101–110 of 289 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit would need to fix their UI so that it isn't actively hostile to people trying to read content on their site.
StackExchange is a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the web. I saw a meta post the other day where they were soliciting feedback about how make their mobile site more information dense. Love it!
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings
There's also an even worse thing here. If you search for a product under shopping on google, something that is somewhat known like a certain TV model, and you'll see most SHOPPING results are from websites that actually don't sell anything, but rather will have a "product page" where either the buy button is disabled or redirects to amazon. They typically have much lower prices, or just low enough so you'll click.
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
It is always weird to me that people think the quality of Google results compared to the past are a deliberate choice by Google, and not the consequence of an adversarial process where marketers spend billions of dollars trying to distort the rankings
Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.
In retrospect, this was a profound failure of our imaginations back then. It's also somewhat damning that in the 25+ years since, nothing about the affiliate sales concept has been substantially modified to mitigate the weaponization of this by "best X for 202X" pages.
I'd like to note, donning my #2 at amzn hat again, that when the idea for affiliate sales originally came up, we certainly did imagine people creating pages with lists like "best bikes for under $500". However, I feel fairly confident in saying that nobody involved in that in the 95-96 timeframe was imagining that such pages would be created by anyone other than actual enthusiasts (probably a reflection of the state…
Whenever I want to make a purchase online, I search for "best _____" and add reddit as a keyword. Reading through a few threads on reddit will typically give me a pretty good idea of where to start.
Try https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=best%20road%20bikes... If you search Million Short then the top two results are (1) an actual bike store and (2) an actual bicycling magazine that's 100+ years old instead of seo spam.
But you raise a much more important point: if you query the web like a stupid person then you'll get stupid results.
The OP shouldn't have searched for "under 500" because good bikes under 500 are called used road bikes from a local shop or craigslist owner (as the author revealed and I discovered myself when I was younger c. 2006) so saying "under 500" is sort of like saying, "show me the cheap mass market bicycles please", because the number of people who want good bikes is small, but it's a really devoted group, who are willing to pay what people like us would pay for a good PC or even a car, so if you've already decided you want the chromebook of bikes, then amazon and google aren't doing you that much of a disservice, let's be fair.
So here's a side-question. The original key idea behind Google's approach to search was page rank : how many, and what kinds, of other sites linked to this one (and potentially, in what context). Does anyone think that this can possibly be at the core of Google's page rank anymore? Most pages don't have any significant number of links any more, and if they do, they are presumably garbage most of the time. Who is out…
Google broke itself over a decade ago when they began giving you results either that their algorithms assumed you wanted or that they wanted you to have , period. Verbatim search hardly produces anything useful anymore, either. Search has been coopted, making the prime thing (past general connectivity) that made the internet so useful now all but worthless.
I get this from their perspective. Their goal isn't to work just for people whose work makes them extremely precise in phrasing. I am sure that a lot of the mechanisms that make me bonkers are ones that make search results better for the average user. But it's still frustrating when my skill in using words to trick machines into doing what I want gradually becomes useless.