231–240 of 284 posts
uBlock Origin supports blocking search results, so I don't require an additional browser extension. I maintain a blocklist for myself, targetting Google and DuckDuckGo [1]. Feel free to contribute more websites or use this list as a template for your own repository. [1] https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/master/adblock...
Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?
No. This is a classic mistake of intellectual types, who are impressed by each others' cogent arguments. But there is a much wider pool of people who are not, and among whom the intellectual types actual have very little influence, due to being boring and hard to understand (plus, it has to be said, kind of snobbish about how smart they are).
Now, you might reason that Google is full of smart people who should care about cogent arguments. But that assumes as an unspoken premise that Google's internal goal is to maximize the quality of the service and profit from being The Best. They passed that goal years ago are now so awash in money that it's cheaper to just squash competition than to innovate. They can be moved by threats to advertising revenue got up by angry crowds on social media (a market when they have little direct power), but Google would probably be delighted if grumpy nerds wandered off somewhere else. If they need talent or access to some compelling technology they can just throw a pile of cash at the problem.
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It does in fact use the Bing backend for the majority of its web searches: > DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple part…
Of their additional sources they receive the commonly from Bing, but that is only from their additional sources. They use the results from there sure but by no means are they "Bing based".
Their "hundreds of sources" are for very niche topics and appear in separate boxes. The 10 links per page come from Bing which would make them Bing-based.
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DDG has no idea of the intent of your search based on your previous searches and unfortunately this generates abysmal results for me when searching for something like `ruby xxx`. Those terms rarely return results about the programming language. I unfortunately end up using Google in these situations, always to immediate success.
>ruby xxx Not sure if the X's were to denote wildcards or if you're after porn actresses named Ruby, but either way it might be worth adding a term to the query to clarify
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
I think the question was specifically about declining to improve one's own circumstances because someone else could, not declining to help someone else. That's different from the bystander effect as usually conceived. The theoretical bystander effect is something like "Someone is being attacked, I could call 911 but someone else will;" this is perhaps something like "I am being attacked, I could scream for help but o…
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DDG has no idea of the intent of your search based on your previous searches and unfortunately this generates abysmal results for me when searching for something like `ruby xxx`. Those terms rarely return results about the programming language. I unfortunately end up using Google in these situations, always to immediate success.
One of the biggest reasons to switch away from Google is to shed that "previous search" bias, and refine + refilter results till you hone in on what you want. Leaving it to "the algorithm" to decide what to show you based on what it "thinks you want" from previous interactions turns the tool into no better than Twitter or Facebook optimizing engagement by showing you what they think you should see.
For reference, Ruby is only has 6% on the Stack overflow dev survey https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...
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Fair enough, maybe Learned Helplessness is a better fit.
I feel like the iterated prisoner's dilemma is part of it too -- if you let someone off the hook repeatedly for defecting, you just enable them to continue defecting. Or somewhat related, the "if you touch it you own it" problem. So to overcome this learned helplessness effect, we'd need a good strategy to prevent the deterioration of duty of whoever is "supposed" to be fixing a problem, and/or a way to cut out the d…
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Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" as a justification for doing nothing at all to help or improve one's own circumstances? I see more and more of it in the public discourse over the last years and it kind of bothers me. I see it a lot in conversations related to poverty or climate change, but it is as we see here by no means exclusive to those topics. To the original replyer: you coul…
> Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" At the risk of sounding pretentious, I call it "socialist", since they spend their lives telling others what to do or what is good or not for the rest of us but they rarely do anything about it. Surprisingly, this is the group that is really worried about poverty and climate change and do as much as I do for it, with the difference that I do it by…
Isn't this Google's job? Are developers a small but lucrative target and so the suits at Google don't see the benefit of improving that experience by cleaning up the spam? Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?
Is there a word for this tendency to say, "it's someone else's job" as a justification for doing nothing at all to help or improve one's own circumstances? I see more and more of it in the public discourse over the last years and it kind of bothers me. I see it a lot in conversations related to poverty or climate change, but it is as we see here by no means exclusive to those topics. To the original replyer: you coul…
It’s often possible to work around issues in lower layers, but it's usually at least worth raising it upstream to get it fixed 'properly'.
It'll help me when I dont have a blocklist active, and it'll help new programmers who arent familiar. It'll reward good sites with extra traffic and discourage new spammers entering the market.
In the worst case, if Google really can't or won't address tge issue, understanding the upstream problem more fully can help make a better workaround.