381–390 of 888 posts
Even though Google's search engine will censor some content in China, it will still be miles better than Baidu. People who use Google will find highly relevant results quickly when searching about health, academic research, and a million of other things. They won't have to worry about finding thinly disguised promotions of illegal hospitals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi ) on the first page of Goog…
It really pains me how Google has changed. When I was younger I always wanted to work there. Now that I've graduated college, I would probably never want to work there.
might wanna check this out(and their other debates).
Not anymore.
As Google's position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it's slightly tarnished brand), it doesn't need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.
I also feel like they've changed search so much for profit purposes that it's impossible to find certain things without receiving pages of irrelevance. I've been using Google since the early 2000's and it's so easy to tell Search has dropped in quality. Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads. It's still the best, but the profit m…
examples please
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How did you argue against the inevitable "if we don't take this contract, dude across the street will"? Collective action. They can hire 14 new guys, but they won't have any to instruct the new employees in their work.
While I’d like to try and agree... I think you may be missing a sense of scale and the reality of just how replaceable people are... even magically-gifted google employees.
It really pains me how Google has changed. When I was younger I always wanted to work there. Now that I've graduated college, I would probably never want to work there.
I also feel like they've changed search so much for profit purposes that it's impossible to find certain things without receiving pages of irrelevance. I've been using Google since the early 2000's and it's so easy to tell Search has dropped in quality. Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads. It's still the best, but the profit m…
examples please
First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.
Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.
Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".
I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.
[1] https://twitter.com/riiiiiiiikk/status/1012859335095959552
To me the optics of refusing to work for the US government on maven but complying with censorship in China seem very bad in the US’s politics climate. There is nonzero risk that the brand will be, for lack of a better word, fucked.
And if the employees placed thier values over profits, why are they still there? I wonder if they are going to refuse their stock based compensation?
It's another thing to work at a company which has decided to aid a government on the other side of the world that's forcibly relocating a million religious minorities to re-education camps.
(Cue the China apologists!)
Maybe they just have worse PR?