281–290 of 555 posts
No, DDG bang operators don't let you do this. I want an SERP, not a shortcut to a single site's on-site search.
To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…
There’s a lot of good quality reviews on YT on launch date of pretty much anything these days. It’s not a problem of doing the review, it’s that there’s not much of a market for written reviews, most people would rather watch a video instead.
This is already happening for a bunch of verticals: Travel - Expedia, Hotels.com, Kayak, etc. Consumer Goods - Amazon, WalMart, EBay, Etsy, etc. Automobile Purchase - Cars.com, Autotrader, etc. Career/Job - Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. As Google continues to lose search volume on these big revenue categories it is going to make spam much more difficult as they are working to sort out long tail spam. Way harder.
Mayo clinic, Harvard health, and pubmeb do a great job with health info. IMDb for movies, Goodreads for books, *gearlab.com for reviews, booking.com for accomodations.
I think the biggest threat to Google isn't a better general search engine, it's user behavior switching to more domain-specific websites as the top of the funnel. E.g. people going directly to Amazon to search for products instead of first searching Google.
To some extent, Google has figured this out, which is why they now have a dedicated flight search, hotel search, product search (Google shopping still exists and it's pretty good!), etc.
The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…
Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already. The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it,…
At some point, Google must have moved away from using site-level reputation in search rankings, as I almost never see recipes from reputable sources like King Arthur Baking, Serious Eats, or Food52 in the first page of results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Legitimate question; if this is a real business model (and I believe it could be) then why the fuck does Yahoo.com look like a dead clickbait aggregator instead of, yknow, what it used to look like? i.e. FINANCE ___ [Stocks] [ etc] ENTERTAINMENT ___ [Movies] [TV] Where's that site?
Visionary leadership left the company? And arguably it lost its soul and excitement. I genuinely thought when Marissa Mayer was brought in as CEO and announced they bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, I thought she could actually turn Yahoo! around - that she understood platforms and holistic systems; perhaps she did but her hands were tied, and then they made terrible decisions like banning porn on Tumblr - so b…
Listen, first of all, do not consider ending your life. Seriously, you're way too smart for that. I'm sure you've got it worse, but I've had enormous sciatic problems in my life, I've had 3 herniated discs; they're behaving for the moment after massive doses of cortisone and without any painkillers, but I know what it feels like to cough them all out of my back at the same time. Not to be able to put a foot in front of another or turn your neck for weeks. (I'm a huuuuge fan of intramuscular cortisone injections, though. Like 5 or 6 large cortisone over a week, with some B-12. Every couple years. Not in the spine... fuck that. Alternating butt cheeks. You won't feel any benefit until the third day at least. If you can convince a doctor to give you that for a week, you will be fucking superman. They won't do this in America unless you know a doctor personally, but they'll do it in Mexico or Spain. I had it the last time my discs went out and it's been 6 years and the inflammation has not come back. They thought it would).
Anyway, before you off yourself, do try a fuckton of intramuscular steroids. The fifth day I levitated off a bed in the hospital; I hadn't walked in a week; I felt so good I went to a club; I got drunk and spent the night on a beach drinking and making out with an 18 year old model from Denmark. Seriously. There were wild cats walking around; it was winter on the Spanish coast. If you do one thing before you die, go get five cortisone shots in your ass, in a week.
I also got the hiccups for 24 hours and couldn't sleep, but that's neither here nor there. And I got temporary blindness in my left eye from fluid behind the retina, caused probably by too much testosterone. But. Goddamn it, I'm ok. You can be okay.
Enough about that.
About Yahoo and Google. That entrepreneurial spirit is, in my experience, way too often just about getting the funding and fucking off. We all know why these companies go downhill, but somehow it's always such a shock when they actually deteriorate in front of our eyes, huh? Google's search results, for instance. I would have expected their cofre business to stay more or less fine, not collapse a couple years after all the competition was eliminated.
It would be fine if they didn't grow into every crevice. Get search right, that's all we ask. I don't want Google to be my chat room or my shopping site. Why do they need to? Search is huge. They own 90% of the market.
>> but organizing to turn that into adequate specs to get solid estimates or fixed price quotes for work is extremely difficult to me.
That's always the worst. The business side. I've always just built things and hoped for the best. It sounds like you've got something interesting going there, although I have no damn clue what you're building, that's an exciting feeling. ENGN is killer. If you own ENGN.com, hell, money well spent.
I don't understand what you mean about "executive function", since you obviously have the capacity to write well-crafted email and think pretty clearly; perhaps I lack the executive function to discern your lack of executive function (I'm a brutally self-punishing alcoholic, but otherwise a damn good programmer)
Anyway I don't know if you're trying to ask for pointers to workers for this concept, I'm probably not it; I'm $200/hr and I'm already covered for the next year. This, however, should be your symphony. And I think you know how to do it.
To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…
Reviews are a special category. It suffers from a couple of issues: 1. You need to have enthusiastic reviewers (people who care enough about a product category to review them semi-throughly.) 2. Proper reviews can take time and may need domain knowledge. 3. Competition. When there were one or two people doing reviews on some category of products, maybe the economics worked out. Once you have hundreds or thousands com…
In my experience, the best reviewers are hobbyists. The thing is, it's not reviews that are their hobby. Rather, they review the products go along with their hobby.
So, for my hobbies (espresso and aquariums), there are tons of easily accessible reviews on all kinds of aquarium gear and coffee machines, grinders, etc. On the other hand, nobody does plumbing or HVAC as a hobby (that I know of) so it's very difficult to find high quality reviews of water softeners or furnaces. It takes a very special rare sort of person who would install these things just to review them. The closest thing I could find was this video [1] on a DIY water filtration system by an RV/off the grid type hobbyist (from what I can tell).
The quote-Tweeted thread mentioned recipes as one of the things that has been SEObliterated. It's a great example of the problem, and also a great example of the problems any solution will encounter. Recipes have become a bellwether Internet problem. In the past, your great-grandmother had a card file with a bunch of 3x5 index cards with the ingredients and instructions on how to make everything, and they pretty much…
>I'm not sure there is any technological solution The technological solution would be to stop rewarding them for these monstrosities. One of the main motivator for turning a short recipes into a 19 page essai about the chef's life is that more words = better ranking.
Interestingly, Google Maps doesn't suffer as much from the issues with Google Search. Maybe because it has those community-driven curation features that PG is talking about? Google Maps is fantastic at finding places to go to (and getting you there). Also, why hasn't Apple built a search engine yet? It baffles me that they chose to go head-to-head with Google on Maps, yet outsourced their search engine. I would've li…
For licensed trades the solution is to go to your official trade licensing body (for the UK it's the NICEIC for electricians and the Gas Safe Register for gas/HVAC technicians), for unlicensed ones it's more difficult. There are "review" sites that claim to provide good results but their business incentives & vulnerability to spam/fake reviews are unknown.