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Elevating original reporting in Search

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Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#151

Post by toasterlovin »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #143
toasterlovin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, I guess, if you also want to give more representation to far right organizations. The organizations OP mentioned are not far right. They are mainstream right. With the possible exception of RT, which I'm not actually all that familiar with.

Fox News is far right, it was founded to with the explicit purpose of putting far right view points into the main stream[0]. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a...

A) your link doesn't even mention the phrase "far right", and B) what something is today is not the same as what it was intended to be in the 70s.

You can just go to foxnews.com. It may be low-brow journalism that doesn't carry itself with the same gravity as NYT or WaPO, but none of the stuff on there seems very extreme to me. No white nationalism, for instance, which is I think is basically the right wing equivalent of the socialism (as in, actual socialism, not social democracy) and communism you see on the far left.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#152

Post by ldng »

gambler wrote: post #133
rdtwo wrote: post #125

Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Anytime you search for a game guide/faq/hint you get drivel from the big name sites that are super short on content and have bad advice. Almost in all cases the content I’m looking for is in some tiny blog that barely ranks but matches all the search words.

> Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Yeah, but what if stupid people search for the wrong thing, find the wrong website and get infected with Wrongthink? Have you thought about that? Crushing amateur content creators and betraying all the ideals of the early Web is small price to pay for preventing that intolerable scenario.

Who or what define "Wrongthink" ?

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#153

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ldng wrote: post #152
gambler wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Yeah, but what if stupid people search for the wrong thing, find the wrong website and get infected with Wrongthink? Have you thought about that? Crushing amateur content creators and betraying all the ideals of the early Web is small price to pay for preventing that intolerable scenario.

Who or what define "Wrongthink" ?

Whoever gets to define what the "right" or "authoritative" answers are.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#154

Post by krapp »

ldng wrote: post #152
gambler wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Authoritative seeming sources are not always a good thing. Yeah, but what if stupid people search for the wrong thing, find the wrong website and get infected with Wrongthink? Have you thought about that? Crushing amateur content creators and betraying all the ideals of the early Web is small price to pay for preventing that intolerable scenario.

Who or what define "Wrongthink" ?

People who disagree with something, usually progressive or feminist ideology or mainstream science, but can't or won't make a rational argument for their position, choosing to portray themselves as victims of persecution for their radical, dangerous, status-quo threatening ideas.

Ironically, the same people who insist that terms like "racist", "white supremacist," "hate speech," etc. are arbitrary and can only lead down the slippery slope towards a fascist Orwellian dystopia never seem to believe that an Orwellian metaphor can be incorrectly applied.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#155

Post by ldng »

charlesism wrote: post #63
enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

> Has anyone found that recently Google search > is becoming more and more useless? Absolutely. I use DDG now. Google spams me with ads, and ignores my search terms. This 'search disease' seems to be spreading, too. Retailers like Amazon, NewEgg, Ebay, and others happily insert results that they want the user to buy, instead of putting the user in control. On Ebay, half the time they remove filters I want to use. Ama…

Yes that trend is worrisome. But when confronted about it those site will respond but "the user asked for it !", "We protect our clients from scams". And I totally agree, it is really annoying.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#156

Post by ldng »

logicchains wrote: post #41
enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

Twice in the last month I found Bing gave me a better search result than Google (thing I was looking for in the first couple answers, not even on the first page in Google). That never happened to me before.

Bing probably has benefited from more people using Duckduckgo.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#157

Post by crispinb »

snazz wrote: post #100
andrewvc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people have been switching to DDG for years now, yet still google is utterly dominant. Candidly, I'm mystified by the complaints. Google's search works great, and has for years for myself and everyone I know IRL. Any post about any product that isn't brand new on HN is going to get comments along the line of "Company X? Their product is garbage, it used to be great! I've been using and once I got it going it was…

I won’t argue about your experience, but DDG isn’t any harder to use than Google aside from the fact that you need to change your default search engine. That’s not a “ton of extra effort to setup”.

When trying DDG again for a while, my use of g! gradually increases as a necessary tactic to surface what I'm looking for. When it gets to over about 80% I go back to using Google again with a sigh.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#158

Post by rjf72 »

crispinb wrote: post #157
snazz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won’t argue about your experience, but DDG isn’t any harder to use than Google aside from the fact that you need to change your default search engine. That’s not a “ton of extra effort to setup”.

When trying DDG again for a while, my use of g! gradually increases as a necessary tactic to surface what I'm looking for. When it gets to over about 80% I go back to using Google again with a sigh.

Can you give some examples?

I think a few years ago this was somewhat reasonable but in my opinion DDG has not only matched but surpassed Google for most searches. As an example (to not make this as if I'm only asking you to do the lifting) a random search that's relevant for me would be 'spacex rocket thrust.' Since Google's results are based on arbitrary tracking and whatever per user magic marketing metrics they decide to apply, it's not repeatable but I imagine you'll probably get at least something similar. We should get identical results for DDG:

-----------

Google:

- 4 redundant wiki pages (all link to each other)

- 2 redundant links to spacex.com site (all link to each other)

- 1 irrelevant theverge article on an arbitrary launch

- 1 space.com link with some relevant information

DDG:

- 1 relevant wiki page

- 2 redundant links to spacex.com site

- 1 tangential article from space.com

- 1 space.com link with some relevant information

- 1 spaceflight101.com link with extremely relevant information

- 1 irrelevant link from teslarati talking about a 'spacex rocket package' for a roadster

- 1 cnn article comparing rocket thrusts

- 1 redundant wiki page

-----------

That was literally the first thing I searched for and I think DDG is clearly better there, though both overall results are quite poor. One big thing is a much better diversity of sources with much less redundancy. But the thing that really pushes this example over the edge is the spaceflight101. It not only provides the most relevant information by a rather wide margin, but is also a critical source for a wide array of related news, specs, and other information.

The reason I think both searches are quite poor is because of how much all search engines today lack any notion of context whatsoever. When I search for 'spacex engine thrust' am I searching for technical information, or am I searching for media information relating to recent launches or developments? That's something that ought be able derived from a contextual analysis of my query, yet nonetheless it quite obviously is not!

Google took us that big leap from 'Abraham Lincoln' not returning hardcore porn, but it feels like the progress we've made since then has been pretty.. meh. And I feel the last few years have seen an overall decline in search quality, but a relative increase in quality for the formerly secondary players such as DDG. In other words it "feels" as though Google of ~4 years ago > DDG today > Google Today. But of course this is, in some ways, going to come down to the person.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#159

Post by concordDance »

sverige wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea for a tech company with no experience or education in the field to have so much influence over what people perceive to be good journalism?

Agreed, I would want some additional criteria for consideration for a number of these, for example when it comes to news I would want interview transcripts or links to such things to affect ranking, similarly links to scientific papers. Avoiding certain a number of common reasoning errors (such as equivocation) or stats errors (such as not considering biased sampling or even not considering sampling size at all when making points) should also be required for top quality.

Re: Elevating original reporting in Search

#160

Post by concordDance »

outime wrote: post #58
enlyth wrote: post #32

Has anyone found that recently Google search is becoming more and more useless? Google tends to ignore what I actually type in, and tries to search according to some weird NLP machine learning inference on what it thinks I'm actually trying to ask. Top results will include maybe 50-75% of the words I actually typed in, and it will treat the rest as mere hints or related words. My queries end up looking like this afte…

Almost every thread that's somehow related to Google Search has this same question (which often goes to the top) and the same answers. It's difficult to imagine that most of the people haven't seen this a bunch of times as well. And while I agree with this, I'd love to know why people keep asking and/or upvoting this same question over and over. Is it for the sole purpose of bashing Google or what is it? Honest quest…

Raising awareness of what was lost in my case.

I miss the early 2000s when I'd do a search for things and get information heavy, presentation light content made by non-commercial enthusiasts.

Though in my case I mostly don't blame Google as much as the commercialization of the internet and the short attention spans of the majority of its current inhabitants (who are a lot less bright and technical than the ones from the late 90s and early 2000s). What I do blame them for a bit is catering to those masses and their commercial focus rather than trying to improve the quality and depth of information we are exposed to. (I can probably also blame them for some of the censorship they seem to do based on these guidelines)

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