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Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

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Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#231

Post by strken »

SenHeng wrote: post #224
strken wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what Koh Lanta is like, but the world has 1.11 million km of ice-free coastline. I'm also not sure what tourist amenities are, but you can probably build them anywhere you want.

Build with what money? The whole point of even having tourist amenities is that there's a community that that's attempting to draw tourist money to their location, and probably create a thriving economy. An unknown tourist attraction with amenities is a failed location where the amenities are unmaintained/dilapidated, the local economy has nosedived, the young have moved out and the population is collapsing.

The comment I replied to suggested that if tourists could find good places they'd become too busy. My reply was that if one spot becomes busy, it means places like that spot are profitable, and people will build more places on the million-kilometres of global coastline.

In the context of the discussion, I don't understand your question. The money comes from the hypothetical tourists who're hypothetically making all the usual spots too busy. What point are you making?

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#232

Post by bryanrasmussen »

notahacker wrote: post #144
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…

IIRC Google of 15 years ago would have prioritised high PageRank sites containing the strings "Ko Lanta" and "Croatia" which would probably have been the Ko Lanta listings page of popular travel booking websites (with "Croatia" referenced somewhere in the sidebar). It was less likely to ignore the absence of a particular keyword but certainly wasn't better at NLP

I think that's definitely the google of 10 years ago, 15 years ago might still have been like the parent commenter suggested. The reason being that the persons blog with travel information would be likely to have a higher pagerank than the popular travel booking sites which might also not be SEO optimized enough to hit that particular search.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#233

Post by marginalia_nu »

carschno wrote: post #218
marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

> What I dream of is Google circa 2006. A time where a search engine searched what you asked for. A time before aggressive SEO. A time before social media, when the only people on the internet had a reason to be there. A time before sticky headers and full-screen modal pop-ups asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before reading the article. A time before click-bait and subscription-only websites which tease you wi…

Impressive! I'm genuinely curious: Where do you host the index and the DB, and how do you finance it? Hosting an index of that size on AWS is not cheap, and maintaining the server infrastructure yourself seems quite some effort.

It's literally hosted off a beefy PC in my living room. I could definitely not afford to host this on AWS or rented servers.

About ~5k USD total investment including a small UPS, operational costs are $40/mo. Doesn't actually require all that much maintenance, at least not compared to the work I've put into building a search engine (including crawler, index) from scratch.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#234

Post by marginalia_nu »

iakh wrote: post #194
marginalia_nu wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why should it matter if a website is marked up on the server side or client side to a search engine?

I don't know why it matters, but enforcing a JS budget turns out to rather effectively reduce the amount of problem websites down to nearly none.

Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#235

Post by nsmog767 »

SEO person here. If you look at any topic or vertical with a lot of competition, there is bound to be monotony. That's because SEO people are trained to study "search intent", meaning, what do people think about when they search? What questions/desires can we, as publishers, help them fulfill?

It's a good theory, but becomes circular when you consider that one of the primary ways to determine search intent is . . . seeing what does well on Google.

So if you search for, say, "customer feedback", you see a lot of general guides about strategy, offering general definitions. That's likely because the first couple pages that ranked did it, and then more players saw that and said "oh, search intent for 'customer feedback' is [whatever they are doing]."

When you see all the listicles for certain queries, that's what you're seeing. Yes, it probably reflects some desire from people to see a list of options. But it's also just SEO people saying "look, the search intent is X." It leads to everyone copying each other and reduces the incentive to try and be innovative/think outside the box with content.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#236

Post by joshka »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

> What I dream of is Google circa 2006. A time where a search engine searched what you asked for. A time before aggressive SEO. A time before social media, when the only people on the internet had a reason to be there. A time before sticky headers and full-screen modal pop-ups asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before reading the article. A time before click-bait and subscription-only websites which tease you wi…

Neat, I wonder if applying something like GPT-3 to understand what each page gives might help with that a little. Kind of like reversing the SEO spam. I wonder if that's something that ML tools could detect given enough input?

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#237

Post by joshka »

yazzku wrote: post #34

I would also ask, why is HN so monotonous? If you compare 'new' vs what goes on the wall, you'll see a non-trivial amount of Big Tech bias and very good posts (often criticisms) effectively getting censored. Is the paycheck that good?

This comment seems pretty off-topic from the article linked to, can you provide a bit more context on how it's related other than the concept of monotony?

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#238

Post by marginalia_nu »

joshka wrote: post #236
marginalia_nu wrote: post #24

> What I dream of is Google circa 2006. A time where a search engine searched what you asked for. A time before aggressive SEO. A time before social media, when the only people on the internet had a reason to be there. A time before sticky headers and full-screen modal pop-ups asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before reading the article. A time before click-bait and subscription-only websites which tease you wi…

Neat, I wonder if applying something like GPT-3 to understand what each page gives might help with that a little. Kind of like reversing the SEO spam. I wonder if that's something that ML tools could detect given enough input?

My guess is doing exactly that is most the source of Google's problems right no, meanwhile the spammers do the exact same thing except trying to teach a ML model to successfully pose as authentic content, and what you get is the gloriosu mess we are in. (Even though it's just the last battle in a long war against spam)

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#239

Post by joshka »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #238
joshka wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat, I wonder if applying something like GPT-3 to understand what each page gives might help with that a little. Kind of like reversing the SEO spam. I wonder if that's something that ML tools could detect given enough input?

My guess is doing exactly that is most the source of Google's problems right no, meanwhile the spammers do the exact same thing except trying to teach a ML model to successfully pose as authentic content, and what you get is the gloriosu mess we are in. (Even though it's just the last battle in a long war against spam)

Too much / too little, both are problematic I guess. This ends up becoming a war of algorithmic generation vs understanding, and devolves to effectively answering the age old question "is this spam"?

I was going to suggest that perhaps adding info about whether the site had ads, etc. might help the usability. Then I tried marginalia ... :) Perhaps we need to invest in similar detection for other antipatterns (listicles, blogspam etc.) - this is mostly what I was talking about. Less the understanding for indexing, and more the classification for user safety and authenticity of results.

But again, this is very cool.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#240

Post by marginalia_nu »

bagacrap wrote: post #195
marginalia_nu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The fact that Google has such a power over the shape of web traffic, along with a few other websites, absolutely re-shapes the Internet to fit whatever its standards make a website rank well. It's in many ways almost exactly the same process as natural selection. Whatever works gets traffic and gets copied by other websites, whatever doesn't fades away.

I think the analogy to natural selection is apt. So is it really Google's fault? Seems like a consequence of a fitness function. And even if there were 4 competitive search engines in the world, each spammy site would optimize for one (or would even have 4 versions that each optimized for a single search engine).

If you had multiple search engines, say four of them like in your example, then the rewards for successfully specializing in either one of them would be a fourth what it is now, meanwhile you would have to put in four times the work to maintain four versions of the site, you would have to conduct four times as much research to maintain your advantage. The economies tip to make specialization less rewarding.

Just as in nature, monoculture rewards specialization, whereas ecological diversity rewards generalization. Not that specialization doesn't exist in diverse ecosystems, it's just not as devastating.

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