago [-]
Been desperately trying to get information on some retrocomputing equipment I bought and Google has been next to useless. Except for handful of results (no more than a dozen) majority of results seem to be websites that scrape Ebay listings and rehost that information. Much of the content that supposedly matched, but was behind a paywall and it was difficult to tell if it would be any useful offhand.
To be fair, in my case the lack of information is real (I've gotten only a minuscule amount of info by asking on niche forums sadly), but cutting out the noise early would be helpful.
koonsolo 1471 days ago [-]
I agree with you on the SEO spam.
But I perceive this as Google losing the battle with SEO. On one hand Google writes the algorithms, and on the other SEO tries to exploit these algorithms to rank as high as possible.
I was thinking that a solution would be instead of page rank, have an author rank. This rank keeps track of authors that are experts at certain topics. When you search for certain keywords, the articles of these known experts are ranked higher.
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
I think it's more than that. If you also consider AMP and various Chrome redesigns, there is this feeling that Google wants to take control of the web. URLs and site's actual locations are being de-emphasized, and searching is becoming more "ask question, get an answer" instead of "enter query, get documents best matching it".
notahacker 1471 days ago [-]
Yeah. AMP is the intentional promotion of content whose creators care a lot about SEO over content which is more reputable, relevant and established and sometimes even with lower page weight. If they're losing a battle with spammers on mobile, it's because they gave them a loaded gun and lined up their search results in its crosshairs.
realusername 1471 days ago [-]
For me the line was the Panda update, that update just completely destroyed the quality of the search results. They did try to improve the quality since that update (with moderate success) but it never came back to the level they had before it.
The ones that do best, the ones that are the greatest public benefit, seem to be governed by a strong leader who stays at the helm.
As soon as the people at the top change, you get jostling and unclear leadership, and power gets diffused.
You get emergent behavior - lots of internal and external competing for power and interests - and the ability to say "no" or "this sucks" or "we will do this" happens less frequently.
Normally competition would take care of all this, but with big gorillas that dominate a market, it might take a while.
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
> Normally competition would take care of all this,
Not necessarily. When you find yourself with beancounters and MBAs at the helm, they for sure will optimize the company to outcompete others. Such companies will eventually die from the rot, but not before they drag down the entire industry they're operating in.
h91wka 1471 days ago [-]
Very true. Two years ago I fully switched to qwant and DDG, and never looked back. It's not because these two engines are great, it's because Google's output is as good as random.
anovikov 1471 days ago [-]
Maybe it's just that now there's whole lot more money in the game of tricking Google? In 2010, people too dumb to use a computer were just getting on the Internet, as smartphones only started to become a thing. Now these people are in and there is lot of money to make on them.
SEO spam instead of car repair manuals is a joke. It has a lot bigger and scarier implications. Just try imagining someone like Obama winning elections now... simply not possible... And it's not because people became more dumb, they totally didn't: it's just because now dumb people have a voice online. And spend money online. Internet works for them now, and shows everyone what they want to see...
anoncake 1471 days ago [-]
That does not explain why Google "finds" results that don't even match the query.
gempir 1471 days ago [-]
Some buzzword recipes are impossible to google.
Overnight Oats as an Example. You just find pages upon pages of blogspam. And almost every page has the same useless information. No normal recipe site is somehow in the top 10 pages.
perl4ever 1471 days ago [-]
"do not even contain all the words in the query"
You may be overlooking where Google found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself. That can actually be useful sometimes.
userbinator 1471 days ago [-]
found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself.
Then why not just show that as the result.
That can actually be useful sometimes.
...hence why the related: operator exists, it's just not the behaviour that most people expect by default.
adelHBN 1471 days ago [-]
I couldn't agree more. I research a lot of history and get junk... so much junk on Google. I also research technical info for our website and get junk. What do you use? What do you recommend?
amelius 1471 days ago [-]
Yes, for example when I'm looking for a datasheet of an electronic component, I often get SEO spam instead of just redirecting me to the pdf which usually is readily available at the manufacturer's website.
armitron 1471 days ago [-]
Fully agree with you, Google -as a lot of us expected- has turned into a corporate scourge.
Which makes their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" come across like a bad joke. They really should update it since they don't even bother to keep up appearances anymore.
dang 1471 days ago [-]
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Denunciatory rhetoric isn't substantive and worse, tends to be repetitive.
Thoughtful critique that adds information (like userbinator's GP comment) is of course welcome.
In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructive, complex discussion. This is one reason I like podcasts and why, for example, Joe Rogan has become popular. The demand for long form, complex discussion is higher than the supply the internet currently provides.
notacoward 1472 days ago [-]
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anywhere. Meanwhile, content from my actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided notions of engagement. Bad feeds ruined the internet.
I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.
RickS 1472 days ago [-]
Agreed. It's not the feed that broke the internet – it's the forced filter.
The notion that forced filtration, reprioritization, and chronological rearrangement of content is implicit the idea of information feeds (search, social media, etc) shows how deep the brokenness is baked in.
Sometimes the filter is a feature, but sometimes it's not. In the name of convenience, it feels like we've given up our right to choose to see everything and decide for ourselves how to filter.
sneak 1471 days ago [-]
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience).
I think daily about ways to get people to stop donating content to these censorship and surveillance platforms. Most people don't run businesses, so they never realize the rent-seeking nature of these jerks.
onion2k 1471 days ago [-]
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship.
This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting.
In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does have some "censorship" rules like filtering out illegal content, but I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.
sneak 1471 days ago [-]
> This would imply HN "censors" the front page.
That’s precisely what they do. Everyone’s allowed to censor what they wish on their own webpage. I, for example, censor from my own webpage (which otherwise contains a lot of information about me) anything someone could use to physically harm me.
The issue comes up when the censorship is used, for example, in DMs or timeline posts between friends (as it is on Facebook and Instagram and Discord), versus one’s own content on a webpage.
There’s a difference between moderation and rent-seeking.
leeoniya 1471 days ago [-]
HN's front page is heavily moderated/curated; it is far from being purely vote-based.
notacoward 1471 days ago [-]
> I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.
Assuming impartiality seems awfully optimistic, given both human nature and the fact that Google admits that it is committed to maximizing profit.
bcrosby95 1471 days ago [-]
Or even youtube. The site gives you zero ability to manage your subscriptions in a reasonable fashion so you're best off just watching whatever it thinks you should watch. I've resorted to bookmarks over subscriptions because it's a better user interface than what the site gives me.
chrisco255 1472 days ago [-]
On your last point, that's more or less how HN works for comments. You can't tell if a comment has been upvoted 20 times or -5 times (until it reaches the negative threshold for fading out). But I agree, that would help.
ssss11 1471 days ago [-]
Its the capitalism of it.
threatofrain 1472 days ago [-]
The feed competes against all the learning resources on the internet. Perhaps people in general are just tired and looking for banter, because the non-banter, however a minority, is completely discoverable.
neutronicus 1472 days ago [-]
I think Podcasts are mainly popular because you can consume them in the car on the way to work.
threatofrain 1472 days ago [-]
Sounds if self-driving vehicles ever take off, we'll be back to video.
blondin 1471 days ago [-]
omg same here...
with the current confinement situation in the world, my podcast episodes list has been growing. i caught up with some of it over last weekend but i feel like i don't have a dedicated time for podcast anymore.
twitter & the web have replaced that time.
userbinator 1471 days ago [-]
the herd mentality
Ever since the first time I heard that word, I've always imagined animals on a farm feeding happily at a trough, unaware of their impending doom. It turns out, that's closer to reality than I thought.
Edit: I mean the word "feed".
mc32 1471 days ago [-]
it's also when predators go after prey and the heard of whatevers blindly follow the direction of a peer, sometimes into peril.
btilly 1472 days ago [-]
The book Trust Me, I'm Lying expands on this point greatly.
It is well worth a read.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
What I would like to see is a way to build charters and algorithmicly enforced governments, and then fork communities when divide exceeds concensus. What I mean by this is a subreddit where you can choose how votes are tallied, and instead of a fiefdom, becomes an open source template for other communities who can inherit the historical record.
When you create the community, it gives you a mad libs style page, where you can choose if you are a democracy, republic, autocracy, a mix of them. Vote weighting, whos votes count for what things, vote prediction and extrapolation. Conditions and Voteing for changing the charter rules, votes for how content gets posted, votes for leadership boards and mastheads. The ability for editors to strengthen or amplify certain voices or voters in a community.
If you could seed a community with "role model voters" and then use the other voters who vote like them to extrapolate how they would vote on stories they havent seen. There is this common misunderstanding in the word that votes are only used as votes, and not as a signal to indirectly form a decision.
Every AI feed I've ever used (prismatic being one that comes to mind) buckles under popular vapid content rising above. Extremely strictly moderated feeds do exist tho: https://aldaily.comhttps://longform.org/https://longreads.com/ I just wish there was a way for a group of strangers, who arent math experts, could spin up a collaborative feed reader (something that autoingests rss/twitter), and through their collective upvotes posts it to a more static page. Counterparties did something like that with Percolate.com and was able to still use the product once it pivoted markets. https://www.techmeme.com, https://www.mediagazer.com and https://www.memeorandum.com/ do the same thing. But those were all close knit teams that knew each other, their underlying tools arent accessible to spin up your own. I'm sure these tools exist for newsrooms, with the abundance of modern CRMs coming to maturity, a place to chat and edit before things get published. But they arent built for strangers to create community together.
It would make sense for these communities to more resemble Wikis with more static content, instead of the endless feed first. /r/personalfinance wiki being the front page, and the feed being something on the side powering new content to add to it.
Id really like to see something that combines reddit, git, fandom/wikia, techmeme, rtings.com, slant.co, kit.co into a collaborative consumer reports, wirecutter, or metacritic, rotten tomatoes. A place for people to gather to build consensus around something in a more structured way than wikipedia, and then publish it. Places like https://letterboxd.com succeed in some ways, but only through the existence of a shared culture and keeping to a specific topic.
There could also be an element of customizability for the end user. A metacritic or rotten tomatoes where you can weight certain critics votes, or a wirecutter where you can express your preferences for certain traits and then have it output a ranking list. Not completely dissimilar to rtings.com's magic tv ranker.
nradov 1471 days ago [-]
Sounds good. If you build it I'll use it.
blablabla123 1471 days ago [-]
I don't know, chronological formats have been there even before the WWW, namely Usenet, IRC and even E-Mail in a way. So this stuff also rarely made its way to web searches.
But probably there is a higher percentage hosted on proprietary platforms (Reddit, FB, ...) that replaces services mentioned above but personal websites as well.
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jrockway 1472 days ago [-]
> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail."
I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors, two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is exactly ruined.
ntsplnkv2 1472 days ago [-]
Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.)
The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.
jonas21 1471 days ago [-]
Are you sure you're not confusing Google and DuckDuckGo? (I know I do from time to time)
For me, a Google search returned only General Motors results in the top spots, while a DuckDuckGo search had Gmail as the first result after the news stories.
I get the same as you for DuckDuckGo, but my Google does look different. I guess Google is customising the results: https://imgur.com/dccAZBg
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
To add another data point, my Google results for "gm" look like those on your screenshot, with a market summary card and then GMail being the first result, and General Motors second - with one extra difference that "Top Stories" card in my case is above, not below the GMail result.
josefx 1471 days ago [-]
I also get gmail as first result for gm. However I also get a GM.com entry to the side of the search results.
BalinKing 1472 days ago [-]
Just as an anecdote, DDG also suggested Gmail as the first result for me (past the news carousel, ofc).
MivLives 1472 days ago [-]
Even as a Gmail user, my results align with yours.
If I type it into the browser search bar however it is the first result. This is not Google's fault, as I'm on Firefox, which is smartly trying to look for sites I frequently visit.
cadmuxe 1472 days ago [-]
Yeah, same here, gmail is the last result in my try.
Oh, as a gmail user, why not it ranked as number 1? I don't care the GM news : )
I think people have different standard for a good/bad search result.
midef 1472 days ago [-]
GM is in the news because of its respirator production and the search results are dynamic. I've seen Gmail rank #2 or #3 for that search.
Avamander 1472 days ago [-]
I use gmail and the first suggestion for me was "GMT time".
asdfasgasdgasdg 1472 days ago [-]
Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever.
"Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.
bborud 1471 days ago [-]
Normally you would be right. Service X is not the Internet.
But this doesn't really apply anymore once service X dominates the way a large proportion of the western population are trying to locate something - as opposed to clicking on links or bookmarks.
Reality is what actually matters. Not what people think or what they wish. It is what people do and what actually happens.
The reality is that Google not only holds a vastly dominant market position in search - but its search is the default way a majority of people interact with the Internet.
The address bar in your browser is not just an address bar. It is both a search bar and an address bar. And that makes a real difference when the search engine behind it is most often one search engine.
userbinator 1471 days ago [-]
Unfortunately it's the only way a lot of people find information on the Internet.
LoveMortuus 1471 days ago [-]
That's probably because Google is still good enough for most people, that there hasn't yet been a need to change the search engine. If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else, of course it will first start with the tech savvy people, but as with all things it will trickle down to others. If the alternative isn't better then Google then, of course, nothing will change. I don't really see a reason why people feel the need to be so negative about pretty much everything, same goes with every aspect of life.
I am aware that this comment is more or less useless to many, but I still wanted to write it, because I have the power and the freedom to express my _opinion_, and because I still hope that there are people that will understand what I'm trying to say.
Let Google be Google.
If Google's vision sings the same song as the song of the people, then the people will use it.
If it doesn't then people will find another search engine that will sing a song that people will like.
Or in other words, I don't see a reason for us to try to change Google, if Google will want to be the primary search engine, then Google will have to change on it's own.
Am I completly wrong? I Google strong enough to be able to shape the song of creation (strong enough to be able to prevent any other search engine from rising up even though the other search engine could be better)?
abdullahkhalids 1471 days ago [-]
> If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else,
This is not what happens easily. In a near monopoly, the monopoly product can be significantly worse than other options, or what is reasonably possible, but people will continue using it for a long time because of various economic, network, psychological lock-in effects.
airstrike 1471 days ago [-]
Agreed, but even "Google sometimes gets things wrong" isn't entirely accurate.
So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private company.
asdfasgasdgasdg 1471 days ago [-]
I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy. Actually I think that is a seriously editorialized take as well, not in keeping with the spirit of HN. I think it would be more correct to say that much of the time popularity is accuracy, in that it's what the searcher is looking for. When there are a variety of interpretations of a query, the most popular interpretation is the rational prior expectation. When not -- for example, when I search for "go" with a history of searching for programming related topics -- Google tries to give me what I'm looking for.
But it's also just a hard problem. That featured snippet about the dentist for example: Google's computers aren't investigative journalists. The purpose of the featured snippet is actually to favor accuracy over popularity by deferring to journalists when Google senses that the searcher is looking for information about an event that was covered in the news. However, if the journalists get it wrong, how is Google going to know? Dollars to donuts, if Google actually knew the right answer, that's what they would surface.
airstrike 1471 days ago [-]
> I don't think it's correct to say that it favors popularity over accuracy.
I'm not the one making that claim, I'm just starting from that assumption since the parents are claiming as much
twomoretime 1471 days ago [-]
>So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what?
As the defacto front page to the internet, it is aeguably in society's best interest for search results to return more than SEO spam and ads.
I think the modern state of Google is a huge disservice to civilization, compared to what it was and could be. By prioritizing popularity it reduces the majority of search queries to the lowest common denominator and encourages shallow, non-technical culture.
I think what we're seeing in the refinement algorithm is a regression to the layman's mean, so to speak, as they tune (train?) The algorithm to work better for the majority of their users, who happen to be non-technical.
But when you excessively dumb down technology you reduce incentive for people to learn anything and, more importantly here, the dumbing down means showing entertainment and SEO results over possibly more technical content.
Personally I find it disheartening when I search for technical words and the only results are celebrities or media.
anoncake 1471 days ago [-]
So you're saying that for-profit companies by nature don't provide value?
airstrike 1471 days ago [-]
They provide value in a specific form, which is aligned to their goals, and it may or may not overlap with what's optimal for society. But they're not in the business of providing what's best for society. That's a byproduct of competition, not a goal from the outset.
anoncake 1471 days ago [-]
Either way, an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.
airstrike 1471 days ago [-]
But that's the thing. Any single actor can only provide sub-optimal results, but competition and regulation create a competitive game which provides society with optimal results.
Google isn't wrong – it's actually doing its part really well. It's either competition or regulation that need tweaking. Probably both.
In other words
> an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.
The economic system can provide optimal results. Individual actors can but don't need to in order for the prior statement to be true.
anoncake 1469 days ago [-]
It very much doesn't. Unless there is a working search engine right now that I just don't know about.
CM30 1472 days ago [-]
Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites.
But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.
zozbot234 1472 days ago [-]
SEO is behind many of these dynamics, though. The "more accurate"/"better quality" signal is getting so noisy that rewarding freshness and hoping the user meant to search a very current topic is perhaps the best you can do. Quite disappointing of course (since we'd rather have good-quality content be easily reachable) but not entirely unexpected.
CobrastanJorji 1472 days ago [-]
If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.
Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.
basch 1471 days ago [-]
It's obviously a harder problem than I want to believe it is, but considering the terrible quality of results as of late, I don't think this would be worse.
First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs.
Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional information, consider them a dupe and don't list them. They can run their portals, but they don't need to show up in search.
It's come up multiple times in this thread, car manuals is a good example. They would be better off throwing away every result they have and hand indexing the good information, than what gets returned right now.
Recipes in particular have turned into a giant story about the way grandma used to do it with a picture followed by the same couple variants with different proportions. Pick winners by hand.
Someone has a finance question, just put boggleheads at the top, instead of whichever 59 affiliate credit card sites sprung up.
Need health advice? Put examine.com at the top above WebMD and healthline. Why? Because a human exper compared them and decided examine is a better first result. You could comb through tens of thousands of sites with a team of hundreds of people, something Google easily has at its disposal. What PageRank had, that seems to be missing now, is a seed of "we trust these most" and let the network grow from there. It tried to find expertise, instead of clickability. It was about getting you the best information first.
s5ma6n 1471 days ago [-]
How would you pick the options by hand? This way you would introduce the thought and point of view bias of the people working at Google to the results. Additionally how would you pick who is the winner? For example how would you compare a technology article is more correct coming from various sources? They also have their own bias introduced to their content.
basch 1471 days ago [-]
>This way you would introduce the thought and point of view bias of the people working at Google to the results.
Correct. I would do that.
.
>They also have their own bias introduced to their content.
Yes. Good.
I'm not necessarily saying they hand pick the best article for every single story. Although techmeme.com and hn do that to an extent, when they notice a better version of an article, they replace the top link with the better version.
toto444 1471 days ago [-]
> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.
I spent a few days thinking about it not so long ago and I have thought of something rarely mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have completely solved the problem, just noticed it changes the perspective.
If I remember well, from my user perspective, the biggest change Google introduced was the ranking by page. Yahoo used to rank by site not by page.
Maybe going back to a ranking by site would help creating a good index.
A site would be associated to a number of keywords, say 20 and that's it. That would give incentive to pick the keywords you want to rank for carefully and really be an expert about them instead of having SEO experts deciding which keywords they want to rank for this week and write empty TF-IDF optimized blog posts.
This sort of search engine would not give you the answer to everything but it would give back power to the websites. The information retrieval process would then be 2 steps :
- find a good website
- find the information within the website
zozbot234 1472 days ago [-]
> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat.
Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.
anticsapp 1472 days ago [-]
DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that beast of a PageRank 7 link.
zozbot234 1472 days ago [-]
Yes, but this only ever impacted categories where for-profit links are common (and over time, people learn to disregard these links). And Google Search still does a pretty good job of searching for relevant businesses, since it's one of the main things that people use it for.
CM30 1471 days ago [-]
The issues with the DMOZ approach were basically speed and corruption:
1. It was slow to add categories/sites, which especially hurt categories where things change pretty quickly (gaming, tech and media are good examples, since new systems and frameworks need to have categories added ASAP).
2. Editors were often drawn into corruption, and either judged submissions based on how much they were paid elsewhere or prioritised their own/friends/family's websites.
Both of these issues could potentially be fixed with some more resources and better oversight, but it may mean any future DMOZ equivalent would need a lot more funding than the previous one.
zozbot234 1471 days ago [-]
> The issues with the DMOZ approach were basically speed and corruption:
Federation would help with both factors, though. A workable "right to fork" is a powerful incentive against corruption. Notably DMOZ was not federated or "forkable" in any real sense, even though it did have a reasonable amount of sites mirroring it.
thatcat 1472 days ago [-]
For scientific/technical domain stuff you could:
1) look for references to source materials
2) check references quality - is reference real? does the quoted text match the text from the reference? is it an academic paper published in a journal?
3) authorship quality - what is the academic "impact factor" score for the author?
4) confirmed viewer reviews - subjective review by confirmed users
5) accessibility score - automated user interface usability analysis
lonelappde 1471 days ago [-]
Why? Where is the money in providing high quality information to the general public? The public wants cheap candy.
High quality data exists, but it's not much of the ad supported web and not much of what users what to read.
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
The public doesn't have much say in things, it consumes what it's given. Cheap candy is the cheapest to produce, so that's what gets delivered.
tomaszs 1472 days ago [-]
I see it that way: people tried to get exposure with Google finding ways to do it. For example by exchanging links. Was it bad people Exchanged links? No. Was it used by spammers? Yes, also. Did Google decide to punish it? Yes. Who is hurt? Normal website users. Spammers found new ways. But the truth is with each Google update normal website owners was punished. And for spammers it just got a little bit more complicated to find a new hack.
Now we are at a point where normal website users have very little ways to be high in search results. And people with money can buy it either with very expensive SEO or with expensive Ads.
Sometimes i wonder why the heck should normal website user even try to please Google. As a normal website owner i dont feel Google gives me as much as it expects me to do.
Dont link to this, use AMP, God forbid to Exchange links. There are books about how to please Google. But what is the point? It all comes to who has more money. I dont, so i will never win a good position.
I think we should just forget all these Google rules because they destroyed the Internet how it used to be. Autodiscoverable.
rob74 1471 days ago [-]
One example I came across recently: if you search for "Amiga floppy disk capacity" (https://www.google.com/search?q=amiga+floppy+disk+capacity), you get "1.76 MB", which is completely wrong. Of course, the Wikipedia article which Google's algorithm chose to extract this information from doesn't mention the actual capacity of "standard" Amiga floppies (880 KB): "Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon." - so Google picked the first number it found (the "uncommon" one) and ran with it. I'm just wondering which executive thought having this "feature" would be a good idea?!
devinplatt 1470 days ago [-]
You can provide feedback on the answer card. I've had a few answer cards fixed after providing feedback. Notably "https port" used to yield the http port.
Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query.
* There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs.
* There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here.
* A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.)
* The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.
cmckn 1472 days ago [-]
> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob.
Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful.
I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.
blahedo 1472 days ago [-]
> founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob"
I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress.
I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I really remember that the presenter brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point to you, the only way to do that would be if you, too, were persuasively an expert on the thing.
(These were... naïve times in many ways.)
Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system, because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was founded on an algorithm that rewarded expertise.
It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't meant to, and b) actually didn't in the very earliest days, because the WWW link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then the measure became the target, etc etc)
jandrese 1471 days ago [-]
I wonder if in the fight against SEOs Google didn't accidentally punish actual experts. SEO organizations will relentlessly hound changes to Google's algorithm in ways that regular users do not.
In the old days it was cost prohibitive to setup a massive network of interconnected fake hosts to boost your rank, but these days with cheap VPSes this is entirely possible and probably even profitable. I'm certainly not the only person who has searched for something and found a ton of differently styled blogs all hosting exactly the same content stolen from some legitimate website and clogging up pages of Google results.
lonelappde 1471 days ago [-]
PageRank is not how Google tanks pages now. It's not the reason Google serves so much junk.
luckylion 1471 days ago [-]
Links are still the super-major-almost-100% factor in determining ranking though, whether you call it PageRank or some other algorithm.
It's why buying expired domains and throwing your totally unrelated content on them works great.
It's why subdomain/folder leasing is a thing where affiliate sites will pay "high PR" sites to reverse proxy a subdomain or folder to them and (that's the important part) link to it from their main site. And boy, does that work. The same content that would be > page 100 suddenly is in the top 3.
There are other factors, but they don't matter nearly as much as Google's "we have 200 factors that contribute to the ranking" stuff makes it seem. You can throw the most atrocious low quality content on a site with lots of incoming links and it will rank at the top.
midef 1472 days ago [-]
The web wasn't mob-like at all in the beginning. Most of the content was created by reasonably educated people who were publishing because of passion, not profit or other motives.
dang 1472 days ago [-]
We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and representative, we can change it again.
When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them by going to other similar websites and we would link to each other. Also, there were webrings and directories. Now if you link to each other Google thinks you are gaming their search engine and will demote your link and possibly your entire site.
bovermyer 1472 days ago [-]
Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine.
It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
jbritton 1472 days ago [-]
Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there indexes of websites available to the public that you are suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple scripting?
Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build our own index?
Or are you suggesting finding curated links to sites?
takeda 1472 days ago [-]
I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest curated list[1])
I still have a paperback book that claimed to be a comprehensive, not curated list of internet sites. It didn't even come with electronic media as became customary with computer books later on.
ntsplnkv2 1472 days ago [-]
There was a post a month or two ago that talked about the design of the Yahoo homepage back then, and looking at the link again, it's striking how much more pleasurable an experience it is.
I've idly wondered what would happen if you made a search engine based on a custom crawler that only logged sites without any references to Google.
blondin 1472 days ago [-]
i might be wrong but i didn't think OP was suggesting to re-index the web. that's a totally different beast from finding an answer to a question/problem or learning a new topic.
depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff.
wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles.
&c.
bovermyer 1472 days ago [-]
There are multiple ways that I know of to approach this problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for yourself.
techslave 1471 days ago [-]
yup. use gopher instead
asjw 1472 days ago [-]
That could be true to some extent, but the best information I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums.
Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums
And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.
agumonkey 1472 days ago [-]
I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ?
must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
chrisco255 1472 days ago [-]
Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.
jaredsohn 1472 days ago [-]
Yahoo was a registry back in the day.
projektfu 1472 days ago [-]
Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle
projektfu 1472 days ago [-]
Altavista was early. If you were on in 1996, that was only 5 years after the “birth” of the web. Before spiders, things were organized like Gopher. There were directories you could look up. Some pages kept archives of links.
Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
rv-de 1472 days ago [-]
Printed magazines recommending the best websites.
walshemj 1472 days ago [-]
Back in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic
agumonkey 1472 days ago [-]
heh, that's true, the whole web graph could fit on a floppy
maps7 1472 days ago [-]
Does searching articles on wikipedia count?
ehsankia 1472 days ago [-]
I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
abruzzi 1472 days ago [-]
The funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.
dang 1472 days ago [-]
Looks like the OP domain itself is a version of that.
Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me.
I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results.
But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result.
Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not.
You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.
And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations.
I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.
Avamander 1472 days ago [-]
> If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.
I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants.
> I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers.
Why not use quotation marks?
tomaszs 1471 days ago [-]
It only proves Google is unpredictable. And this is also a sad reality. I often see "my" Google is better adjusted to find some answers but extremely lame at 90% of other queries.
Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to
hombre_fatal 1472 days ago [-]
> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are.
What does this even mean?
The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work.
Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context.
Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution.
Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find.
Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside filter bubbles.
Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.
Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.
ehsankia 1472 days ago [-]
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas
Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them.
A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly fine. They spent their whole day working hard, come home, and now you want to force them to spend their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be the internet you want but it's not what people want. The internet can be for more than one thing.
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.
This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up. (Thankfully, usually only a couple of these appear in most discussions, and usually people don't spam this.)
> Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
danem 1472 days ago [-]
> Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open mind and read widely and voraciously.
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself, and it shows: the users that accumulate karma the fastest usually have insightful comments, which is rarely true elsewhere.
NikolaeVarius 1472 days ago [-]
No. Exactly like reddit, it awards people that have the most popular comments.
Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as reddit
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I do, and they all do it "fairly".)
Aeolun 1472 days ago [-]
HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
I consider both kinds of comments to be low-quality, and yes Hacker News has both. But the really nice comments aren’t just straightforward praise or criticism.
huffmsa 1472 days ago [-]
Eh. If I post something taking shots at Europeans before America wakes up (3-4am CST) I usually get down voted for a few hours before American commenters come on and exchange fire with the Euros.
Your upboats are time sensitive.
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
Such comments are rarely insightful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
huffmsa 1472 days ago [-]
They usually are, they're just not what the Europeans like hearing.
cosmodisk 1472 days ago [-]
Amd what are those things Europeans don't really want to hear?
catalogia 1471 days ago [-]
Are you trying to bait that user into starting such an argument in this thread as well?
ehsankia 1471 days ago [-]
Filter bubbles aren't inherently bad. For example, Google bubbling up news from my city makes sense, but if it were to show me small news from every single city on the planet, that would be insane. Similarly, I enjoy it when it gives me some article about Animal Crossing that I've been playing lately, but doesn't show me any sports news that I have zero interest in. There are just so many different interests out there that it's simply impossible to follow every single one, so having news bubbles absolutely makes sense.
When people talk negatively about bubbles, they generally focus on the couple cases where being in a bubble is harmful, such as when it comes to science, politics and so on, but ignore all the other times where a bubble is good.
basch 1471 days ago [-]
Filter bubbles are bad when they serve to only confirm your bias.
Do you read politics you agree with or disagree with? I make an effort to click more on things I think I'll disagree with.
scythe 1472 days ago [-]
>Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
Hacker News is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of charity by pg and YC to attempt to provide a forum for a specific subculture. It's obvious from the goal of the project: "things that hackers would find interesting".
But what most people get from the Internet is not a product of someone with effectively unlimited funds (and legendary software engineering ability) building a website to support their community. They get to choose between eyeball-extraction megasites or clunky off-the-shelf vBulletin or Wordpress clones run by underqualified volunteers. It certainly is nice to be among the target audience of Hacker News -- but what if I weren't?
basch 1472 days ago [-]
It is harder to find things on google than it used to be. The noise to signal ratio has increased considerably.
Aeolun 1472 days ago [-]
I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.
ajmurmann 1472 days ago [-]
I haven't found individual blogs to typically be the problem but commercial websites that focus on things like how-tos. This is especially true if I'm just looking for an answer to a question. I frequently just end up searching Reddit or better a specific subreddit.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
Even reviews. Searching best TV brings CNET, techradar, digitaltrends, Tom's hardware rank above rtings. Almost every one of those sites has the same paragraph of mumbo jumbo next to a TV name. It's become an art. There's nothing wrong with the CNET or digitaltrends roundups, but they also don't really add to the conversation or offer any unique insight, do they cut clutter better than their competitors? Hell 3 of my top 10 are futureplc results (Tom's hardware, techradar, whathifi.) The same company has seod its way to 3/10 results for that search.
There's obviously a level of notoriety beyond just quality. I don't need the same article 3 times under 3 logos.
scarmig 1472 days ago [-]
The big issue is various how to sites and republishers. If I could filter out ~100 particular domains, my search experience would be much improved.
patcon 1471 days ago [-]
I feel for you in empathizing for people's ability to just have what they want, but... I worry about it too. (I say all this with compassion and a non-confrontational tone.)
> The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them
No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be?
Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.
And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.
Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.
imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape.
Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3
Are you contemplating compulsory education? What we already do to kids so they don't resort to hedonism?
hombre_fatal 1472 days ago [-]
> google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.
Can you explain what this means?
I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search.
And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a programming language most of the time, by "re-learning search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious problem of the search engine needing more context. In the same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off.
How does your complaint differ from this?
marcosdumay 1472 days ago [-]
> you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search
Hum, not exactly. Google will ignore extra context that doesn't match your profile. People coped very well when it didn't.
UnpossibleJim 1472 days ago [-]
What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of people or make the same amount of money as MacDonald's. You can't always scale up a BBS to serve 2.5 billion people and expect it to have the same charm and not expect companies to charge for services to getting results. Dial up services and bulletin boards had their charms, but this internet is way better =)
basch 1472 days ago [-]
Personally I just think google is losing to seo because google is playing it too neutral and not opinionated enough. Like facebook, they want decisions to look like math chose the answer, and not people, because they want to deflect accusations of bias. Google would be better if it were more opinionated. I go there because I WANT them to rank results and tell me what they think are the best quality answers.
Google may also be lost in an A/B testing catch 22 feedback loop, where what gets clicked gets elevated, and whats elevated gets clicked. The less straightforward, more clickbait cryptic results get clicked to see what they are.
The result that spells out all the answers might not get
a click at all. Ive noticed in the last year or two wikipedia not even being on the first page of searches it should be the top two or three results for.
UnpossibleJim 1471 days ago [-]
They can put in optimization and skew the results with opinion, but not doing that might have more to do with lawyers than desire. There is a keen eye on their search results as far as political and business results are concerned.
dbuder 1471 days ago [-]
Except that Google is quite happy to manually adjust things for their own ends, they just lie about it. They arrange search to make them money, not to help us find what we want.
eyegor 1472 days ago [-]
> being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find.
Wikipedia does a damn fine job in my opinion. You can find decent, democratized knowledge on almost any topic complete with translation into your preferred language (if not on wiki, then through google translate). Or efforts like MIT's open course ware, which hosts lectures and syllabus materials on a variety of topics. There's also arxiv derivatives and a thriving black market (scihub, libgen, etc) of open access to research papers on any topic you'd like. Social media =/ the internet.
Barrin92 1472 days ago [-]
>There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge
Did anyone really believe this other than middle aged libertarian hackers from the 90s who kept repeating this in prayer like fashion?
The internet is, as the name suggests, a network. Google also is a sort of network, one that is semantically searchable. But Google Search is not a fact checker. It doesn't have an editorial room for every piece of content it exposes, it doesn't have deep knowledge about everything it throws back at us, and it could not have those things at the scale it operates.
That's not Google's fault either. It's not a search engine's job to correct wrong reporting. It's the job of journalists and news outlets to fact-check information, it's the job of citizens to be critical of the information they consume, and it's the job of governments to facilitate that this happens.
It's our fault that our civic institutions have degraded, and not the fault of Google that it spits our own stupidity back at us. It's not Google's fault that we don't like what we see when we look in the mirror and techno utopianism isn't going to save us either.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
>Google mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
It does not succeed as well as it did in the past at its current mission. It has regressed.
Aeolun 1472 days ago [-]
I think it’s mostly the average quality of the information available has regressed.
I’m fairly certain they’re doing the best they can with what’s available to them, but right now they probably get more accurate results by focusing on what is popular than by blindly accepting the contents of the websites.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
That goes back to them upranking fresher results. If the old results were better, they should keep them at the top and ignore fresher but worse quality content. Google exists to rank content, and it should be by quality not age.
cosmodisk 1472 days ago [-]
The tech has changed,not humans. Back in the day, Romans were happily watching gladiators slaughtering each other and all they cared was 'bread and entertainment'. Obviously not everyone, some tried to invent things,do commerce,medicine and etc. Those were the curious ones. It was a small percentage then and it is a small percentage now. The majority are much simpler people. The internet is bursting at its seams with amounts of knowledge available one click away from potential users( yes,you may need to look deeper to find it) but majority don't need it,they want entertainment and they get it.
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
You're spot on. But really... all people are basically the same. And like Google, they're incentivized by the system to be horrible to each other and/or horrible to the environment. I think people all have a choice. But I think the good choices are really hard to make when you're only surrounded by bad choices.
cosmodisk 1472 days ago [-]
Human life is usually too short to care too much and we also get bogged down with stuff like work and family,so all those 'great ideas' quickly turn into distant dreams for many.
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
Yes, absolutely. And it's completely the right idea to focus on building a great life and family. Things will get better. People never stop dreaming.
rdiddly 1472 days ago [-]
The funny part about democratizing knowledge is that it happens on the supply side too. In a knowledge democracy, knowledge comes not just from the knowledge elite, but from the knowledge poor as well! ;)
No but in all seriousness, the mistake was in relying so heavily on private corporations motivated by profit. An unpopular idea is an unprofitable one. I'm not sure what a non-profit Google would look like... maybe the same... but I feel pretty confident that a non-profit YouTube for example would likely have a totally different recommendation algorithm.
thorwasdfasdf 1472 days ago [-]
Yup. one thing I hate about google search is that it gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm actually asking for. Also, the "politically correct" bubble mask is in full effect.
Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore.
There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are really well done.
abruzzi 1472 days ago [-]
I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest frustration on the web. Lots of different search engines think it is better to return lots of unrelated garbage rather than returning no hits. No hits has actual meaning to me about my search, changing my search to return stuff I don’t want is just noise.
cosmodisk 1472 days ago [-]
Just add '+' sign before each keyword- seems to be working. I tried a sequence of 10 or so random and made-up words to see if it will find anything.while it returns results, it does it on a shorter search and it also says at the top that no results were found for this query.Then I started removing one keyword at the time and return the search. Eventually it found a matching result and it contains all four words from my query.
chris_f 1471 days ago [-]
The '+' operator was deprecated in 2011 [0].
Based on Google’s advanced operator page at one point, the addition of a plus sign to a search termed either prompted the lookup of Google+ pages or a blood type.
'+' was replaced by adding quotes around each search term.
Are you sure this is on Google? I just tried with a three word query, and it failed for me.[1]
If true, this would be big news, as the "+" qualifier on search terms stopped being obeyed about a decade ago with the launch of... whatever that now-forgotten Facebook competitor Google used to have. The workaround was to use quotes around individual words, which mostly worked, unless it didn't. But the combination of using quotes and "verbatim" (under Tools/All Results") almost always worked.
[1] The way it failed is sort of interesting. I randomly tried "+rhino +cereal +gm", and the first result didn't include the word "rhino", and considered "gm" to be a synonym for General Mills. Quotes around the individual terms seems to work for this query, even without verbatim.
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enneff 1472 days ago [-]
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge.
I vividly remember the promise, and believing in that promise, but there was never a time that the Internet was this. In retrospect I don't see why we should have believed in it in the first place.
vkou 1472 days ago [-]
> I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find.
There was never any such promise, no contract signed in blood. It was just the wishful thinking of a group of people sharing a particular political persuasion. Just because a monocultural group of pioneers who are all radical thinkers (But not too radical) build something, doesn't mean that the people moving into what they build are interested in sharing, or even tolerating their idiosyncratic culture or politics.
The web is supposed to be a way to route a bit of information from one computer to another. This is so low-level, and so broad, that it proscribes nothing about the outcome.
threatofrain 1472 days ago [-]
Politically correct is what people like, IMO, as measured by Disney products. I don’t believe Disney is politically correct as a matter of whim, as opposed to well measured brand strategy.
kursus 1472 days ago [-]
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place
I have been there since the old times of IRC and I have never seen anything promised.
huffmsa 1472 days ago [-]
This is correct. Try filtering Google news by date.
It doesn't work.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
I just had one today, said the result was from 3 days ago, result was from more than a decade ago.
It used to work well for Reddit, but now you can't trust the date filter. Something changed less than a year ago.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
It's like sites are modifying their templates, and it refreshes the published date, and google goes off that page change date and not the date on the page. It's terrible and googles search by date is now nearly useless. Sometimes it helps filter out old results, but it is impossible to keep new results from bleeding into the past.
geofft 1472 days ago [-]
I strongly disagree that the democratization of knowledge is hard to find / that what floats at the top is the most popular, and I strongly disagree that Google is doing anything to make it so.
Imagine in 1995 asking someone whether MSG is harmful or whether razor blades were ever found in Halloween candies. You would hear fairly confident answers of yes to both. Perhaps someone would feel like checking things, and they'd pull out a book of popular facts or an encyclopedia that happily answered yes (or perhaps no) without much discussion, and that would be the end of it. (The Encarta College Dictionary, which awkwardly straddled the transition from books to the internet, had an entirely uncritical definition of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" as a real thing, for instance.)
Go to Google and type in "is msg harmful" and the featured snippet says that while some people have a sensitivity to it, it's definitely not harmful in anywhere near the amounts used in food.
Go to Google and type in "razors in halloween candy" and the top result is a Wikipedia page debunking the urban legends of the '80s. After it is a YouTube video reporting on an actual case of razor blades being found in candy this past Halloween, which Wikipedia hasn't been updated for. In a single Google SERP above the fold, you already have a more accurate synthesis of multiple sources than any single publication has. (And no, I didn't plan this, I didn't even know about the 2019 cases until just now!)
What about political correctness? There's no shortage of content criticizing either the current president or his political opponents past and present. Or, say, search for "puberty blockers" and you get YouTube videos both in favor of them and against them, an handout from Seattle Children's Hospital on how to get them, an article from The Federalist on why they're clearly dangerous, a paywalled article from The Economist discussing it, an article from NBC News saying they've lowered the suicide rate among trans kids... basically any viewpoint you want or don't want, you can find it.
It's all there.
snarf21 1472 days ago [-]
I agree. That might be what the author and other people hoped the internet would become but money drives the development of most things. If there is such an opportunity, then strike out on their own. People talk about privacy but most people just want free and easy, not to be challenged. Each of us is more than welcome to stay in the corners of the internet that we value.
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
The internet is arguably* terrible today. There are about four websites that most people visit each and every day. And of those four websites, they're most likely owned by one or all of the five largest tech companies.
Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
krapp 1472 days ago [-]
>Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
And yet there is more content on the web, of greater variety and higher quality, than there ever was on that old web. Youtube is a walled garden, but some of what's on there is brilliant, and there's certainly plenty of non-commercial "for the love" content as well. Twitter is, well, Twitter, but accounts like TheSunVanished are publishing ARGs on the platform. Streaming music, video, gaming, all sorts of platforms are full of creative expression despite also being centralized.
Is all of that really unarguably terrible merely because everyone putting their art out there didn't first go through the trouble of manually writing HTML pages on a shared host first?
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
The internet is definitely, and I still stand by this comment, unarguably terrible today, compared to what it used to be. Is that anyone's fault? Probably not.
People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
I can't blame progress for killing culture, but I'm glad that back then, something like serving up an MP3 library in an AOL chatroom was a deeply awesome experience.
krapp 1472 days ago [-]
>People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
>Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
And nowadays people torrent. It's not as if piracy and file sharing are dead or anything.
But I think you're really saying the web is terrible for you, because it no longer resembles what you used to enjoy, and because other people use it in ways you don't find interesting. And that's valid for you, but it's a subjective opinion, not objective fact.
Personally, I'm happy giving up downloading random mp3s from the web to have the depth of content and interactivity the modern web offers. But I care more about content than culture.
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
You're right. Thanks.
Avamander 1472 days ago [-]
> It's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
It might be easier, but it depends on your target audience how effective it is.
caetris1 1472 days ago [-]
That's a really good point.
basch 1472 days ago [-]
I believe there are other ways to rank content than the modern feed and votes/shares.
Teams and editorial boards are great at working together to build things, wikipedia, reddit wikis, fandom/wikia. But the tools they have to calculate consensus (not just the most popular answer but the most correct one, given a cultures beliefs) are stone age. Mahalo.com was an attempt at collaborative information sorting, and https://inside.com/ isnt a bad successor, in theory.
I also think the premise that search/feed are the best options is flawed. The directory was, and stills is a great way to drill down into topics. Search should be more encyclopedia/directory like, and less feed like.
And even in the realm of search, some flags or operators to specify if I'm looking for a historical result, a timely news result, a review, a fact, or an opinion could come in handy.
Google would benefit from humans sitting down, searching things and then going "what should the top results actually be, why are we not there" from a much more exerting their bias standpoint. How are they ranking recipes without a kitchen to taste them? I would totally support a Google recipe division taste testing and ranking technique,to actually know what the best pot pie recipe is. It would be less a waste of money than another messenger product every other year.
anigbrowl 1472 days ago [-]
The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything.
Wikipedia is what the web was supposed to be. Prior to that you had Usenet (for conversation) and services like Gopher, Archie, and Veronica (various sorts of databases). The web was meant to be an accessible front end for that that wasn't as headache-inducing as 80x25 terminal.
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cletus 1472 days ago [-]
What a bizarre piece.
We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email".
What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously?
I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing beliefs.
Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but people are way worse at that.
Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group that seem to thrive in this informationless world.
jmiskovic 1471 days ago [-]
Over last decade or so google is becoming less and less helpful. Results are not user-oriented and they can be far removed from original search queries. This is google's fault, they are for-profit organization with own agenda. Google's usage of your personal data to custom-tailor results to your bubble also contributes to echo chamber.
There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's results, so no help there.
Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting better alternatives to google search.
wildpeaks 1471 days ago [-]
As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find (and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a while.
With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately.
It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.
l0b0 1472 days ago [-]
I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for how long?
chris_f 1471 days ago [-]
Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most.
Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results.
Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread):
Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.
manigandham 1472 days ago [-]
Seems like the hidden complaint is that online news media is mostly bullshit.
colechristensen 1472 days ago [-]
Alternative thread:
Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.
Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world.
Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".
I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race.
Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.
Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably.
It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.
antirez 1472 days ago [-]
Google didn't stop there. It ruined the internet even at protocols level. Google engineers didn't understand the beauty and simplicity of the original internet protocols, and were in a position to trace the evolution path of such algorithms without any of the elegance and equilibrium the original designers had. Now if you want to make an HTTP query you have to understand an incredible amount of details. Before that with adsense Google forced the web to evolve into a clickbait arena. Google is the worst thing that ever happened to the internet.
qeternity 1472 days ago [-]
A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set information free. And like the millennia before, the masses congregated to gossip, laugh, fight, and whatever else helps pass the time.
adelHBN 1471 days ago [-]
Can anyone suggest alternative search engines, please? I research the following two areas (1) history and (2) website maintenance and SEO info. Thanks in advance.
_trampeltier 1471 days ago [-]
I tryed to search an article / press release, I saw about Corona in january. But it seems I can't search for "just from january" there is now so much news about Corona out there, there is no chance to find this article. And much worse, even I know some key words, Google does present most of the search results by totaly ignoring the half of my keywords.
jessriedel 1471 days ago [-]
I don't understand. Are you filtering by date? This is one of the search tools from Google.
madrox 1472 days ago [-]
This person's argument is arguably weaker with their gmail address written out inside a H2 tag at the bottom of the page
jacquesm 1472 days ago [-]
Actually, it isn't. It makes it immeasurably stronger. You see, you just can't get around google. They've poisoned the well in so many ways that you just have to use their products or you will end up being cut out. Email is the best example of that. Google determines who can and who can't email and the best defense against that is to make the problem worse: use a gmail address.
(I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)
soneca 1472 days ago [-]
I think I am much more likely to find the truth about a question I have with Google than asking on a BBS forum or browsing through a curated list of links on Yahoo.
That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of BS.
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
Speaking of popularity over accuracy:
> Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need.
I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.
titzer 1471 days ago [-]
Not sure I got that message, considering the bulk of the population motors around on their little cushy chairs, drinks slurpies all day, and is endlessly served by robots, never doing any strenuous work at all, and only interacts with their screens. The spaceship has artificial gravity, artificial sun, artificial everything.
The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.
TeMPOraL 1471 days ago [-]
It was a cruise ship converted to an ark. It was meant to stay in space for a short time, precisely because of (as one scene in the movie explained) long-term exposure leading people to grow fat and weak.
tcbasche 1472 days ago [-]
The irony of the big 'gmail' address at the bottom of the blog post...
miked85 1472 days ago [-]
It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use their own domain for email.
saagarjha 1472 days ago [-]
Not everyone knows how to set up forwarding.
Avamander 1472 days ago [-]
Why bother?
miked85 1471 days ago [-]
1. portability, you are not locked into a provider like gmail
2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address
tcbasche 1471 days ago [-]
It's not overly expensive either to get a custom G Suite domain if you enjoy gmail, but don't want the domain name.
toto444 1471 days ago [-]
The worst is when you search for important information and you get flooded with SEO crap.
Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is close to impossible to find anything relevant.
longtimegoogler 1472 days ago [-]
My thesis is that smart phones ruined the internet with the rise of Apps and a different, less text-based interaction with the internet.
In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported calling and texting.
gumby 1472 days ago [-]
Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no adjective on “organize”.
“Worse is better” wins again.
devinplatt 1472 days ago [-]
Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."[1]
According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2]
Useful to whom is the question of course. I stopped using google a while ago because it gave me a useful response less and less frequently and I had to scroll over a lot of cruft to find a good answer if any. When google started it had the best results and no cruft.
Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.
colechristensen 1472 days ago [-]
By becoming so dominant they shifted from organization to inspiration, and not the good kind of inspiration, the kind where you have to spend lots of time shaping yourself to please the algorithm so that what you do and how you look is dominated by Google, whatever you're trying to do/share/sell is secondary to that.
Razengan 1471 days ago [-]
Google has been emphasizing click-baity results for years now. A moderately complex query for X will usually be filled with "Top 10 X" or ignores the context. Their results (on web search as well as YouTube) also seem to be biased against Apple and Microsoft which feels a bit scummy.
p2t2p 1472 days ago [-]
Complains about Google ruining the Internet, has no RSS link on the website. Stop wining and be the change you seek.
wslh 1472 days ago [-]
100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.
remir 1472 days ago [-]
It's all perspective.
Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth.
And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?
1472 days ago [-]
distdev89 1471 days ago [-]
Rubbish! I just searched for `gm` no capitalization, nothing and got a page full of results for General Motors, from news articles to the wikipedia page.
I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth`
You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link.
I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false.
Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this.
They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.
malandrew 1471 days ago [-]
It also emphasizes liberal media over conservative media. It's often more challenging then it needs to be to find conservative content even when you know what you're looking for and you're trying to find it again.
amelius 1471 days ago [-]
Who cares whether you return accurate results if you can send the user down a rabbit-hole of some completely irrelevant topic?
oytis 1471 days ago [-]
Well, if you can solve Google's deficiencies, you can become the next internet billionaire.
dzonga 1472 days ago [-]
which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend. I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.
JJMcJ 1472 days ago [-]
No they use other search engines and have their own web crawler as well.
JJMcJ 1470 days ago [-]
That is, they use other engines besides Bing. They are not simply repackaging Bing.
fancyfredbot 1472 days ago [-]
ITYM Google ruined Google?
snowsilence 1471 days ago [-]
Oh, is it just Google? I thought it was ... everything.
beastman82 1472 days ago [-]
Happily no one is required to use their services
techmaster7b 1472 days ago [-]
google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.
chance_state 1472 days ago [-]
/s ?
bravoetch 1472 days ago [-]
The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.
jimmaswell 1471 days ago [-]
How does Google suck here? Do people actually expect Google to hire millions of extra employees or develop hard AI to rank every single webpage in their index by accuracy? I don't see any practical alternative to how it already works.
colechristensen 1472 days ago [-]
More like Google is the mascot for the Internet sucking. Or at least a certain part of the transition.
justlexi93 1471 days ago [-]
Google search is not working anymore. Google abandoned Google search altogether. It’s defunct. Google started with search engine innovation and now, like many other businesses in capitalism, abandoned the very essence of its business for short gain reasons. Google, Microsoft, Apple, they all failed customers miserably.
sabujp 1472 days ago [-]
tldr; (don't shoot me i'm just the messenger): if google says it's true it must be. This is bad because people are dumb so they will just look at what one search engine says without checking sources and believe that to be the truth.
voz_ 1472 days ago [-]
The author had a few bad queries and chalks the whole thing up to "Google Ruined the Internet". This is akin to having a bad experience with airline food and declaring that flying has ruined travel. It is absurd, it reeks of the stallman-esque style of negative, borderline luddite spew. Instead of offering a solution, this person just rants.
Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction.
As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.
midef 1472 days ago [-]
"information has never been easier to find!"
I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.
Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that do not even contain all the words in the query. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about other errors.
Currently just to get basically workable results I'm finding myself putting "every" "keyword" "in" "quotes" (to make sure they're actually in the result pages at all), the site: modifier to restrict it to real sites, and negative modifiers (-"keyword") to remove some SEO results.
Google used to be "magic" in that it knew what you were thinking, and gave you what you wanted instead of what you asked for. These days it is just page after page of auto-generated results, pages that don't contain anything relevant to your query, or just low quality results.
I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in Google's search, and I'm sure they're meeting some metric or another, but from my perspective things have gone seriously downhill to the point where I am looking elsewhere.
It used to be THE technical search engine de jure. Now it feels like a search engine you have to hack to get it to work well. Not a good place to be.
PS - I have read, in HN comments (so pure rumor) from self-proclaimed ex-Googlers, that Google's internal culture punishes people for improvements/maintenance to existing products, and that promotions come from developing new products/features. If even semi-accurate might go a long way to explaining why Google Search feels neglected aside from changes which seem to exist to improve their button line/promote sister products.
On the most extreme end of this, I've seen four-word queries produce results, in which three of the words were stricken out. More often, it's just one word, but it's usually exactly the one that makes the difference between a very specific query, and a very generic one.
Worse yet is that they try to do synonym substitution, but their algorithm has a ridiculously low bar for that. Like, you might be searching for "FreeBSD", and it will substitute that for "Linux", or even "Ubuntu". Or search for a specific firearm model, and it finds "gun".
Quoting keywords suppresses all of that, but synonyms are actually useful - if it did them accurately...
Maybe they're already doing this, but it sure acts like learn-to-rank is always ranking pages as if the query were very sloppy.
It's been a long time, and I certainly never read the code, but I vaguely remember a Google colleague mentioning something (before learn-to-rank) about a back-end query optimizer branch that would intentionally disable much of the query munging if there were any search operators in the query. There was some mention about using cookies / user account information to do the same if the same browser/user had used any search operators in the past N days, but I'm not sure if that was implemented or just being floated as a useful optimization.
But when Google first came out, it was a shock. You could just search for something like "Linux", and the most authoritative sites all showed up on the first page.
At least those search engines gave you that many results to go through... now Google gives you less than that, full of spam (despite the index probably containing far more), and you'll be in CAPTCHA hellban if you try harder to get to the rest.
Of course, you'd have to read a manual to use it and it would have a ton of spam, but some people just want lower-level control - they still sell stick-shift cars.
There’s a long tradition of compiling and publishing concordances, which are just indices of every place each word appears in the original text. They’re generally not useful without access to the original, so noboy seems to mind them very much. Google’s index is just a modern form of the same thing.
1) Google CANNOT provide you with technical search, because choice of index/query filters is always limited (ie. Do I prefer exact matches over multiple matches?)
2) Google has shareholder & public responsibility. It means that service is adjusted (and it's 'algorithms') towards biggest type of queries performed.
All of this is a constant battle between precision and recall for given query. Adding to complexity, Google needs to account for
* Extraordinary amount of users using their search
* Extraordinary amount of data on webpages
* Importance of authority
In smaller search engines (ie. shop full-text search) you usually adjust towards one use case. This in itself is already hard.
Google does that for all possible use cases, for all possible queries while still fighting same precision/recall battle.
To be clear. I think google is terrible, but I also think that there is no other option for them at this point.
All of this became clear for me the moment I've got interested in build search and relevance engines.
Is there a superior alternative to Google?
Cliqz has hardly anything indexed at the moment, but it actually gets relevant results from those. (e.g. "zoom privacy" brings up the Zoom privacy policy first, then three news headlines from the last 12 hours, then a news article from yesterday, then an IT@Cornell guide for making Zoom meetings private, then some more news articles, some stuff about HIPPA…) I really like it, even if it isn't great for programming at the moment.
[DuckDuckGo]: https://duckduckgo.com/ [Cliqz]: https://beta.cliqz.com/
I would agree. The quality of the company seems inversely proportional to the number of employees, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...
In the early 2000s, it was the one search engine that returned relevant results. All the old ones returned a hodge-podge of key-word matches. Google used the number of citations as a strong signal of relevance (the number of pages that linked to a page meant something).
In the age of GMail beta, Google was my hero and I wanted to work for them. They were doing new things with the browser. First was Google Pack, which included necessary software like Firefox. Then Google introduced Chrome, which was even better.
Both began to descend. I don't know, they became slower and clunkier, as if they were designed by the denizens of any number of companies. Google had about 50,000 people at this point.
Recently, I can't stand even to read Google's documentation, because of its (1) bureaucratic wordiness, and (2) cluttered layout that reminds me of that video about Microsoft redesigning the iPod box. In the early 2000s, Google was a maverick. Nowadays, Google is hard to distinguish from any other corporate giant.
Google is indistinguishable from any other corporate giant because they now are any other corporate giant.
Did anyone seriously think an Ad company would go any other way? It's the scummiest of industries. It was always just a matter of time.
And now we've given (allowed, stood by, whatever) them ALL the data for >50% of our cellular users for the last 10+ years. I'm an Android user too. Oof.
For those interested in the video
Cloned a git repo where I thought I remembered seeing the function and 500 MB of downloading later grep confirms that I remembered correctly and that the exact keyword I had been searching for is present multiple times in the source code.
My hunch is that since coders use an ad blocker anyway, it's not financially viable to operate source code search on the public internet.
I was searching for the official AWS security certificates (namely, for ISO27001), which AWS neatly publishes on their site. Even for something that specific, the real AWS certification page was at the bottom of the first Google result page. Everything above it was from various random consulting outfits, all trying to sell their "expertise".
When search terms for a company's official security certificate are poisoned with SEO, we know the well has been thoroughly poisoned.
Anyway, I typed in your query " IS027001", and you're right, the AWS result is at the very bottom of the first page on mobile. But if you search "AWS IS027001" it's at the very top.
But IS027001 is not an AWS-specific thing, and the results above it are about the standard. It would seem equally bad to return AWS's product pages to somebody looking for information about the standard.
There's definitely an argument that there are too many results from random websites satisfying the "general information about this standard" intent and it would be good if google could guess what everyone wanted simultaneously, but the query is pretty ambiguous...
To be fair, in my case the lack of information is real (I've gotten only a minuscule amount of info by asking on niche forums sadly), but cutting out the noise early would be helpful.
But I perceive this as Google losing the battle with SEO. On one hand Google writes the algorithms, and on the other SEO tries to exploit these algorithms to rank as high as possible.
I was thinking that a solution would be instead of page rank, have an author rank. This rank keeps track of authors that are experts at certain topics. When you search for certain keywords, the articles of these known experts are ranked higher.
The ones that do best, the ones that are the greatest public benefit, seem to be governed by a strong leader who stays at the helm.
As soon as the people at the top change, you get jostling and unclear leadership, and power gets diffused.
You get emergent behavior - lots of internal and external competing for power and interests - and the ability to say "no" or "this sucks" or "we will do this" happens less frequently.
Normally competition would take care of all this, but with big gorillas that dominate a market, it might take a while.
Not necessarily. When you find yourself with beancounters and MBAs at the helm, they for sure will optimize the company to outcompete others. Such companies will eventually die from the rot, but not before they drag down the entire industry they're operating in.
SEO spam instead of car repair manuals is a joke. It has a lot bigger and scarier implications. Just try imagining someone like Obama winning elections now... simply not possible... And it's not because people became more dumb, they totally didn't: it's just because now dumb people have a voice online. And spend money online. Internet works for them now, and shows everyone what they want to see...
Overnight Oats as an Example. You just find pages upon pages of blogspam. And almost every page has the same useless information. No normal recipe site is somehow in the top 10 pages.
You may be overlooking where Google found the missing words or concepts in a page that linked to the hit, just not within the hit itself. That can actually be useful sometimes.
Then why not just show that as the result.
That can actually be useful sometimes.
...hence why the related: operator exists, it's just not the behaviour that most people expect by default.
Which makes their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" come across like a bad joke. They really should update it since they don't even bother to keep up appearances anymore.
Thoughtful critique that adds information (like userbinator's GP comment) is of course welcome.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.
The notion that forced filtration, reprioritization, and chronological rearrangement of content is implicit the idea of information feeds (search, social media, etc) shows how deep the brokenness is baked in.
Sometimes the filter is a feature, but sometimes it's not. In the name of convenience, it feels like we've given up our right to choose to see everything and decide for ourselves how to filter.
I think daily about ways to get people to stop donating content to these censorship and surveillance platforms. Most people don't run businesses, so they never realize the rent-seeking nature of these jerks.
This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting.
In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does have some "censorship" rules like filtering out illegal content, but I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.
That’s precisely what they do. Everyone’s allowed to censor what they wish on their own webpage. I, for example, censor from my own webpage (which otherwise contains a lot of information about me) anything someone could use to physically harm me.
The issue comes up when the censorship is used, for example, in DMs or timeline posts between friends (as it is on Facebook and Instagram and Discord), versus one’s own content on a webpage.
There’s a difference between moderation and rent-seeking.
Assuming impartiality seems awfully optimistic, given both human nature and the fact that Google admits that it is committed to maximizing profit.
with the current confinement situation in the world, my podcast episodes list has been growing. i caught up with some of it over last weekend but i feel like i don't have a dedicated time for podcast anymore.
twitter & the web have replaced that time.
Ever since the first time I heard that word, I've always imagined animals on a farm feeding happily at a trough, unaware of their impending doom. It turns out, that's closer to reality than I thought.
Edit: I mean the word "feed".
It is well worth a read.
When you create the community, it gives you a mad libs style page, where you can choose if you are a democracy, republic, autocracy, a mix of them. Vote weighting, whos votes count for what things, vote prediction and extrapolation. Conditions and Voteing for changing the charter rules, votes for how content gets posted, votes for leadership boards and mastheads. The ability for editors to strengthen or amplify certain voices or voters in a community. If you could seed a community with "role model voters" and then use the other voters who vote like them to extrapolate how they would vote on stories they havent seen. There is this common misunderstanding in the word that votes are only used as votes, and not as a signal to indirectly form a decision.
Every AI feed I've ever used (prismatic being one that comes to mind) buckles under popular vapid content rising above. Extremely strictly moderated feeds do exist tho: https://aldaily.com https://longform.org/ https://longreads.com/ I just wish there was a way for a group of strangers, who arent math experts, could spin up a collaborative feed reader (something that autoingests rss/twitter), and through their collective upvotes posts it to a more static page. Counterparties did something like that with Percolate.com and was able to still use the product once it pivoted markets. https://www.techmeme.com, https://www.mediagazer.com and https://www.memeorandum.com/ do the same thing. But those were all close knit teams that knew each other, their underlying tools arent accessible to spin up your own. I'm sure these tools exist for newsrooms, with the abundance of modern CRMs coming to maturity, a place to chat and edit before things get published. But they arent built for strangers to create community together.
It would make sense for these communities to more resemble Wikis with more static content, instead of the endless feed first. /r/personalfinance wiki being the front page, and the feed being something on the side powering new content to add to it.
Id really like to see something that combines reddit, git, fandom/wikia, techmeme, rtings.com, slant.co, kit.co into a collaborative consumer reports, wirecutter, or metacritic, rotten tomatoes. A place for people to gather to build consensus around something in a more structured way than wikipedia, and then publish it. Places like https://letterboxd.com succeed in some ways, but only through the existence of a shared culture and keeping to a specific topic.
There could also be an element of customizability for the end user. A metacritic or rotten tomatoes where you can weight certain critics votes, or a wirecutter where you can express your preferences for certain traits and then have it output a ranking list. Not completely dissimilar to rtings.com's magic tv ranker.
But probably there is a higher percentage hosted on proprietary platforms (Reddit, FB, ...) that replaces services mentioned above but personal websites as well.
I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 search results for General Motors (their web page, another of their pages, a New York Times article about them, and the Wikipedia article about them), a box containing tweets from General Motors, two more news articles about General motors, and finally a link to GMail. Then the other "GMs" start, including GraphicsMagick for node.js. I think they did a pretty good job interpreting "GM" here, and I don't think the Internet is exactly ruined.
The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.
For me, a Google search returned only General Motors results in the top spots, while a DuckDuckGo search had Gmail as the first result after the news stories.
https://i.imgur.com/m2iXSN9.jpg
If I type it into the browser search bar however it is the first result. This is not Google's fault, as I'm on Firefox, which is smartly trying to look for sites I frequently visit.
"Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.
But this doesn't really apply anymore once service X dominates the way a large proportion of the western population are trying to locate something - as opposed to clicking on links or bookmarks.
Reality is what actually matters. Not what people think or what they wish. It is what people do and what actually happens.
The reality is that Google not only holds a vastly dominant market position in search - but its search is the default way a majority of people interact with the Internet.
The address bar in your browser is not just an address bar. It is both a search bar and an address bar. And that makes a real difference when the search engine behind it is most often one search engine.
Example: if(Donald_Trump.as(President) == Bad){ Election.vote = !Donald_Trump; }else{ Election.vote = Donald_Trump; }
I am aware that this comment is more or less useless to many, but I still wanted to write it, because I have the power and the freedom to express my _opinion_, and because I still hope that there are people that will understand what I'm trying to say.
Let Google be Google.
If Google's vision sings the same song as the song of the people, then the people will use it. If it doesn't then people will find another search engine that will sing a song that people will like.
Or in other words, I don't see a reason for us to try to change Google, if Google will want to be the primary search engine, then Google will have to change on it's own.
Am I completly wrong? I Google strong enough to be able to shape the song of creation (strong enough to be able to prevent any other search engine from rising up even though the other search engine could be better)?
This is not what happens easily. In a near monopoly, the monopoly product can be significantly worse than other options, or what is reasonably possible, but people will continue using it for a long time because of various economic, network, psychological lock-in effects.
So it favors popularity over accuracy. So what? Google is not in the business of providing the most accurate search results. It's in the business of generating ad revenue. If popular links make Google more valuable, then favoring them is "getting things right" from the perspective of a private company.
But it's also just a hard problem. That featured snippet about the dentist for example: Google's computers aren't investigative journalists. The purpose of the featured snippet is actually to favor accuracy over popularity by deferring to journalists when Google senses that the searcher is looking for information about an event that was covered in the news. However, if the journalists get it wrong, how is Google going to know? Dollars to donuts, if Google actually knew the right answer, that's what they would surface.
I'm not the one making that claim, I'm just starting from that assumption since the parents are claiming as much
As the defacto front page to the internet, it is aeguably in society's best interest for search results to return more than SEO spam and ads.
I think the modern state of Google is a huge disservice to civilization, compared to what it was and could be. By prioritizing popularity it reduces the majority of search queries to the lowest common denominator and encourages shallow, non-technical culture.
I think what we're seeing in the refinement algorithm is a regression to the layman's mean, so to speak, as they tune (train?) The algorithm to work better for the majority of their users, who happen to be non-technical.
But when you excessively dumb down technology you reduce incentive for people to learn anything and, more importantly here, the dumbing down means showing entertainment and SEO results over possibly more technical content.
Personally I find it disheartening when I search for technical words and the only results are celebrities or media.
Google isn't wrong – it's actually doing its part really well. It's either competition or regulation that need tweaking. Probably both.
In other words
> an economic system that by it's very nature can only provide sub-optimal results is broken.
The economic system can provide optimal results. Individual actors can but don't need to in order for the prior statement to be true.
But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.
Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.
First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs.
Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional information, consider them a dupe and don't list them. They can run their portals, but they don't need to show up in search.
It's come up multiple times in this thread, car manuals is a good example. They would be better off throwing away every result they have and hand indexing the good information, than what gets returned right now.
Recipes in particular have turned into a giant story about the way grandma used to do it with a picture followed by the same couple variants with different proportions. Pick winners by hand.
Someone has a finance question, just put boggleheads at the top, instead of whichever 59 affiliate credit card sites sprung up.
Need health advice? Put examine.com at the top above WebMD and healthline. Why? Because a human exper compared them and decided examine is a better first result. You could comb through tens of thousands of sites with a team of hundreds of people, something Google easily has at its disposal. What PageRank had, that seems to be missing now, is a seed of "we trust these most" and let the network grow from there. It tried to find expertise, instead of clickability. It was about getting you the best information first.
Correct. I would do that.
.
>They also have their own bias introduced to their content.
Yes. Good.
I'm not necessarily saying they hand pick the best article for every single story. Although techmeme.com and hn do that to an extent, when they notice a better version of an article, they replace the top link with the better version.
I spent a few days thinking about it not so long ago and I have thought of something rarely mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have completely solved the problem, just noticed it changes the perspective.
If I remember well, from my user perspective, the biggest change Google introduced was the ranking by page. Yahoo used to rank by site not by page. Maybe going back to a ranking by site would help creating a good index.
A site would be associated to a number of keywords, say 20 and that's it. That would give incentive to pick the keywords you want to rank for carefully and really be an expert about them instead of having SEO experts deciding which keywords they want to rank for this week and write empty TF-IDF optimized blog posts.
This sort of search engine would not give you the answer to everything but it would give back power to the websites. The information retrieval process would then be 2 steps :
- find a good website
- find the information within the website
Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.
1. It was slow to add categories/sites, which especially hurt categories where things change pretty quickly (gaming, tech and media are good examples, since new systems and frameworks need to have categories added ASAP).
2. Editors were often drawn into corruption, and either judged submissions based on how much they were paid elsewhere or prioritised their own/friends/family's websites.
Both of these issues could potentially be fixed with some more resources and better oversight, but it may mean any future DMOZ equivalent would need a lot more funding than the previous one.
Federation would help with both factors, though. A workable "right to fork" is a powerful incentive against corruption. Notably DMOZ was not federated or "forkable" in any real sense, even though it did have a reasonable amount of sites mirroring it.
1) look for references to source materials
2) check references quality - is reference real? does the quoted text match the text from the reference? is it an academic paper published in a journal?
3) authorship quality - what is the academic "impact factor" score for the author?
4) confirmed viewer reviews - subjective review by confirmed users
5) accessibility score - automated user interface usability analysis
High quality data exists, but it's not much of the ad supported web and not much of what users what to read.
Now we are at a point where normal website users have very little ways to be high in search results. And people with money can buy it either with very expensive SEO or with expensive Ads.
Sometimes i wonder why the heck should normal website user even try to please Google. As a normal website owner i dont feel Google gives me as much as it expects me to do.
Dont link to this, use AMP, God forbid to Exchange links. There are books about how to please Google. But what is the point? It all comes to who has more money. I dont, so i will never win a good position.
I think we should just forget all these Google rules because they destroyed the Internet how it used to be. Autodiscoverable.
Edit: I think you've actually managed to find a really terrific example of a case where modern ML systems are going to have trouble, because of how that Wikipedia page is worded in relation to the query.
* There isn't a single phrase that answers the query directly, so the ML model would need to make very good use of context (attention), both within multiclause sentences and between paragraphs.
* There are many different numbers on the page, so the model has to determine the right one. It can't just get lucky by guessing here.
* A wrong number (1.7MB) has close proximity to literal keywords in the query (floppy, disk). (The right number [880KB] does too.)
* The model has to understand and properly make use of "most" vs "unusual" in its decision.
Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful.
I don't disagree with the general point that the amount of content in today's Web makes the job of a search engine much harder. Perhaps some of Google's techniques lower the result quality for some users, for some queries. That's a much more boring title for a blog post, I guess.
I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress.
I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I really remember that the presenter brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point to you, the only way to do that would be if you, too, were persuasively an expert on the thing.
(These were... naïve times in many ways.)
Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system, because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was founded on an algorithm that rewarded expertise.
It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't meant to, and b) actually didn't in the very earliest days, because the WWW link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then the measure became the target, etc etc)
In the old days it was cost prohibitive to setup a massive network of interconnected fake hosts to boost your rank, but these days with cheap VPSes this is entirely possible and probably even profitable. I'm certainly not the only person who has searched for something and found a ton of differently styled blogs all hosting exactly the same content stolen from some legitimate website and clogging up pages of Google results.
It's why buying expired domains and throwing your totally unrelated content on them works great.
It's why subdomain/folder leasing is a thing where affiliate sites will pay "high PR" sites to reverse proxy a subdomain or folder to them and (that's the important part) link to it from their main site. And boy, does that work. The same content that would be > page 100 suddenly is in the top 3.
There are other factors, but they don't matter nearly as much as Google's "we have 200 factors that contribute to the ranking" stuff makes it seem. You can throw the most atrocious low quality content on a site with lots of incoming links and it will rank at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/
My family actually had a book like and I learned about a bunch of the net culture sites through it.
https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
depending on what i am looking for there are a few avenues i would explore if google wasn't available. github, gitlab, & stackoverflow/stackexchange for code related stuff.
wikipedia for general topics. youtube for how-tos. twitter for the news. newsletters and podcasts for links to new articles.
&c.
Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those tematic forums
And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past 20.
must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)
Web crawlers were introduced in 1993. At that point, gopher probably had more content. Remember WAIS? All the libraries liked that protocol. Encarta was still selling like hot cakes.
https://www.superhighway98.com/
I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results.
But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result.
Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not.
You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.
And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and thousands of illustrations.
I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather than giving cheap crappy answers.
I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants.
> I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers.
Why not use quotation marks?
Ps. Quotation marks help in some degree. But the response pool is often very small. Also sometimes quotation marks return broader results than expected to
What does this even mean?
The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work.
Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal context.
Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal solution.
Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock that's much more interesting.
Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside filter bubbles.
Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct.
Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead of guiding us to ask better questions.
Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't force them.
A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and that's perfectly fine. They spent their whole day working hard, come home, and now you want to force them to spend their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be the internet you want but it's not what people want. The internet can be for more than one thing.
This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up. (Thankfully, usually only a couple of these appear in most discussions, and usually people don't spam this.)
> Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open mind and read widely and voraciously.
Some people are more insightful than most, but its the exact same system as reddit
Your upboats are time sensitive.
When people talk negatively about bubbles, they generally focus on the couple cases where being in a bubble is harmful, such as when it comes to science, politics and so on, but ignore all the other times where a bubble is good.
Do you read politics you agree with or disagree with? I make an effort to click more on things I think I'll disagree with.
Hacker News is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of charity by pg and YC to attempt to provide a forum for a specific subculture. It's obvious from the goal of the project: "things that hackers would find interesting".
But what most people get from the Internet is not a product of someone with effectively unlimited funds (and legendary software engineering ability) building a website to support their community. They get to choose between eyeball-extraction megasites or clunky off-the-shelf vBulletin or Wordpress clones run by underqualified volunteers. It certainly is nice to be among the target audience of Hacker News -- but what if I weren't?
There's obviously a level of notoriety beyond just quality. I don't need the same article 3 times under 3 logos.
> The issue is that most people aren't looking for [a marketplace of ideas], and you can't force them
No? We can't? Or we shouldn't? Might that be our hyper-individualist culture constraining our imagination of what the right path (survival) might be?
Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.
And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.
Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. (search terms: optimal foraging strategies, radius of perception, levy walk, agent-based modeling, in the vein of [1]) Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.
imho, we DO need to consider "forcing" (as a collective) changes in that infrastructure, or else our hitherto evolved psychology might just as well see us destroyed. So in the end, what people "want" is maybe not the highest principle to hold, because what we individually "want" might be tuned for a dying reality, and a prior foraging landscape.
Heh, anyhow... perhaps this is just a mad-cap rant from a technologist and failed biochemist <3
[1]: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10135146
Can you explain what this means?
I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack more context into the search input which is strictly worse since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a finer point on your search.
And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a programming language most of the time, by "re-learning search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious problem of the search engine needing more context. In the same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off.
How does your complaint differ from this?
Hum, not exactly. Google will ignore extra context that doesn't match your profile. People coped very well when it didn't.
Google may also be lost in an A/B testing catch 22 feedback loop, where what gets clicked gets elevated, and whats elevated gets clicked. The less straightforward, more clickbait cryptic results get clicked to see what they are. The result that spells out all the answers might not get a click at all. Ive noticed in the last year or two wikipedia not even being on the first page of searches it should be the top two or three results for.
Wikipedia does a damn fine job in my opinion. You can find decent, democratized knowledge on almost any topic complete with translation into your preferred language (if not on wiki, then through google translate). Or efforts like MIT's open course ware, which hosts lectures and syllabus materials on a variety of topics. There's also arxiv derivatives and a thriving black market (scihub, libgen, etc) of open access to research papers on any topic you'd like. Social media =/ the internet.
Did anyone really believe this other than middle aged libertarian hackers from the 90s who kept repeating this in prayer like fashion?
The internet is, as the name suggests, a network. Google also is a sort of network, one that is semantically searchable. But Google Search is not a fact checker. It doesn't have an editorial room for every piece of content it exposes, it doesn't have deep knowledge about everything it throws back at us, and it could not have those things at the scale it operates.
That's not Google's fault either. It's not a search engine's job to correct wrong reporting. It's the job of journalists and news outlets to fact-check information, it's the job of citizens to be critical of the information they consume, and it's the job of governments to facilitate that this happens.
It's our fault that our civic institutions have degraded, and not the fault of Google that it spits our own stupidity back at us. It's not Google's fault that we don't like what we see when we look in the mirror and techno utopianism isn't going to save us either.
It does not succeed as well as it did in the past at its current mission. It has regressed.
I’m fairly certain they’re doing the best they can with what’s available to them, but right now they probably get more accurate results by focusing on what is popular than by blindly accepting the contents of the websites.
No but in all seriousness, the mistake was in relying so heavily on private corporations motivated by profit. An unpopular idea is an unprofitable one. I'm not sure what a non-profit Google would look like... maybe the same... but I feel pretty confident that a non-profit YouTube for example would likely have a totally different recommendation algorithm.
Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore.
There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are really well done.
Based on Google’s advanced operator page at one point, the addition of a plus sign to a search termed either prompted the lookup of Google+ pages or a blood type.
'+' was replaced by adding quotes around each search term.
[0] https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/10/googles-plus-opera...
If true, this would be big news, as the "+" qualifier on search terms stopped being obeyed about a decade ago with the launch of... whatever that now-forgotten Facebook competitor Google used to have. The workaround was to use quotes around individual words, which mostly worked, unless it didn't. But the combination of using quotes and "verbatim" (under Tools/All Results") almost always worked.
[1] The way it failed is sort of interesting. I randomly tried "+rhino +cereal +gm", and the first result didn't include the word "rhino", and considered "gm" to be a synonym for General Mills. Quotes around the individual terms seems to work for this query, even without verbatim.
I vividly remember the promise, and believing in that promise, but there was never a time that the Internet was this. In retrospect I don't see why we should have believed in it in the first place.
There was never any such promise, no contract signed in blood. It was just the wishful thinking of a group of people sharing a particular political persuasion. Just because a monocultural group of pioneers who are all radical thinkers (But not too radical) build something, doesn't mean that the people moving into what they build are interested in sharing, or even tolerating their idiosyncratic culture or politics.
The web is supposed to be a way to route a bit of information from one computer to another. This is so low-level, and so broad, that it proscribes nothing about the outcome.
I have been there since the old times of IRC and I have never seen anything promised.
It doesn't work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617635
Imagine in 1995 asking someone whether MSG is harmful or whether razor blades were ever found in Halloween candies. You would hear fairly confident answers of yes to both. Perhaps someone would feel like checking things, and they'd pull out a book of popular facts or an encyclopedia that happily answered yes (or perhaps no) without much discussion, and that would be the end of it. (The Encarta College Dictionary, which awkwardly straddled the transition from books to the internet, had an entirely uncritical definition of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" as a real thing, for instance.)
Go to Google and type in "is msg harmful" and the featured snippet says that while some people have a sensitivity to it, it's definitely not harmful in anywhere near the amounts used in food.
Go to Google and type in "razors in halloween candy" and the top result is a Wikipedia page debunking the urban legends of the '80s. After it is a YouTube video reporting on an actual case of razor blades being found in candy this past Halloween, which Wikipedia hasn't been updated for. In a single Google SERP above the fold, you already have a more accurate synthesis of multiple sources than any single publication has. (And no, I didn't plan this, I didn't even know about the 2019 cases until just now!)
What about political correctness? There's no shortage of content criticizing either the current president or his political opponents past and present. Or, say, search for "puberty blockers" and you get YouTube videos both in favor of them and against them, an handout from Seattle Children's Hospital on how to get them, an article from The Federalist on why they're clearly dangerous, a paywalled article from The Economist discussing it, an article from NBC News saying they've lowered the suicide rate among trans kids... basically any viewpoint you want or don't want, you can find it.
It's all there.
Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
And yet there is more content on the web, of greater variety and higher quality, than there ever was on that old web. Youtube is a walled garden, but some of what's on there is brilliant, and there's certainly plenty of non-commercial "for the love" content as well. Twitter is, well, Twitter, but accounts like TheSunVanished are publishing ARGs on the platform. Streaming music, video, gaming, all sorts of platforms are full of creative expression despite also being centralized.
Is all of that really unarguably terrible merely because everyone putting their art out there didn't first go through the trouble of manually writing HTML pages on a shared host first?
People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
I can't blame progress for killing culture, but I'm glad that back then, something like serving up an MP3 library in an AOL chatroom was a deeply awesome experience.
>Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
And nowadays people torrent. It's not as if piracy and file sharing are dead or anything.
But I think you're really saying the web is terrible for you, because it no longer resembles what you used to enjoy, and because other people use it in ways you don't find interesting. And that's valid for you, but it's a subjective opinion, not objective fact.
Personally, I'm happy giving up downloading random mp3s from the web to have the depth of content and interactivity the modern web offers. But I care more about content than culture.
It might be easier, but it depends on your target audience how effective it is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744171
Teams and editorial boards are great at working together to build things, wikipedia, reddit wikis, fandom/wikia. But the tools they have to calculate consensus (not just the most popular answer but the most correct one, given a cultures beliefs) are stone age. Mahalo.com was an attempt at collaborative information sorting, and https://inside.com/ isnt a bad successor, in theory.
I also think the premise that search/feed are the best options is flawed. The directory was, and stills is a great way to drill down into topics. Search should be more encyclopedia/directory like, and less feed like.
And even in the realm of search, some flags or operators to specify if I'm looking for a historical result, a timely news result, a review, a fact, or an opinion could come in handy.
Google would benefit from humans sitting down, searching things and then going "what should the top results actually be, why are we not there" from a much more exerting their bias standpoint. How are they ranking recipes without a kitchen to taste them? I would totally support a Google recipe division taste testing and ranking technique,to actually know what the best pot pie recipe is. It would be less a waste of money than another messenger product every other year.
Wikipedia is what the web was supposed to be. Prior to that you had Usenet (for conversation) and services like Gopher, Archie, and Veronica (various sorts of databases). The web was meant to be an accessible front end for that that wasn't as headache-inducing as 80x25 terminal.
We have low-quality content generation not because of Google but because of the low cost of publishing (which the author even mentions). It's exactly why we have email spam: it costs nothing to send. To repurpose a Chris Rock bit, "if sending an email cost $5,000 you'd have no more spam email".
What's the alternative being touted here? No Google? Making things harder to find? Seriously?
I'd say a far bigger issue is people sharing content from and to people who think the same, creating these myopic echo chambers of self-reinforcing beliefs.
Google may do a questionable job at filtering out provably false content but people are way worse at that.
Within such a system it's too easy to foster fear, anger and hate and to propagate provably false information. Anti-vaxxers are just one such group that seem to thrive in this informationless world.
There are also other factors. There is a vast decrease of internet's signal-to-noise ratio due to low-cost content you mentioned. For a while we could rely on google to get us through the jungle to useful information. Now every SEO is targeting google search. Most other search engines use google's results, so no help there.
Blaming google doesn't help, their interests are not aligned with user interests. Author is actually criticizing us and our dependence on this one-size-fits-all source of information. The alternative is building and adopting better alternatives to google search.
With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately.
It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.
Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results.
Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread):
https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=GM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Google shapes the Internet and that shape leaves many things in ruins.
Google shapes the Internet by motivating so many people to produce content to make money through advertising. Most people make virtually nothing, a few people make a lot. There is an enormous amount of content on the internet whose driving purpose of making money is secondary to that of sharing something with the world.
Google shapes the Internet through it's algorithm. Ever read or angrily scroll through pages of BS when trying to find a recipe? The only reason anyone does that is for google. My grandmother's recipe for deviled eggs was stored on an index card in a box on the stove. I bet it didn't have 200 bytes of data. A search algorithm can't do much with that so everybody has to add a grand story about their grandmother, her toenails, and how nice a vacation to the Balkans was which nobody ever actually took. It also has to be on top to force people to spend more time on the site, so they're more "engaged".
I just want to know a good amount of time to hard boil eggs in an instant pot, but fuck me for wanting to know the number of minutes. "Organizing information" became being as much of an impediment as possible and directing me to the winner of the SEO race.
Before Internet advertising was so popular people would put things out there much more just because they wanted to, not for some profit motive. Now everybody doing that is doing it on somebody else's platform, making somebody else money, and often tracking everybody who comes past.
Much of the ruins are "caused" by Google, because Google won the race, next in line would have done the same thing. Probably.
It occasionally brings up the question of how to fix it. That probably requires new transport layers, new browsers, and well chosen limitations. Doubtful it would get off the ground. Decentralized solutions tend to get overwhelmed with extremely unsavory things. A new "browser" based on an entirely different stack would be hard to compete, especially if your goal was eliminating ads and tracking and general money-grubbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Beard
(I have several of his humorous Latin phrasebooks.)
That's like saying Gutenberg ruined books because now I can find books full of BS.
> Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need.
I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.
The movie is one huge anti-consumerism screed.
2. especially for businesses, it comes off as unprofessional if you are using gmail, yahoo, etc as your contact address
Try searching for 'retirement for French people leaving in the UK'... It is close to impossible to find anything relevant.
In general, I think we would all be better off if phones just supported calling and texting.
“Worse is better” wins again.
According to a Wikipedia citation (The Guardian) this was the original mission statement.[2]
[1] https://about.google [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/03/larry-pag...
Disclaimer: I work at Google.
Like people who complain that the latest macs are “terrible”, perhaps I’m simply not google’s audience any more. That doesn’t make google, or me, wrong.
Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth.
And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?
I searched for `dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth`
You do see the excerpt, but right underneath that you see the Snopes link.
I don't think Google should be in the business of debunking articles written years ago. As long as it's relevance algorithms can brings up contrasting sources, in this case the ABC news article and the Snopes stories. It's bad journalism from ABC that they haven't marked that article as redacted even though it's been proven false.
Recently I remember, seeing that the google card UI for the news marked an article as Satire, because in-fact it was a Satire article. I'm not sure if that's because the original article embedded some information that helped Google discover this.
They do a pretty good job at organizing information and making it available.
Google has been a pivotal center of the internet - information has never been easier to find! Ease of access to information does not, however, alleviate the need placed upon the reader to sift out fact from fiction.
As a thought experiment, would our luddite-esque author friend prefer that Google was the arbiter of truth, rather than trends? I certainly would not.
I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080808121324/http://www.facebo...