Oh, is it just Google? I thought it was ... everything.
Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
201–210 of 280 posts
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#202The internet is not ruined just because Google sucks.
How does Google suck here? Do people actually expect Google to hire millions of extra employees or develop hard AI to rank every single webpage in their index by accuracy? I don't see any practical alternative to how it already works.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#203Earlier 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…
Filter bubbles aren't inherently bad. For example, Google bubbling up news from my city makes sense, but if it were to show me small news from every single city on the planet, that would be insane. Similarly, I enjoy it when it gives me some article about Animal Crossing that I've been playing lately, but doesn't show me any sports news that I have zero interest in. There are just so many different interests out ther…
Filter bubbles are bad when they serve to only confirm your bias.
Do you read politics you agree with or disagree with? I make an effort to click more on things I think I'll disagree with.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#204IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherw…
For me the line was the Panda update, that update just completely destroyed the quality of the search results. They did try to improve the quality since that update (with moderate success) but it never came back to the level they had before it.
Probably I'm not the only one who looked this up, so click saver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#205IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherw…
Maybe it's just that now there's whole lot more money in the game of tricking Google? In 2010, people too dumb to use a computer were just getting on the Internet, as smartphones only started to become a thing. Now these people are in and there is lot of money to make on them.
SEO spam instead of car repair manuals is a joke. It has a lot bigger and scarier implications. Just try imagining someone like Obama winning elections now... simply not possible... And it's not because people became more dumb, they totally didn't: it's just because now dumb people have a voice online. And spend money online. Internet works for them now, and shows everyone what they want to see...
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#206As an experiment, I have taken the habit in the past year to write down search queries I'm making along with a short explanation of what I expect to find (and sometimes even comments on the results) as I was also starting to wonder if I'm the problem given results seemed to get less and less relevant for a while.
With the benefit of hindsight, I'd highly recommend it and confirmed my suspicion that my queries weren't the problem, unfortunately.
It also showed queries are usually only advanced topics as one of my other habits (writing down summarized information in my wiki) lets me usually skip searching online for low-hanging fruits or information I already encountered.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#207In 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…
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anyw…
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience).
I think daily about ways to get people to stop donating content to these censorship and surveillance platforms. Most people don't run businesses, so they never realize the rent-seeking nature of these jerks.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#208Have 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.
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.
It's obviously a harder problem than I want to believe it is, but considering the terrible quality of results as of late, I don't think this would be worse.
First, start with a whitelist. Hand pick high quality publications, and rank them towards the top. This may tilt results back towards institutions, and away from blogs.
Second, punish similarity. If everybody is reposting AP or Reuters without any additional information, consider them a dupe and don't list them. They can run their portals, but they don't need to show up in search.
It's come up multiple times in this thread, car manuals is a good example. They would be better off throwing away every result they have and hand indexing the good information, than what gets returned right now.
Recipes in particular have turned into a giant story about the way grandma used to do it with a picture followed by the same couple variants with different proportions. Pick winners by hand.
Someone has a finance question, just put boggleheads at the top, instead of whichever 59 affiliate credit card sites sprung up.
Need health advice? Put examine.com at the top above WebMD and healthline. Why? Because a human exper compared them and decided examine is a better first result. You could comb through tens of thousands of sites with a team of hundreds of people, something Google easily has at its disposal. What PageRank had, that seems to be missing now, is a seed of "we trust these most" and let the network grow from there. It tried to find expertise, instead of clickability. It was about getting you the best information first.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anyw…
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience). I think daily about ways to get peop…
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship.
This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting.
In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does have some "censorship" rules like filtering out illegal content, but I'd be surprised if they're not impartial about everything else.
Re: Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. Algorithmic "timelines" (which aren't timelines at all) are one of the biggest mass scams ever perpetrated. It allows giant companies to sit and mediate personal friendships, and extract rent for anyone who wants more reach (even within their existing, opt-in audience). I think daily about ways to get peop…
You can't prioritize some content without deprioritizing other content, which effectively amounts to censorship. This would imply HN "censors" the front page. Of course that's nonsense. Sometimes sorting by an algorithm is just sorting. In the case of HN it's up votes, and in the case of Google it's a basket of hundreds of criteria (including up votes if you think of clicks on results as voting). Google probably does…
HN's front page is heavily moderated/curated; it is far from being purely vote-based.