151–160 of 243 posts
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That page is certainly useful to find alternatives , I like I can filter by FOSS
Which of the ten Google result pages full of Alternative to___ pages are you talking about?
After having used computers for a few years (oh, about 30), and having grown up with the internet (first dialup at age 16 in 1996), I gotta say, Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find wha…
"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."
They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.
I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.
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> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead And then > Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?
It's not good enough that Google makes massive amounts of money for each click, the market demands they make more per each click every day. Gotta chase that growth.
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There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.
Back to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring (This is a joke (or is it?))
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A perfectly optimized ad algorithm reflects the market, and offers little opportunity that isn't present in the business itself. Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.
Naive question, but if a winner had been found in a given niche, wouldn't there not be as much bidding competition and thus costs would go down? Concretely: if I am the only pie baker in the world (I won), who else would bid against me for "place to buy pie"? My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that google has gotten better at cross-promoting - so they could target people who like cake, increasing the market and competi…
I believe there are some agreements for larger corporations to continue to promote things even if it is not necessary. People with funny money can treat ad markets like billboards.
Another fucked up aspect is that the government often runs ads to promote its own policies.
Much like real markets there is sometimes unnatural activity that keeps it moving.
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No, 'gamed' as in mass blocking one's competitor's results. If you think ads are bad you should take a peep into the world of 'negative seo'. I can assure you that any solution you can think of that will improve web search will be used in the exact opposite way you imagine.
You can allow individuals to customize their own search results without having to use that more broadly.
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I realize this is anathema to Google, but they could always pay a human being to investigate the domains that receive the most spam reports, and make a decision about it based on human judgment. One wonders how much bullshit might have been solved through a .005% increase in Google's payroll...
Having worked at Google for almost 10 years, I can say that almost any solution proposed that includes "we'll have a person look at this with their eyes" would be instantly discounted as unworkable. The reality distortion field towards automatic everything with computers is intense.
For spammy websites, you don’t review every one individually. But you have an algorithm that e.g. downranks them, and you AB test it.
They probably already have this strategy now, just not deployed for one reason or another. (For example, it might be expensive and unreliable to scan every website.) But if Google loses enough traffic to a competitor, they’ll be forced to do something.
You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT…
And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.
This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.
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To further support my argument in favour of manual curation, I would like to ask: why, for the past few years, have people ‘in the know’ been appending “Reddit” to their search strings on Google? Because Reddit is the largest repository of manually curated links, discussions, and original non-encyclopedic information on the internet. People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its ve…
I feel like Reddit is a bad example for an argument against search, because it still relies heavily on search. People aren't finding a specific subreddit for their query and then browsing it until they find what they're looking for, and they're usually not even searching directly on Reddit (because of the poor search quality), they're searching on Google. What does "manual curation" mean in this context? I think it r…
The root cause of all this madness: Ads. As long as there is even a marginal financial incentive to get human eyeballs on websites (as opposed to the viewers actually playing for services or, you know, just hosting websites for free because they are cool), this will keep getting worse. A genuine desire to help incoming traffic doesn't really matter either. Anything helpful will be infinitely cloned, as long as there…
Have you seen a 419 scam? Doesn't have any ads. Just a direct intro to get scammed.