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.
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Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
131–140 of 280 posts
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#132Earlier 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.
The big issue is various how to sites and republishers. If I could filter out ~100 particular domains, my search experience would be much improved.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#133Happily no one is required to use their services
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#134100% correct. I am right now doing an experiment and observing that posting everyday some low quality text spinned articles amplified the high quality articles at the point where some obscure high quality articles with ZERO organic traffic for months suddenly received organic traffic.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#135> Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. Ever heard of PageRank? Google was literally founded on an algorithm that uses the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob" to determine importance/relevancy. Obviously this is only one factor in search results (and may not even be used anymore), but this approach is what has made Google successful. I don't disagree…
> founded on ... the endorsements of "an angry, misinformed mob"
I started grad school at Brown in 1997 and I remember a talk there, by someone from Google or connected to it, about PageRank. PageRank was still new, Google was still in beta. Free swag from dotcoms was literally growing on trees. But I digress.
I remember that the narrative about PageRank at the time was not about popularity, but about expertise. I really remember that the presenter brought up a possible threat to validity—what about gaming the system?—and pointed out that if you wanted to persuade the system that you were an expert on a thing, you could get lots of people who talk about the thing a lot to point a link at your site. BUT, he says: that shows the system works! If you can get that many people who are at least mini-experts on the thing to point to you, the only way to do that would be if you, too, were persuasively an expert on the thing.
(These were... naïve times in many ways.)
Twenty years ago this was highly persuasive. It was an un-game-able system, because "gaming the system" meant the system changed you. I can be pretty cynical about a lot of things, including and especially Google, but I really do think that even Google itself believed this. The company was founded on an algorithm that rewarded expertise.
It turned out that the algorithm also rewarded angry, misinformed mobs, so cmckn isn't exactly wrong here. But I think it's important to be clear that to the extent that Google's algorithms have always done this, they a) weren't meant to, and b) actually didn't in the very earliest days, because the WWW link structure really did, in the 90s, work like they thought it did. (Then the measure became the target, etc etc)
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#136In 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
#137We've rewritten the linkbait title, as the site guidelines ask. I used what seems to be the first netural and representative phrase from the article itself. If someone can suggest language that's more neutral and representative, we can change it again.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ce…
The internet is definitely, and I still stand by this comment, unarguably terrible today, compared to what it used to be. Is that anyone's fault? Probably not.
People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
I can't blame progress for killing culture, but I'm glad that back then, something like serving up an MP3 library in an AOL chatroom was a deeply awesome experience.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#139Fun 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.
Looks like the OP domain itself is a version of that.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#140google has never been good. Sheeple just jumped on the band wagon and started using it despite it never being any better than the compition. People are dumb and instead of trying to learn they would rather just follow.