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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#101

Post by abruzzi »

ehsankia wrote: post #20
maps7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does searching articles on wikipedia count?

I would say that using a website's own internal search is fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia, Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.

The funny thing is I never book mark. Most of the sites I visit I just remember the URL. On rare occasions when I can’t remember the URL, I’ll search for in on Google. Like most people, I use Google a lot when I’m looking for things I don’t already know, but not when going to my commonly used sites. In the early 2000s I developed a website for a local public radio station. One thing it thought me was the usefulness of “speakable URLs”. Since most pages I built would require someone on the air speaking the url, they had to be short and distinctive, easy to say, and easy to remember (since the listener wouldn’t be taking notes, they had to remember it long enough to get to a computer and type it in). That got me in the habit of just remembering the URL, which I still do to this day.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#103

Post by saagarjha »

Aeolun wrote: post #82
saagarjha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, of course, that's tautologically true. The difference is that the most popular comments are more often to be insightful, and the people with the most karma have it because they post insightful things, rather than the type of comment I mentioned above. (Believe me, I would know if people were spamming those; there are only a handful of people that accumulate karma faster than I do, and they all do it "fairly".)

HN suffers from fanboy’ism just as much, if not more, than elsewhere. Though I’ll admit there’s many more critical comments as well.

I consider both kinds of comments to be low-quality, and yes Hacker News has both. But the really nice comments aren’t just straightforward praise or criticism.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#104

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#106

Post by UnpossibleJim »

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…

What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of people or make the same amount of money as MacDonald's. You can't always scale up a BBS to serve 2.5 billion people and expect it to have the same charm and not expect companies to charge for services to getting results. Dial up services and bulletin boards had their charms, but this internet is way better =)

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#107

Post by caetris1 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #97
basch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The tech has changed,not humans. Back in the day, Romans were happily watching gladiators slaughtering each other and all they cared was 'bread and entertainment'. Obviously not everyone, some tried to invent things,do commerce,medicine and etc. Those were the curious ones. It was a small percentage then and it is a small percentage now. The majority are much simpler people. The internet is bursting at its seams with…

You're spot on. But really... all people are basically the same. And like Google, they're incentivized by the system to be horrible to each other and/or horrible to the environment. I think people all have a choice. But I think the good choices are really hard to make when you're only surrounded by bad choices.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#108

Post by vkou »

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…

> 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.

There was never any such promise, no contract signed in blood. It was just the wishful thinking of a group of people sharing a particular political persuasion. Just because a monocultural group of pioneers who are all radical thinkers (But not too radical) build something, doesn't mean that the people moving into what they build are interested in sharing, or even tolerating their idiosyncratic culture or politics.

The web is supposed to be a way to route a bit of information from one computer to another. This is so low-level, and so broad, that it proscribes nothing about the outcome.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#109

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

jrockway wrote: post #47

> Search for "GM" and the Gmail homepage ranks prominently. Is Google pushing its own products on people? Well, yes, but not here. This is an example of a query refinement algorithm at work. Google is altering its results in recognition of the fact that many people who search "gm" subsequently search for "gmail." I tried this and there are three news articles about General Motors, an infobox for General Motors, 4 sea…

Just tried this. GMail was the first link, validating "the Gmail homepage ranks prominently." Also, all the suggestions were gmail (before the search.)

The rest of the results were GM related news/Twitter/links.

Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

#110

Post by cosmodisk »

abruzzi wrote: post #89
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest…

Just add '+' sign before each keyword- seems to be working. I tried a sequence of 10 or so random and made-up words to see if it will find anything.while it returns results, it does it on a shorter search and it also says at the top that no results were found for this query.Then I started removing one keyword at the time and return the search. Eventually it found a matching result and it contains all four words from my query.
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