The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.
More like Google is the mascot for the Internet sucking. Or at least a certain part of the transition.
Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
121–130 of 280 posts
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Google mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It does not succeed as well as it did in the past at its current mission. It has regressed.
I think it’s mostly the average quality of the information available has regressed. I’m fairly certain they’re doing the best they can with what’s available to them, but right now they probably get more accurate results by focusing on what is popular than by blindly accepting the contents of the websites.
That goes back to them upranking fresher results. If the old results were better, they should keep them at the top and ignore fresher but worse quality content. Google exists to rank content, and it should be by quality not age.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is harder to find things on google than it used to be. The noise to signal ratio has increased considerably.
I wonder how much it would increase/decrease if we filtered out all blogging software.
I haven't found individual blogs to typically be the problem but commercial websites that focus on things like how-tos. This is especially true if I'm just looking for an answer to a question. I frequently just end up searching Reddit or better a specific subreddit.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. That might be what the author and other people hoped the internet would become but money drives the development of most things. If there is such an opportunity, then strike out on their own. People talk about privacy but most people just want free and easy, not to be challenged. Each of us is more than welcome to stay in the corners of the internet that we value.
The internet is arguably* terrible today. There are about four websites that most people visit each and every day. And of those four websites, they're most likely owned by one or all of the five largest tech companies. Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no…
>Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
And yet there is more content on the web, of greater variety and higher quality, than there ever was on that old web. Youtube is a walled garden, but some of what's on there is brilliant, and there's certainly plenty of non-commercial "for the love" content as well. Twitter is, well, Twitter, but accounts like TheSunVanished are publishing ARGs on the platform. Streaming music, video, gaming, all sorts of platforms are full of creative expression despite also being centralized.
Is all of that really unarguably terrible merely because everyone putting their art out there didn't first go through the trouble of manually writing HTML pages on a shared host first?
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#125Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so Google can find it for me. I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to get better results. But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives the same result. Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content. Now, it is not. You could write an arti…
> If your audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.
I empirically disagree. For me Google often shows small sites with perfect matches before big sites with vague matches and a few of my small sites also rank very well next to giants.
> I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching query, not guessing answers.
Why not use quotation marks?
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#126In my opinion, "the Feed" ruined the internet. The news feed, the Twitter feed, the Reddit feed, etc. The addictive nature of the Feed, and the tendency to reward dramatic or outrageous or ridiculous content leads to the herd mentality and mindless dogpiling that occurs on these platforms. And then, because expression is compressed into short form soundbites, pics and videos, the platforms actively inhibit constructi…
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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#127Google’s mission is/was “to organize the world’s information”. There was no adjective on “organize”. “Worse is better” wins again.
By becoming so dominant they shifted from organization to inspiration, and not the good kind of inspiration, the kind where you have to spend lots of time shaping yourself to please the algorithm so that what you do and how you look is dominated by Google, whatever you're trying to do/share/sell is secondary to that.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. That might be what the author and other people hoped the internet would become but money drives the development of most things. If there is such an opportunity, then strike out on their own. People talk about privacy but most people just want free and easy, not to be challenged. Each of us is more than welcome to stay in the corners of the internet that we value.
The internet is arguably* terrible today. There are about four websites that most people visit each and every day. And of those four websites, they're most likely owned by one or all of the five largest tech companies. Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no…
> It's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
It might be easier, but it depends on your target audience how effective it is.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#129It's all perspective. Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or any search engine, as sources of truth. And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power by using Gmail?
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Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#130> 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 believe there are other ways to rank content than the modern feed and votes/shares.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22744171
Teams and editorial boards are great at working together to build things, wikipedia, reddit wikis, fandom/wikia. But the tools they have to calculate consensus (not just the most popular answer but the most correct one, given a cultures beliefs) are stone age. Mahalo.com was an attempt at collaborative information sorting, and https://inside.com/ isnt a bad successor, in theory.
I also think the premise that search/feed are the best options is flawed. The directory was, and stills is a great way to drill down into topics. Search should be more encyclopedia/directory like, and less feed like.
And even in the realm of search, some flags or operators to specify if I'm looking for a historical result, a timely news result, a review, a fact, or an opinion could come in handy.
Google would benefit from humans sitting down, searching things and then going "what should the top results actually be, why are we not there" from a much more exerting their bias standpoint. How are they ranking recipes without a kitchen to taste them? I would totally support a Google recipe division taste testing and ranking technique,to actually know what the best pot pie recipe is. It would be less a waste of money than another messenger product every other year.