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The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

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Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#121

Post by microtherion »

the_duke wrote: post #37
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that. Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era…

When I started increasingly using DDG a while ago, it was primarily because I (1) thought it was "good enough" and (2) I wanted to preserve some diversity in the search ecosystem.

But by now, DDG is simply better. An important use case for search for me is to copy and paste URLs for discussions etc. Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google.

At best, those are ugly and confusing when pasted into text. At worst, for e.g. image URLs, naïve processing may not longer recognize them as images because the suffix is buried deep in the redirect link.

DDG gives original URLs, As Sir Timothy Wanted Them.

Additionally, for image search, I get the impression that yandex gives more relevant results, although I don't have hard data to back that up.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#122

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

kgersen75 wrote: post #50
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

> I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to not treat Google as a single block, hate everything they do or love everything they do.

They weren't mature enough to do that for Microsoft or IBM back in their days of dominance, why would you expect that level of maturity now?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#123

Post by buboard »

mojuba wrote: post #56
kgersen75 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

"Losing our support" means a process, it doesn't mean everybody hates Google now, of course it's not the case. > I always question the agenda of people promoting this. My only agenda is my growing frustration with using Google Search and the lack of competition. Web pages can be excluded now for not using any of Google's plugins for example. I see how Search is increasingly becoming a tool for plain old profit maximi…

Comprehensive means centralized. This provably cannot be fair. We can’t have everything. I use bing for difficult searches (google can only understand 1 or 2 words it seems) and yandex for image search. Not bad

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#124

Post by mojuba »

capableweb wrote: post #112
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas: - Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward) - Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked […

Everything you mentioned is possible but needs a lot of product management level refinement. Also I'd be wary of all kinds of adjustable and adaptive stuff since they create a bubble that may be difficult to escape should you become curious about things you don't know. Adaptive stuff discourages curiosity and it's one of the things I started disliking about Google Search among other things.

There may be some room for thinking about bringing unique content above non-unique one. Chit-chat on myriads of forums is probably not interesting unless you are looking for something very specific in which case you'd use the query language. It would also de-rank all non-unique marketing fluff that can be seen everywhere. Of course this might open an opportunity for spammers to de-rank good sites by copying them or to boost others by adding artificially unique content, but then combined with the human review process it might yield net positive results.

Voting... I don't know, Reddit's /all is a result of popular voting. Do we really want the Internet to become all kittens, memes and showerthoughts? :)

But I'm thinking the stereotype of what a search engine UI should look like could also be reconsidered. Google has made a lot of interesting gradual improvements (Wikipedia, IMDB etc. snippets, maps, calculator, dictionary) while leaving the core UI almost intact. For example, when skimming through the search results, do you read the web page titles or the content with your search terms highlighted? Etc, I think there's some work to do for UX folks. Let alone that Google's highlighting functionality has declined considerably to the point of being almost useless most of the time.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#125

Post by craftinator »

kgersen75 wrote: post #50
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

So, you don't happen to work at Google, do you?

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#126

Post by buboard »

roenxi wrote: post #53
kgersen75 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…

People who think carefully then call Google 'evil' may as well be the same people who used to call it 'good'. Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful. Being good is many things, but a key part of that is restraining the self from acting improperly. Corporations can't do that, they will sooner or later do whatever makes money. Or they get replaced sooner or later by a corporation that will. At best, there…

> Corporations aren't good or evil. They are powerful

That meant to imply that google is neutral? The strong nuclear force is powerful that doesn’t mean anything on its own. It can be harvested for good electricity or bad bombs. Of course the consensus on this is almost universal, the consensus on google is much more ambivalent. Corporations may well be good or evil

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#127

Post by mojuba »

mmahemoff wrote: post #116
mojuba wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some evidence that older pages (>10 years old) drop out if they don't use any of Google's plugins. I think it was Tim Bray who was one of the first who noticed [1] I also found another case of a lot of un-googleable reddit pages from only 5 years ago. They just don't exist on Google anymore even though they are linked from e.g. peoples profiles who commented there. Someone decided that Reddit is not importan…

I didn't read the comments, but the article didn't mention anything about Google plugins, did it? I suppose it's possible Google used GA stats and maybe even content fingerprinting to determine if certain pages should be indexed, or reminded from the index, and how often to crawl them if indexed.

True, I think it was in various discussions here on HN including maybe under Tim Bray's article too. Same kind of rumors were circulating regarding AMP. There is still no direct evidence that Google's web plugins matter, but at least it seems like spammy websites that are fully equipped with Google's stuff get favorable ranking. And vice versa, you won't see high ranking spammy results that are not crammed with GA, Google Fonts and what not.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#128

Post by buboard »

capableweb wrote: post #112
mojuba wrote: post #33

In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…

> a new perspective on how the information on the Internet can be indexed and searched I wholeheartedly agree! In order to fuel the brainstorming with some divergent ideas: - Queries answered/improved by real people (you didn't find what you wanted with "X", now people can suggest alternative search terms to help you find it. Whoever helps, gets a reward) - Reputation-based search based on reviews (can be networked […

Web directories failed though, repeatedly and especially the curated ones. Google was seen as better because the algorithm was opaque.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#129

Post by mojuba »

mynameishere wrote: post #111
irrational wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... 87.76 percent. Not everyone is going to pay a massive premium for Macintosh no matter its alleged advantages. What are the advantages anyway? I used it for a while and came away mystified. Is it all about the appearance? They spend so much effort on its appearance that I suspect that's a big part of it. It does look and feel much nicer than a typical lap…

The UNIX shell is not just nice, for people like me it's crucial. And mind you we are talking about Windows vs. macOS here, not macOS vs. everything else.

Re: The Web Began Dying in 2014 (2017)

#130

Post by buboard »

mynameishere wrote: post #111
irrational wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... 87.76 percent. Not everyone is going to pay a massive premium for Macintosh no matter its alleged advantages. What are the advantages anyway? I used it for a while and came away mystified. Is it all about the appearance? They spend so much effort on its appearance that I suspect that's a big part of it. It does look and feel much nicer than a typical lap…

I ve come to find these arguments about pc vs mac are neverending and very polarised. They re not very rational either. Just like all arguments about aesthetics
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