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Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

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Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#101

Post by trasz »

shadowgovt wrote: post #78
Kye wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get search traffic was to write a quality article tackling questions like this. Google was thirsty for answers to the ever-growing number of queries it had never seen before and would shower traffic on anyone who answered them even if it was a bad answer. A good a…

I was there for it. It worked for a select group of toy problem domains and the answer for most high-concept searches would be noise or nothing. The author never manages to convince me that the information they're looking for is on the Internet for Google to index in the first place. The author then asserts "don't just hit me with garbage," which is a fine assertion, except what they're interpreting as 'garbage' is t…

What won was what _appeared_ to be something useful, at least at first glance.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#102

Post by svnpenn »

Karellen wrote: post #94

> Google search results are significantly less helpful than they used to be. > Anyway, forgetting that Google is bad at long tails, I search for `what is the koh lanta of croatia?` Well, in at least one significant case Google searches are more helpful than they used to be, in that they now take into account natural language queries like "what is..." and try pretty hard to DTRT. Contrast that to "the internet of yore…

> and try pretty hard to DTRT

TRTD works fine though.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#103

Post by RajT88 »

guntars wrote: post #41
RajT88 wrote: post #30

Google is not the front page of my internet. I recently decided to create my own landing page, stored locally on disk, with a funny gif and favicon.ico, and a shortlist of my most used work and personal links (including this site!). No ads, no tracking. Shockingly - I had to install browser extensions to override the new tab page in both Edge and Chrome. This used to be a built in setting! Shady guys. Very shady. Alt…

> Not as shady as the fact that Chrome by default sends your entire browsing history to Google for analysis. Citation needed. Are you saying that, as I click around the site here, Google knows what comments threads I'm interested in? Edit: I think they're talking about the History sync, which does indeed by default send Google every link you visit, but only if you explicitly enable it. We should get access to this da…

It's on by default, and history sync is a different setting than what I described. I discovered that actually in checking the setting to describe it in my other reply, I had it enabled on my personal PC. Although I would swear I disabled it a while back.

I would 1000000% never enable this setting. And I suspect that Goog is pulling a Zuck with "accidentally" re-enabling it and hoping nobody notices.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#104

Post by labrador »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #98
labrador wrote: post #92

We all have to get better at using search engines to get past the SEO Google "reminds me of Koh Lanta" turns up Boracay, Philippines in the top three links https://www.google.com/search?q=%22reminds+me+of+Koh-Lanta%2... No you ever used this phrase about anything in Croatia https://www.google.com/search?q=%22reminds+me+of+Koh-Lanta%2... Translating "reminds me of Koh Lanta" to Croatian doesn't help https://www.google…

Google's "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" response probably means you're onto something interesting :)

I get that a lot. They have a really interesting little character fishing that is animated. It appears to be SVG animated by CSS. I need to learn how to do that.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#105

Post by krapp »

keyle wrote: post #90

It's not just google. In the past, Mr Joe Blogs was into a passion, he would write about it on his own shoddy blog with gif links to other blogs part of a blog ring of nerdy stuff he cares about. Nowadays, Mr Joe Blogs writes on Medium, shares on Facebook and potentially has an outdated instagram account with 4 pictures of his passion. All buried down by algorithm to never be found, because his passion "isn't sexy".…

>Nowadays, Mr Joe Blogs writes on Medium, shares on Facebook and potentially has an outdated instagram account with 4 pictures of his passion. All buried down by algorithm to never be found, because his passion "isn't sexy".

From what I've observed, the opposite tends to be true more often than not. Plenty of people have been able to create communities around niche interests because platforms bring something independent blogs never really did - an audience. Joe Blogs probably started a subreddit and facebook group for his passion and gets more people reading his content in a week than likely happened to stumble across his blog in a year.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#106

Post by nonrandomstring »

drivebycomment wrote: post #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 think it's deeper than misaligned expectations. Consider this line:

> Google has gotten exceedingly good at organizing everyday life. It reliably gets me news, recipes...

What I mainly hear on this site and elsewhere is people complaining about how the news is partisan rubbish, fake, and serves the "elites". And recipes. Seriously? I had a half dozen people berate me earlier for suggesting that cooking your own meals should be an enjoyable part of life.

Nobody wants news and recipes.

Here's the problem.. "The Internet" was military project that got loose. "The Web" was a solution for research scientists to exchange papers. That's all. Driven by a massively profitable industry, a solution looking for a problem expanded in expectations, and took over the consciousness of generations of an entire society.

"Organising everyday life" is an inadequate appraisal. Most businesses had to be dragged screaming and kicking online. We still possess a vague, poorly thought-through ideal that somehow a connected, "technological" society is a better one, and a thirst for convenience and speed. But let's be honest, we don't really know what the net is for. It has no telos or guiding design principle other than what we overlay on it.

Military tools in the hands of "the people" tend towards insurgency and revolution. Wasn't The Internet's "killer app" the Arab Spring? The brightest moment of the Web was in it's formative years, as an explosion of ordinary speech and new political power. Much since then has been an reaction to try dampening it, domesticating netizens, or even putting the genie back in the bottle.

Maybe a reason to be optimistic, excited even, is that we're still in the infancy of the network. It's still pregnant with unimaginable possibility.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#107

Post by markdown »

didip wrote: post #80
warning26 wrote: post #22

There's a lot of Google hate on HN, and much of it is deserved, but I think this particular trend of blaming Google for the prevalence of useless clickbait articles is a bit much. The real answer to this question is that walled-garden social media took over everything. The much-pined-for "Old Google" worked because people used to actually create content on their own sites, and not just post it on walled garden monoli…

I disagree because it’s 100% within Google power to purge junk websites, see Panda in 2011. But they didn’t want to do that anymore. Why? Because of ads money. To drive the point home, it is not that difficult for Google to have a junk score and simply phase out the junkiest of junks. But they didn’t even want to do that.

Purging junk sites doesn't do anything for the creation of new sites and articles from real human beings sharing their lives and experiences because they want to and not as an excuse to embed affiliate links. All those real humans only post in the walled gardens.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#108

Post by RileyJames »

cfeduke wrote: post #7
drivebycomment wrote: post #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…

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 a…

This is a big part of the problem. The incentives.

There is no blank space to fill with something useful.

Instead everything is filled with SEO driven, ad riddled, bullshit.

And creating something useful is more cost and effort than creating more SEO driven crap.

And even if you do create something useful, you’d then need to focus on SEO in order to compete.

There’s no way this problem isn’t solvable. But google seems to lack any motivation to solve it.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#109

Post by CodeSgt »

summerlight wrote: post #84
jrochkind1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly…

> then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. I don't think Google of 15 years ago will do a good job on the current age of internet. The size of web has increased a lot like 100x where most of the increment comes from unstructured formats like video or image and its signal to noise ratio deteriorated considerably. SEO has become much more sophisticated ever. A large fraction of usef…

Surely significantly more than 100x. I'd hypothesize 10,000x at minimum from 15 years ago, at least if you measure total bits. Not sure how I could confirm that conjecture though.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#110

Post by billyhoffman »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #37

The author seems to only have a superfluous understanding of SEO. Yes, keywords matter, as well as inbound and outbound links, but, these days Google is also quite sophisticated about surfacing results that meet the criteria for Good Page Experience and pass the Core Web Vitals. That means responsive web sites, with highly optimized images, font delivery, minimal on-load jitter that load super fast, even on old mobil…

True but by Google own posts about initiatives like Core Web Vital and mobile first these are used as tie-breaking factors not as ranking factors. If you have 2 pages that are judged to have equally relevant content per all of Google’s other content ranking, the one with faster core web vitals will appear first. Pages with amazing Core Web Vitals, but poor content ranking, are not ranking more highly than relevant pages with poor web vitals. Example.com has amazing Core Web Vitals.
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