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More content by people, for people in Search

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Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#161

Post by dash2 »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #98
meltedcapacitor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the bootleg page could be a source of inspiration? It has a garbage/content ratio of 32 (the browser downloads 32 bytes for every byte of content) while the original page has a 400 ratio (the browser downloads 400 bytes for every byte of content). It's borderline denial of service attack against the visitor. The original also has a slow aggressive cookie box that is unnecessary as visitors can be spied on using…

To be fair, even though littered with ads the bootleg is indeed more pleasant. Bootleg the bootlegger.

I count one advert on the original, and the page loaded instantly for me on my 10 year old laptop. What am I missing?

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#162

Post by wilde »

It’s great to hear them admit that there is a problem. For years we’d get “our internal quality measures say we’re doing great. You’re imagining things. Fuck off to Bing and see how you like it.”

I suspect they have an inventory problem, not a ranking problem. Why would any real humans publish publicly on the internet at this point?

If you’re posting for fun you have to deal with moderation and stolen content.

If you’re posting for pay Google just takes your content and shoves it onto the SERP, skipping your ads.

Bill Gates had it right. If you want a sustainable ecosystem, you need to make sure the other players are making more money than you in aggregate. As far as I can tell, that’s only true on the internet for eCommerce and so that’s all that’s left.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#163

Post by civilized »

whage wrote: post #76
firasd wrote: post #32

I'm not sure this whole drive towards 'original content' makes sense. It encourages people to make long rambling pages that don't get to the point In fact it seems like Google worked better when wikipedia was almost always the first result on various topics What I mean by rambling is if you type something like "types of oranges" and suddenly land on a page where some dude is clearly just filling up paragraphs for goo…

This resonates with me so freaking much. I am disgusted by how every bit of information on webpages seem to be buried between paragraphs of empty EMPTY talk and even when they seem to get to the point, most of the time there is no real information there. Sorry, this had to come out. We really need better search engines.

I think it's going to require a social rating system. Which is why people append "reddit" to searches these days.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#164

Post by dash2 »

nichos wrote: post #158
addandsubtract wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Youtube has a timeline (with sometimes even chapters) that let you jump ahead. The thumbnails are also a good indication on what type of content you can expect from a video.

Web pages have a timeline in the form of a scroll bar on the right

Actually that's a cool idea, put a graph on the scroll bar which shows where most people spent their time, same as the Youtube widget.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#165

Post by nkrisc »

jraph wrote: post #137
oefrha wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the very first thing in the blog post is a link to the original, so it’s highly unlikely they wanted to pretend to be the author. More like someone who didn’t care much about copyright or license decided to back up information they found useful in their personal blog.

Honestly, a researcher should know better to not plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it. It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere. I also don'…

> I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.

Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#166

Post by visarga »

Youden wrote: post #102
okumurahata wrote: post #49

On YouTube, there is an option called "Don't recommend channel". I wonder why Google doesn't have a similar option. Or even better, a "Recommend me this website as the first option" button. It would useful to avoid spammy sites and to benefit the good ones. To avoid gaming the algorithm, Google can't take this data into account to benefit/punish websites on search results. The button has the only purpose to customise…

Kagi has this feature. You can mark websites to prioritise for your results and websites to demote or completely exclude.

That's great, until they decide to nix it or you want to migrate your list to another search engine. I wish we could decouple these choices from the website providers. A web browser that puts the user back in control.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#167

Post by visarga »

JW_00000 wrote: post #149
dgudkov wrote: post #133

I don't think Google will ever be able to distinguish texts that are written for people from texts that are written for Google. It's effectively the Turing test, and Google won't pass it.

It's worse than a Turing test: it's trying to distinguish between a honest human (writing content they are knowledgeable about or that is original) vs a dishonest human (who writes filler content just to get a higher ranking). It would almost need to be able to read the author's mind to figure out their intention. Or, given a text, figure out if what it is saying is original and/or true.

No, they are trying to distinguish between content that is going to make $ for them vs content that is not going to make $. They don't care about truth or utility.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#168

Post by visarga »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #82

Google used to have the ability to search for "discussions", no idea why they removed that. Nowadays I just append "site:reddit" to most of my queries (although I'm sure there's more and more paid/fake posts there as well)

I'd like more search filters like that, they should be composable with logic expressions. For example, "forums" or "eu" (all EU national domains, so you can find a product that is easy to ship), but you could extend it with page categories like "reviews", "recipes", "python", "js", "in/out_top_1m", "blogs", not to mention verticals like "shopping", "hotels", "tickets".

Especially for the shopping category Google dropped the ball. When I am, wallet in hand, ready to buy a widget, why doesn't it do the best to help me find it? Isn't that the essence of search? Or just to search again and show more ads?

Such a failure of experience to try to use Google. Behaves like the doctor who secretly wants people to be sick so he can have more business.

But the writing is on the wall. Dialogue based search agents are coming, snippet based search is on the way out. The language models become better and better, they can even do sub-searches. The trend towards natural language based search is being accelerated by the mobile phones who lack proper keyboards and large screens.

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#169

Post by infinityio »

alecco wrote: post #80

I don't buy it. Google search of basic programming concepts give almost always as top results sites like geeksforgeeks and other Indian proto-spam sites with very obnoxious sign-up floats covering up everything, while the content is almost copy pasted from docs or other sites. Google rarely gives you the official documentation or tutorials at the top. You have to restrict with site: (to the point I have "search engin…

It is a paid service, so probably not for everyone, but have you tried Kagi? It lets you 'pin' specific sites to the top, rank sites higher, rank sites lower, or block them entirely

Re: More content by people, for people in Search

#170

Post by jraph »

nkrisc wrote: post #165
jraph wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, a researcher should know better to not plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it. It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere. I also don'…

> I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link. Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.

It’s plausible and not malicious, understandable too, but it's not hard to say it in a sentence at the beginning of the post.

This is a public blog, not some internal website.

Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to everyone, for sure.

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