71–80 of 1001 posts
Any CSS wizards that could come up with user injected CSS that would move or highlight ads appropriately? Is GreaseMonkey the best for that, or is there a nice lightweight alternative more fit to purpose?
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…
Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."
I'd suggest giving DDG another try.
I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.
Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine: > "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. " ( http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html ) At th…
They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data. Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad s…
Thanks for posting, it's nice to hear from someone on the inside! Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma's post? It's constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…
I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data. Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there's a search that doesn't yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad s…
A million flies are attracted to shit. I don't believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it's in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don't matter.
In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.
This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they're bad (I click another result because the previous wasn't good), or because they're good (I'm browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy & slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I'm spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.
Really, just use duckduckgo.com. Go to your Firefox' settings and change the default search engine, there, done. See if you care in a week to change it back, I promise you that you won't.
E.g. "search something !g".
Stopping using Google by default is a big deal if enough people do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
read. more. tech. history. You have no idea how furious your comment made me.
They've built browsers, standards, protocols, libraries, and frameworks for the web. They've contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN.
The day "don't be evil" came off their motto is the day they conceded they are evil. At least as evil as any publicly trading company has to be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.
>They cared not to be evil back then. The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.
Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.
Yes I see the same, it's really easy to tell what is an ad and what isn't...