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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#31

Post by saagarjha »

danem wrote: post #28
saagarjha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most politically correct. This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to post something like "$hated_company has always been doing $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people agree with, every time a popular story about t…

> Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is important to keep an open mind and read widely and voraciously.

Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself, and it shows: the users that accumulate karma the fastest usually have insightful comments, which is rarely true elsewhere.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#32

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

Every complaint in the article is about the behavior of the website named google dot com. Google dot com is not the internet. If the complaints were about how Google is changing the behavior of other websites I could maybe somewhat get behind that. But in light of the content of the article the title makes no sense whatsoever.

"Google sometimes gets things wrong" would be a more accurate title. It wouldn't get any upvotes, nor deserve any (surely it's obvious that a website trying to be as many things as Google does will sometimes be inaccurate). But it would be more truthful.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#33

Post by anticsapp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #15
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and would want to chat.

> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.

DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that beast of a PageRank 7 link.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#34

Post by walshemj »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)

Back in 93/94 you could quickly scan what's new on the internet on mosaic

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#35

Post by tomaszs »

CM30 wrote: post #5

Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO. That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on tech sites. But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in terms of quality is definitely an issue.

I see it that way: people tried to get exposure with Google finding ways to do it. For example by exchanging links. Was it bad people Exchanged links? No. Was it used by spammers? Yes, also. Did Google decide to punish it? Yes. Who is hurt? Normal website users. Spammers found new ways. But the truth is with each Google update normal website owners was punished. And for spammers it just got a little bit more complicated to find a new hack.

Now we are at a point where normal website users have very little ways to be high in search results. And people with money can buy it either with very expensive SEO or with expensive Ads.

Sometimes i wonder why the heck should normal website user even try to please Google. As a normal website owner i dont feel Google gives me as much as it expects me to do.

Dont link to this, use AMP, God forbid to Exchange links. There are books about how to please Google. But what is the point? It all comes to who has more money. I dont, so i will never win a good position.

I think we should just forget all these Google rules because they destroyed the Internet how it used to be. Autodiscoverable.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#36

Post by rv-de »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)

Printed magazines recommending the best websites.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#38

Post by chrisco255 »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
bovermyer wrote: post #2

Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web without using a search engine. It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not easy.

I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ? must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly anonymous and invisible :)

Web rings were common. If you visited a webpage on a particular topic, they would usually contain links to other related sites on a side bar. Dmoz was an old registry and I think Yahoo had a registry at one time as well.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#39

Post by zozbot234 »

anticsapp wrote: post #33
zozbot234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like to chat. Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't a VC-funded project, of course.

DMOZ, really? Yes, at the beginning, yes. But 5-6 years later I know plenty of companies and even bloggers who would locate a "volunteer" and ply him with hundreds or thousands of dollars to get them in, get free traffic, and that beast of a PageRank 7 link.

Yes, but this only ever impacted categories where for-profit links are common (and over time, people learn to disregard these links). And Google Search still does a pretty good job of searching for relevant businesses, since it's one of the main things that people use it for.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#40

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

basch wrote: post #7
hombre_fatal wrote: post #3

> The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. What does this even mean? The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's supposed to work. Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of instant information yet you'll notice how ma…

I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place, that being interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's damn hard to find. Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness. Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones, we take solace protected inside fi…

Yup. one thing I hate about google search is that it gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm actually asking for. Also, the "politically correct" bubble mask is in full effect.

Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore.

There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are really well done.

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