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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]

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The karma system is definitely the difference that mostly influences the quality of the discussion and visibility of non mainstream topics.

Another thing I personally hate is daily threads. Anything not deemed worth a normal thread as per each subreddit gatekeeping rules is directed to these huge threads where the attention span is even lower, if you're not lucky to intercept the right set of eyes in a few minutes your post will be quickly forgotten.

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

#192
post #50

The solution for consumers are product/price comparison sites like gh.de and idealo.de (german). I don't know the US equivalents of those, but here they get the prices from many sellers and you can compare including shipping, filter by many spec criteria and even find the cheapest solution for a basket of items, split by seller and including shipping which I believe is a NP hard problem (knapsack or traveling salesma…

I was just looking at laser printers in Idealo yesterday, didn't bother even looking at Google because I share the same experience as Adam. There many cases like this just from my search history. Point is: Google is not the best indexer to shop. Price comparison websites is also present on other countries but it's more scammy websites than legitimate ones. In Southeast Asia for example, maybe 99% of content is in Ama…

https://shopping.google.com/

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or real. Of all the companies in the world google will be the last to employ real humans to verify anything. Look online for the shear amount of forum threads full of people disgrunted with the their poor support response and lack of humans in the loop.

I know, my point is that if they just take a small amount of their $50 billon in profit every year and hire a team of actual people to go through this stuff it would probably be a lot cheaper and more effective than constantly tweaking their ranking algorithm

Coming up with new algo's gets you promoted in google's structure, proposing and managing an army of support people is not 'elegant' and nobody would want to work on it.

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

#195
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…

While not exactly what you've asked, check out uBlacklist add-on. It adds "Block this site" link next to search results in Google, Bing, and a couple of others. You can block a specific url and it this add-on will remove it from the search results page.

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

#196
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…

> I think the problem is that there is no other way to provide feedback to Google other than clicking on links.

I contemplated this on my problem validation forum by creating a 'Search Engine Wall of Shame'[1] , So we could post the search queries and results from different search engines when they give ugly results in the hope that people involved with those search engines could get actionable feedback.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/207-search-engine-wall-of-shame...

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

#197
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…

I believe one of the strongest signals they collect is when people return to the SERP after clicking through.

The problem is people give up on ever getting a decent result after a few clicks on nonsense, and then never come back.

Now Google thinks their last suggestion was obviously a success.

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

#199
This is because there's no such thing as large format laser printers anymore. There are large format LED printers, and it is basically the same technology sans scanning mirror and actual laser. If you click first Google result - first link on that page is what you want.
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