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Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

reasonablypolymorphic.com

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Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#4
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today.

From the article:

> Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. I don’t know exactly; if I did, it’d be easier to find. Anyway, forgetting that Google is bad at long tails, I search for what is the koh lanta of croatia? and get:

This is a near impossible query for human beings, let alone for computer given the state of the AI at this point in time.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#5

Quoted post unavailable.

It could be a situation where Google doesn't mean to do it, but also isn't incentivized to fix it. The people who make the most money off Google have the most time and motivation to find ways to manipulate it to protect and increase their profit. Anyone at Google who wants to fix it is incentivized to come up with new features for promotion rather than bugfix.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#7

This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…

Maybe. If this were a couple of decades ago and this search were performed, the searcher may simply see zero results. This used to be an acceptable response from a search engine - unless there's some website that specifically contains the search term being sought, simply return zero results. Not thousands or tens of thousands results.

What we get instead are incorrect results which are being presented as reasonable answers to the search query in the name of advertising revenue.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#8

This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…

It did used to be possible to craft searches that'd find that kind of thing, with Google. Not in natural language, but you could guess enough unusual words that might show up on a page that had that info to zero in on it.

Their apparently paying a lot less attention to certain things (like link text—"what might someone use to describe a link to this resource, but which might not appear on the resource itself?" used to be a very fruitful way to search), and freely substituting words or dropping terms that are merely not common on hits (but not totally absent from 100% of results) has made this kind of thing impossible.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#9
I miss yahoo of 1996 when they were a table of contents. Practically unmaintainable which is why they gave up, but it was nice to follow a few links and find something interesting on weird subjects. No search at all in those days, but it was better for finding things.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#10
> As it happens, Google rewards websites which use keywords in their url, title, headings, and first 100 words. Just by eyeballing, we can see that this particular website is targeting the keywords “water”, “system”, “irrigation”, and “garden”. Pages like these hyper-optimized to come up for particular searches. The stupid expository stuff exists only to pack “important keywords” into the first 100 words.

Another explanation is that the type of company that buys thousands of links is also the type that pays rock bottom for their writers. I don't think you need to necessarily write trite crap in order to do well in SEO.

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