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I Just Want to Search

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Re: I Just Want to Search

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or people could just use a different search engine that actually delivers results and slowly eat away at Google's dominance, either forcing them to adapt and serve useful results again or become the next Yahoo or whatever, instead of begging an already way too powerful entity for more regulation.

If it was possible it would have happend by now.

Nah, Google is busy digging their own grave. You can't keep on gutting your core product and never suffer from it. No company can.

Vote with every query or keep on begging.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#44
post #2

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The on…

The scale of this would need to be unfathomable. Doesn’t YouTube get something like 100 years of video uploads every day? You’d need hundreds of thousands of people working full time to review that much footage manually.

Isn't that kind of the point though? We don't need 100 years of video uploads every day. We need fewer, higher quality videos. If 90% of those were likely to get rejected, such as all the low-effort AI spam videos generated today, then there wouldn't be much incentive to submit them in the first place. The volume of uploads would drop. This is only a problem if you're an advertising platform who needs an endless stream of new crap to recommend to your users to try to keep them on the platform as long as possible.

This is why I keep landing on moderation-before-inclusion as the standard. Review systems that flag bad content means that bad content still gets seen, and often still has enough of an effect to make it worthwhile for bad actors to churn out. IMO that's part of explanation of why there's 100 years of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. Even videos that get taken down get some exposure; increasing the volume of crap is a solution for their short life span. It seems like a self-reinforcing problem there, even if there were an honest attempt at moderation.

The old content doesn't go away, but YouTube is incredibly bad at making it effectively searchable. They don't want you to find the highest quality videos on a topic, they want you to plug in to the endless new stream of slop which just recapitulates things which were done better before.

This isn't really an "old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn" take that everything older is better. Instead I'm saying that the Wikipedia approach to help users find and collaborate on good content to make it even better or more comprehensive is preferable to the approach that the only way to be seen is to endlessly publish new content, which is meant to obscure what came before it on a topic. It's like if you walked into a library, but the only thing visible was a "new releases" shelf and searching the stacks was nearly impossible. That would make it basically a matter of luck if you found anything relevant, and makes deep research impossible.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#45
post #2

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The on…

Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched. I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preemp…

I'm leaning against the user flagging model of content moderation because it keeps the incentive for bad actors to try to game the system. Bad content, even briefly included can still do a lot of damage. It's like spam email -- even though something like 99.9% gets filtered out, that 0.1% is still valuable enough for spam senders to keep trying. If the problem of spam is just a numbers game, then bad actors will just increase the volume to compensate.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#46
post #29

[flagged]

What are you on about? This doesn't seem relevant to the post and the poster is certainly not in his 30s if they were a teen in 2000.

Don't reply by just reading the title of the article. Read to the end.

The author said "I thought retiring in my mid 30s after a few exits would be fun but".

You never read the whole thing, thus don't get the context of the article. My comment will make sense if you read the full article.

What a friggin troll.. I never mentioned anything about him being in his 30s but said he retired in his 30s...

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@TODO: Add "troll" in all my comments to research comment patterns later

Re: I Just Want to Search

#48
I think the reason is that no one (who has the correct leverage / area of ownership / authority) cares.

Big companies have processes for deciding what gets done and which features are prioritized, and if the people in that loop aren't power users of those features, and they don't have the kind of metrics or analysis framework that would indicate that those features are important, they won't be prioritized.

I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy to make search worse... I think it's just that nobody cares enough, and with time the features break as everything else around them is changed

Re: I Just Want to Search

#49
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current state of things makes the problem seem worse than it is, but it is not a simple problem. Should a post about "L'acteur Gérard Philipe" be found by a search for "gerard", without the accent, through collation? Probably, but should quoted/verbatim searches also do collation? How about the non-verbatim but misspelled "gérard philippe"? What if the search has a correct spelling, but not the page? What if the…

These were all issues mostly resolved by 2000 or so. I remember integrating a search index into our company app in 1998-1999 and it handled most of these cases. The current madness is mostly deliberate bait and switch.

It's sad how fast some people are these days to just say "nope too hard, can't be done." Especially when it's something that WAS accomplished 20, 30, even 40+ years ago in some cases! How can someone watch a satellite train fly through the heavens and think pattern matching algorithms are an unsolved, even unsolvable problem? Such doomerism.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#50

I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct. They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results. Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you…

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