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Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

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Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#181

Post by redox99 »

CodeSgt wrote: post #109
summerlight wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

However the number of actual, genuine content (so excluding SEO listicles and so on) is definitely less than 100x.

In fact it could be less than 1x in many cases. People that would have blogged about their Croatia trip might now instead just have a 10 word tweet, an instagram story (of similar low quality and probably not publicly indexable), or a youtube video (so non text content)

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#182

Post by lupire »

datavirtue wrote: post #143
dakial1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not only that. This search specifically is something that it's impossible because if the search worked, those "places out of the beaten path" the author is searching for, would immediately become popular and they wouldn't be true results anymore. They not being "indexed" by Google (or the internet in general) is what makes them the way they are.

Sort of like how I hope no one ever learns about my city/state and it can keep being pleasant and affordable.

https://www.google.com/search?q=fres%20small%20too%20many%20...

Once I lived in the city, it was too big and noisy

So I moved to the country to stop and smell the rosies

All my city friends joined me and put up nice new housies

Now it's too big and noisy, think I'll move to the country

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#183

Post by ceejayoz »

drc500free wrote: post #142
soulofmischief wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the…

Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.

Fun one today: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source

Prompt: "Is Fortigate open source?"

Article: "Based on the parameters we compared, it seems that pfSense is the more favorable solution because it is open source and also offers great features."

Google: "It is open source!"

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#184

Post by lupire »

binarysneaker wrote: post #161
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…

Part of the problem is the way that data is presented. Google indexes HTML, but wouldn't it be better if sites provided a standard interface to their [shareable] data, so that data quality, and searches could get better?

"Semantic web".

Tried and failed.

How would that prevent spam?

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#186

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#187

Post by jaimex2 »

bluGill wrote: post #168
jaimex2 wrote: post #130

Is there a search engine out there that implements the good old page rank algorithm? The patent expired a while ago now.

It wouldn't work if you did. Back in 2000 everyone created their own web site with a list of links to others they found intersting. Now nobody is creating that input and so you don't get and data to rank by.

That's true but we now also have things like Reddit providing those links.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#188

Post by throwawaylinux »

jquery wrote: post #99
pixl97 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost. Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist. The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran.…

I'm glad I wasn't the only one to cringe at the lack of self-awareness on the part of the author at the inherent paradox of wanting something highly ranked by google but also quiet, cheap, and slow. Here's a tip for the blog author. Learn a foreign language. Then search google in that foreign language. You might be surprised. Be the change you want to see.

Here's another tip. There are quiet, cheap, slow places you can go that don't require learning another language, or even going to another country. That's not what people really want though.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#189

Post by marginalia_nu »

droidist2 wrote: post #174
marginalia_nu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to surface human websites and discriminate against content mills, click funnels and e-commerce. For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether…

> For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts? [1] https://learningsynths.ableton.com

Yeah, those sited go out the window entirely. It's a search engine for documents, not applications.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#190

Post by hammyhavoc »

ceejayoz wrote: post #183
drc500free wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.

Fun one today: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source Prompt: "Is Fortigate open source?" Article: "Based on the parameters we compared, it seems that pfSense is the more favorable solution because it is open source and also offers great features." Google: "It is open source!"

Yes, these are forever spreading disinformation on various topics in my social group. I am forever telling people to actually click and read the article rather than trust the automatic tl;dr by Google.
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