111–120 of 515 posts
[1]https://youtubecensorship.com/2019-08-18-google-youtube-rigg...
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
It's also funny how Google basically nuked groups and made it unsearchable, while once in a blue moon you get a search result to alt.coats.winter or something
I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up.
Any tips on finding "historical" results?
I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.) I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI , and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.
About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that. I think we discount how much the rise of search engines as a discovery mechanism hurt the original PageRank algorithm. Things used to be easy to search for because humans were self-categorizing all the knowledge available (because we didn't have good search engines), and PageRank just made that self-categorization globally available.
Now there's so much more noise on the web, and no one is manually organizing it like we did with the old "web rings", and that's not even beginning to explore the issue of sites manually gaming SEO. The algorithm's job is much harder today, and so we need to give it a little help finding what we want.
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
It's analogous to predatory pricing. Google has all the necessary tech to go back to doing good searches. They can easily pivot back in a few months. A new startup would need to dump loads of money into servers and building their own tech. So there's just no way to recoup the cost of building a competitor.
Not the same thing but, entire SO website runs on like 2 door sized racks. Search engine might be a different thing but if you have funding to get started, hardware costs aren’t going to be impossibly huge. Most is labor (engineering).
I’m curious, how much compute power it takes to index the whole web? I presume queries are super fast.
- There is way more content to sift through, including video. - There are way more Google users, including grandmas. - Conversations have moved from discussion boards to walled gardens and chats. - Google relies more on neural network embeddings, so does a better job when you type full sentences and semantic similarity. - Google relies on authority signals and incoming links to a website, so non-commercial, hobbyist,…
>Anything academic, search on specific websites or Google Scholar. Anything technical/coding, search on StackOverflow. Anything cultural/commercial you want a peer answer, instead of a salesman answer, search on Reddit This is a completely miserable experience, and walls off useful information into classes of people who "are in the know" about where the most relevant information exists. And if you're that grandma sea…
Agreed on the miserable experience. Do you have any ideas on how to attack this? Perhaps Google started out with the right experience, but ads eventually toppled it. Perhaps Google never hit on the right experience. What gives?
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(same poster) BTW, amazon.com is in my opinion even more infuriating. I just searched for "Odense Marzipan" (which is a 100+ years old brand serving the royal danish court) and they show me pictures of gamepads made out of chocolate along with a note: Your search "odense marzipan" was automatically translated into "odicht marzipan". Then searching for "odicht" out of curiousity, they auto-correct it to "olight". So I…
"We know what is best for you, consumer!"
Or how GeeksForGeeks shows up higher than the pages for the official Python docs.
Or how searching for anything seemes to find an auto-generated page with that phrase that outranks any useful info.
The authentic source of the content should be the first hit, not someone talking about it, or a clone, or an SEO page linking to the authentic content. That is a colossal failure.
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The "people also searched for" box is not just useless, but also very much messing with usability for me. Every time I click on a link, go back, then trying to click on the next link, this box shows up and I accidentally click on that (because it shows up with a little delay and an animation). This filter takes care of that box completely: www.google.com##.exp-outline www.google.com##[style="display: block; opacity:…
I cannot stress enough how infuriating it is when a page loads content under my mouse cursor at such a delay that I can manage to point at a link and click on it _before_ the new content is loaded so that I click/tap an unexpected link. This happens _all_ the time on the Twitter app search bar.
I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of it, so there must be some reason why it isn't done - does anyone know why?
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I want a curated search engine so badly. I feel like some enterprising developer could craft one specifically geared towards developers. Imagine a search that doesn't ignore operators like '?.' and where you can set persistent conditions on every single query without having to type it out. This would help prevent you from needing to type in the language you are searching for in every query. Oh, and the cherry on top…
Content curation doesn't scale, so I believe it's out of question for the modern web. The best you can hope for is to have someone throw some quality AI at it, plus a lot of manual tweaking.