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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#131

Post by jbb67 »

nludd wrote: post #53
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

No. If I search for "takeaway pizza" then it's probably because I'm going to be somewhere else later. Why would I ever want to search for takeaway pizza when I'm at home. I already know where to get pizza there.

Searching for my current location is probably the worst possible default

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#132

Post by jccalhoun »

Semaphor wrote: post #45
clusmore wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't deactivated my account, but I have unfollowed absolutely everything so that I have an entirely blank news feed, and uninstalled the app from my phone to avoid notifications. I still use messenger for communication with friends. For me, it was the realisation that 99% of the content in my news feed was posts by corporate pages. I signed up to connect with friends, and initially I did only see status updates…

> But over time it became exclusively friends liking or commenting on posts by pages I just scrolled through several pages of my newsfeed (actually found a bunch of pages I never saw content from but which were also not relevant to me anymore which I unliked) and didn't find anything like that. Everything was personal posts, a few relevant page posts and posts from groups I'm in. But why did you unfollow everything j…

Most of the posts from friends on facebook are personal posts and even the ones that are my friends commenting on posts or sharing stories are at least somewhat interesting to me because I want to see what my friends think are interesting or important.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#134

Post by beojan »

lentil_soup wrote: post #124
piker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.

Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked. Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!

Amazon is particularly irritating for this. If you use, for instance, amazon.fr, the UI is only available in French, even though it's mostly a translation of the English UI on amazon.com.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#135

Post by speedplane »

Klathmon wrote: post #123
speedplane wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google books is done. Yes, the website is up, but they aren't scanning new books and gave up on the backlog. Try it yourself, go look for any book published since 2016.

Wasn't there a large lawsuit that stopped that one?

Nope, Google won.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#136

Post by moultano »

akerro wrote: post #97
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful inf…

Do you happen to remember the query so I can debug? (Check your search history if you have it turned on.)

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#137

Post by pdpi »

Zarel wrote: post #119
hzay wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure OP gets the idea of personalization. Google's personalization is like piling up chairs in order to reach the moon. It's nowhere near its promise of reading the user's mind and helping him. Instead its present implementation simply stops your world view from expanding in any direction, by serving you the same stuff that you knew over and over again. This is not personalization. This is a child's imitation…

...I'm quite happy that Google stops my world view from expanding to include Chicago restaurants when I'm looking for food in Seattle. I'm also happy it doesn't include information about swifts the animal when I search for Swift the programming language. Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information. I'm also happy Google doesn't sho…

> Even when it's about political stuff - I'm rather happy I don't get anti-vax information when I'm searching for health information.

The tradeoff being that it won't give the anti-vaxxers information that refutes their claims. Is that _really_ what you want?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#138

Post by nludd »

rtpg wrote: post #118
nludd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Dutch, so I have to switch languages often as well. I don't think I get what you're trying to explain. Could you provide some examples? If I search for an English error message, I.. search for that message. If I search for a Dutch person, I look him up on the Dutch Wikipedia if he's well-known enough.

You're learning Django, and the error messages are in English. There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top. Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You…

>There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top.

Add "lang:nl".

>Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.

Look up the restaurant on https://www.tripadvisor.com/. Why would you use a general purpose search engine if you already know where to find the right information? Or you could add "lang:en" to your query.

>You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.

Those expats could add "lang:en" to their queries about the places you have blogged about.

I am not denying that there is some value in Google filling in these blanks for you, but 99% of examples about the indispensability of personalized search are rendered moot with very simple additions to the search query.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#139

Post by Daycrawler »

lentil_soup wrote: post #124
piker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once upon a time, the internet allowed you to escape your geography. No longer. For expats, this is one of the worst, constant reminders. One has to adjust every search/url to accommodate for the server's location-based interpretation of intent. Some sites won't even let visitors use the .com version. Surely regulation plays a part, but it's incredibly frustrating.

Same with languages. It's incredibly annoying when pages try to guess what language I want by my location, I rather be asked. Same with marrying the language to the country, if I want to buy a flight from Germany, don't change the page to German!

No need to be asked. The browser sends the Accept-Language header depending on the language set in the browser's settings, which defaults to the OS language for the browser installed by default (other browsers will ask at installation).

In other words this header is the most reliable piece of information to know what language the user wants. Somehow big tech decided IP geolocation is more reliable.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#140

Post by toomanybeersies »

Is there anyone who's moved overseas and quit Facebook, and benefited from it?

Because for me it's my primary link between my home country, where I live now, and all my other international friends. Sure, I could use email to keep in touch, but the problem with email is that it's an active communications medium, unless you have a mailing list and email everyone what you're up to, you don't keep up to date with what your friends are doing.

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