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The next Google

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Re: The next Google

#201

Post by Budged »

nicce wrote: post #189
Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

> That's why TikTok is so successful. More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for search engine? And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? Not…

I don’t think it is fair when we frame products as being objectively and consciously nefarious in this way. Conjuring images of executives rubbing their hands together, giddy with enjoyment that the war is leading to more exciting content.

These are firms that are meeting a legitimate need- and that’s the need to feel connected. Tik-tok provides that, and very effectively. Plenty of people get genuine enjoyment out of their product, and meaningful connections do happen thanks to Tik-tok

Re: The next Google

#202

Post by ip26 »

nicce wrote: post #189
Barrin92 wrote: post #45

I think 'more customization' which is a theme with a lot of these alternatives is a fundamental dead end. I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. There's a huge cost associated with having to make choices, and one feature of successful modern apps is that they're frictionless. That's why TikTok is so successful. There's no login, no user ch…

> That's why TikTok is so successful. More likely, it exploits human's cognitive weaknesses successfully with a simple way. It learns how how people get their dopamine dose. And there is no going back. You need more and more, more extreme content. More polarization. All you need to do is to open app and get that dose. Is it the same for search engine? And people make more crazy stuff to get views. How this ends? Not…

And do you have to carefully configure it for the ideal dopamine hit? Do you have to configure a switchboard to get the extreme content you crave?

Re: The next Google

#203

Post by jtbayly »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #183
simion314 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded peopl…

Because most users would rather not have to customize anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would not have to customize anything. Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No argument from me there. But for most tools…

Being forced to manage an array of options is very different from being able to if the need arises.

Re: The next Google

#204

Post by sdoering »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #86
sdoering wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Or are you the one I should have refrained from feeding. But if you must know: First you need to collect a lot of content from the internet. From many different sites. With very different types of code structure. Broken html. More often than not behind some SPA JS code. Behind robots.txt files and bot protection efforts. So the first problem to solve would be building a crawler at scale. That is able to crawl…

All of this is a long series of solvable problems. I should know, I've dabbled in solving most of them. This is why I suggest actually taking a stab at it before you dismiss it as impossible. There are some problems that aren't as big as they seem. Parts of an SPA can't be reliably linked to anyway even if you find interesting text there, so you can just leave them out of the index. Likewise, there isn't as great of…

> Get rid of that noise and your hardware goes a lot longer.

What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I agree, that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will receive very, very little traffic/search requests. But are these therefore not relevant?

> I'm running a search engine on consumer hardware out of my living room that can index 100 million documents.

That's extremely cool. I would love to know more. To me an impressive feat already.

Re: The next Google

#205

Post by ip26 »

legohead wrote: post #98

I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords. For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple e…

Isn’t that called a travel agent?

Re: The next Google

#206

Post by xtracto »

Nextgrid wrote: post #167
egeozcan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam I think achieving this would be worth billions, at least? We really tend to underestimate the amount of spam on the internet. Google does badly here: it overcorrects and you get only super safe results. Yandex? Unless you get lucky, lots of spam.

Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal. You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page matching the query without the aforementioned items to outrank the spam…

> Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal.

This would be a really interesting experiment: A search engine that ranks websites by the amount of Ads and other spam that they contain.

Re: The next Google

#208

Post by DocTomoe »

cpill wrote: post #125
superasn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but I happily pay for Youtube premium and it's truly an amazing experience compared to the ad-ridden non-usable free Youtube. If Google created a similar Google premium where it had such features and no pesky ads I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.

yeah, but then your just encouraging them to make the free version a bad as is acceptable, like YouTube, and possibility create classes like on commercial airlines. you want the world divided into classes?

We already have classes, and some people do pay premium for better service and quality happily.

A world without that choice, where everyone's experience is equally bad ... how sad that would be. Just ask your average east-European soviet-era survivor.

Re: The next Google

#209

Post by vikingerik »

ryandrake wrote: post #106
superasn wrote: post #89

Google can be the next Google if they just stopped being evil for a second: 1. Let me ban domains like pinterest, quora, stackoverflow clones, stock image sites, etc without requiring a chrome extension. 2. Do what I ask it to do. Don't be too smart. Bring back the plus sign, minus sign, double quotes, tilde which have been deprecated over these years and stop polluting the results with what it thinks I want. 3. A ne…

4. How about an image search that... actually returns the URL of the raw image? Here's a dead simple use case that is just unnecessarily frustrating. As a user, I want a high res picture of a buffalo. So: a. I do an image search for "buffalo" and the results page contains thumbnails of buffalos. b. I click the first result, it's tagged with "nationalgeographic.com" so it's probably gonna be good. Instead of the image…

For step d, why is that Google's fault? Your browser already has a means to view an individual image, why should Google reimplement something that a right-click can just already do?

Re: The next Google

#210

Post by simion314 »

mrtranscendence wrote: post #183
simion314 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know where this persistent myth comes from that people love choice and tinkering, because they clearly don't. People want to accomplish stuff, this means they need tools to do stuff and if a tool can be customized to do the stuff faster or better people want the customization. At my job we have paying users that requests features that indeed are work related(not moving shit around). I know GNOME-minded peopl…

Because most users would rather not have to customize anything. It's funny that your example is gnome, as most users are not tinkerers and would never use Linux on the desktop unless it were made so simple that (again) they would not have to customize anything. Obviously there are exceptions, and some tools are so advanced that it's necessary to be able to customize them. No argument from me there. But for most tools…

I agree, there are users that don't use customization for X but they use it for Y, so you get the idiotic philosophy that removes customization from X and Y. So you get GNOME fanboys that love that 10 features they personally don't use are removed but when the ones they use is removed their brain finally realize that not all people use the exact same options, the exact same workflows etc.

What is even more shitty is when soem feature is removed like the System Tray and first they pretend they do not understand what you mean when you say this feature is very important, then after someone wastes his time to explain a n=th time again how working people use the System Tray features at work or at home the GNOME dude finally admits the issue and offers some workarounds that are not equivalent but are "possible to do but with lot more work".

On short, some people do work on the computer, some people use search engines for work to find relevant stuff, this people do not ask features like "please use the exact same padding everywhere because I am OCD" or "please make those buttons/corners or edges smoother so I don't cut my tongue when I lick my screen", this people want the customization to do a task.

I am not sure why simple people have a SEGFAULT if they randomly end up in the Advanced section of a settings section, what do they expect when they open Advanced? Google main page has a small link for Advanced search see https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ro&authuser=0 how many GNOME users got hurt by this link existing?

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