121–130 of 173 posts
Cool. Now let's get the Library of Congress or NARA -- which are natural homes for this kind of thing -- to implement the public option free of profit-driven cruft.
That would actually be pretty cool. Too bad government software has a tendency to come out shitty and expensive.
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>Search is objectively worse today than it used to be How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? And how would you then show that it's a result of Google's algorithms, and not a consequence of the content of the Internet changing significantly?
>How would you demonstrate that search is objectively worse? There's a few ways to do that. The easiest is to point out that almost any lucrative search query has -0- organic results above the page fold on a typical monitor today. It's all ads unless you scroll down. Then, it's not proof, but how much time do you think Google spends on things that sit below the fold and aren't clicked on much? What would the financia…
Quality organic search results is the reason they can have ads above the fold. There's tremendous financial incentive for them to care about that.
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Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
The same is true for me for contractors of any sort. Top links are frequently referral farms. For local search, I almost always use google maps instead. Maps search isn't perfect, but it beats web search hands down.
How did they even get that patent? It's a well known 70s era bibliometric algorithm.
Citation needed
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Minor rant: I can't seem to contact an actual towing company directly, it's usually some external entity that ranks top in Google then they charge you more to find the actual local towing company. It says "Towing company in city name" but it's not local.
This was my experience last year when I wanted to find a locksmith. EVERY result on GMaps that was shown as being in my city was, in fact, some centralized company that seemed to contract out to guys working out of their cars. Every one took my name and said they'd get back to me (which they did). This is certainly a problem with the locksmith companies, but I think there's also a Maps problem, too: Google enables th…
I had the same thing happen just last week! The locksmith who came for me gave me his personal phone number though and said if I needed help again, I could call him directly and he could give a better rate due to not needing to pay the centralized company a portion. Despite often having social anxiety with strangers, I've still found that just being friendly and treating people well (in this case still giving a tip alongside the cancellation fee after my super finally arrived just moments before the locksmith) ends up getting me better services than any research I've been able to do online. I ended up making a similar connection with the people we hired to install our curtain rods just after we moved in; I was talking to them about how the movers that brought my girlfriends things over to the apartment ended up damaging her desk in transit, and they said that they also do moving as well as installation/assembly, so next time we end up moving, we also will be able to hire people we know and trust (we ended up hiring them again for a few odd jobs since the first time, and we almost always end up getting one of the same three people we've met and made connections with).
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I feel the same way, I think one of the biggest startup opportunities now is to create a decent search engine. Google is absolute rubbish and a new player needs to step in and take away that market share that google is throwing away by means of a terrible user experience.
I strongly disagree that there's a startup opportunity in Google's relatively poor search performance. Obsessive programmers like myself really want a search engine that does better and helps us find the weird corners of the web. Most people do not care. They can type a question into Google and get an answer, and that's all they're looking for.
Relative to what? Google has better performance than any other search engine. It's relatively poor compared to the imaginary ideal search engine that gives you exactly the result you want for any query regardless of whether the information even exists or not.
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My view of it is that they basically lost the SEO spam wars. Without the ML pipelines, the top results would all be dominated by the smaller, highly skilled, SEO manipulators. They didn't find a way to cleanly excise that spam, so they resorted to a very imperfect hammer...giving a lot of SEO weight to large corporate entities. So basically, a different kind of spam dominates now.
There's a tonne of low hanging fruit google completely ignores, for example any page with an amazon referral link is almost certainly spam. "But wait!", you say, "there are some legit reviewers out there." Yes, there sure are, by my starement is accurate, because for every legit review site with aws referrals, there are tens of thousands of ml created spam referral sites. And so the real review sites are often lost i…
I'm not sure how useful this might be to anyone anymore. Google still uses it for the base ranking. But, the results are then run through a variety of add-on ML pipelines, like Vince (authority/brand power), Panda (inbound link quality), Penguin (content quality), and many others that target other attributes (page layout, ad placement, etc). Then there's also more granular weightings for things like "power within a n…
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I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics, as long as you construct a fairly complex search string. However, for general information on things like world events, local news, national politics, etc. it's become little more than a mirror for corporate and state propaganda outlets. This is likely due to those very ML pip…
> I find that Google search results are still the best of any search engine for specific computer science and other specific tech-related topics even without Google account? This is my Google experience from my temporary workplace in Barcelona https://i.imgur.com/X2Avw2v.png Then I click on "I agree" and whatever thing I search I receive Spanish results because I am in Spain. Not my idea of "the best of any search en…
Youtube search is awful. I once went through news queries on Google searches of Youtube (site:youtube.com) looking for popular independent media outlets (BreakingPoints for example) by -MSNBC, -FOX, -CNBC etc., and ended up with a string about 25 queries long, and those shows are just banned. They were feeding me unpopular corporate media shows with hardly any views or subscribers at that point, but zero access to independent media. Full-on propaganda manipulation.