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A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

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Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#171

Post by BashiBazouk »

vincnetas wrote: post #170
BashiBazouk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we called them plotters when printing plan sets...

You could have called them "cars" or "planes" or whatever. This does not change the definition of word "plotter" ;) edit: well, when i think about it, it does change definition of word if everyone starts calling plotters "cars", but there has to be a majority.

https://cpp.canon/products/plotwave-series/

"Get great looking technical documents with the black and white plotters"

The B&W machines are plotters. The color machines are printers and I don't see anything pen based at all...

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#172

Post by magicalist »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #70

In 2010-2012, google results were peak content farm stuff too. Then they fought it actively, in 2013 they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results. Content farms that worked by stuffing keywords and working in rings to boost their p…

> they announced that they changed a lot in their relevance calculations (did they call it “project Panda”? For some reason I remembered it being called that) and it really helped, and in 2013-2015 it was a golden age of search results

There was a lot of blowback from those changes too, though, and even on HN there were people complaining about it and Google's unilateral power at the time (I assume they were usually SEO grifters but likely some relatively innocent sites caught up in the dragnet as well).

I wonder how much antitrust pressure (and, maybe secondarily, the high likelihood that there will be false positives in any crackdown) is preventing another project panda. Bottom feeding deranked sites would be extremely happy to testify in support of any case against google, I'm sure.

Or maybe do it incrementally and never give it a project name?Hard to see any evidence of that, though.

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#173

Post by Majromax »

dale_glass wrote: post #66
aulin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss usenet

Reddit pretty much is the modern usenet. Usenet died because it was made in a time before moderation and spam filtering was universally supported. Formerly useful groups got spammed to hell and flooded with morons, and the smart people decided they had better things to do, so they moved on. Reddit is conceptually the same thing, but holds up better because spam filtering and moderation is built into the system from t…

> The major downside to reddit is that it's not distributed, and the system is owned by a single corporation.

I think the voting system acts as another major difference, with ambiguous effect.

Usenet had no concept of 'likes' or even views, so threads implicitly sorted by most recent reply. In the modern sense, its only measure of engagement was replies. Low-effort posts that would receive plenty of upvotes on Reddit (or equivalently here) but few replies would still quickly disappear, implicitly discouraged.

On the other hand, a reply-only measure of engagement also gave birth to the original (high-effort) trolls and flamebait. Voting systems allow more passive suppression of this content, at least on topics where the "popularity contest" side effect is not a negative.

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#174

Post by myself248 »

vincnetas wrote: post #167
BashiBazouk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. Here is Canon's page on the machines in question: https://cpp.canon/products-technologies/large-format-plotter... See how they are called plotters? They currently use Radiant Fusing technology: https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-... "Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink…

Canon pages has it in the title "plotters AND printers". Plotter is a pen moving over paper drawing continuous lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter

If it understands a plotter pen-based language like HPGL, I consider it a plotter even if the actual print mechanism is an inkjet.

I say this as someone with a Draftmaster II in the spare bedroom...

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#175

Post by [deleted] »

BashiBazouk wrote: post #144

He is not looking for a large format laser printer. True large format would be called a plotter and will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce who was bought out by Canon. Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" and duplex so a booklet can be cut down…

[deleted]

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#176

Post by freediver »

jliptzin wrote: post #74

I don’t understand why this is so hard for google. Allow end users to flag links as SEO spam. It’s very easy for a human to figure out. I can tell in maybe 1/4 a second that a page is just SEO shit. The keyword stuffing, the irrelevant fluff before and after any relevant content (if it’s there at all), the annoying ads that take up the whole screen, etc. Let us flag it, remove it from the index. Take a snapshot of th…

It can not be at Google scale because of massive incentives to mark your competitor's sites as spam.

But a small, boutique search engine where every account is a paying account, does not have this problem and can do it. And guess what - we are doing it. (Kagi)

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#177

Post by thunderbong »

scoutt wrote: post #77

I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links. I used to search on Google without an account. Then I created a phony account at work to see if there is an improvement in my searches (because it should be "learning", right?). And after some months... nope, or at least it's not noticeable. How does Google know what I like, what I search or the content I wan…

You get this on Bing

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#178

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

rplnt wrote: post #69
cryptos wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe its time for Microsoft to invest a bit more in Bing ...

It's the investing that ruined Google search. Instead of search it's super smart, and as a result super annoying. It would be so much better if they kept it as is and just worked on removing spam.

Manual curation could probably improve things a lot more than people think. I’d pay for that.

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#179

Post by ChrisCinelli »

I am afraid that if you are optimizing for ads revenues this is exactly what you will get. Results with relevant ads at the top and results below that are not relevant at all.

For me the quality of result on Google have been constantly going down. I sometimes find that among the first 3 results there is nothing that answer what I am looking for.

I know for sure that around 2008 Google had humans evaluating both the quality of a website and how well it was satisfying the query. As far a as I know, they stopped doing that a while back. Maybe it's time to resume that practice?

Re: A rant about search engine results for large format laser printers [video]

#180

Post by sleepybrett »

jeffbee wrote: post #165
BashiBazouk wrote: post #144

He is not looking for a large format laser printer. True large format would be called a plotter and will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce who was bought out by Canon. Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" and duplex so a booklet can be cut down…

Yeah ... this rant is kinda more about the author than anything. He's mixing information by constructing a nonsense query. "Large format printing" is at least 18 inches wide, on a roll. He's looking for 11"x17", which is just "a printer". The Google results for the query `11x17 laser printer` are much better. At least for me all the carousel ads on the top, the top (and only) text ad, and the first organic results ar…

It's all advertising lingo. I have certainly seen machines that claim to be 'large format' when the largest they support is 11x17 (or A3). But others that support roll paper with widths > 24". HP sells a number of these under the designjet brand and calls them plotters.

While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension.

Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead.

The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.

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