Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit can't build a better search engine

ruky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 289 posts

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#171

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

voldacar wrote: post #136
cowl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why has nobody done this? What am I missing? The answer is in your proposal: >- Charge 1 cent per search, or as much as is necessary 90% of people do potentially hundreds of searches everyday. Especially non expert users that practically use the search engine to search for the domain of the sites they need to go too. The people ready to pay a fixed fee /per search wouldn't be able to cover even a fraction of the inf…

>Google's solution that "outside links" are considered as "votes" that this site is good is what made it good but also what made it vulnerable to SEO. Do you have any other idea on how do you decide if a result is good or not beyond the literal text search? Maybe you could have a "report spam" button next to every search result, and sites that got reported more often would get weighted way down in the results. But wh…

If there was a “report spam” button, companies would hire people to “report” anything that praises their competitors’ products.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#172

Post by Chris2048 »

Decabytes wrote: post #145
s8s8discourse wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?

Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google wi…

> I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favourite content creators

Because they where offered up for free? And only now are charging?

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#173

Post by krapp »

Decabytes wrote: post #145
s8s8discourse wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?

Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google wi…

People have been able to tune out of, skip or ignore advertising on every media platform since the beginning of time. There is no obligation, anywhere, on the part of the consumer to engage with advertising in exchange for content.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#174

Post by dspillett »

JSavageOne wrote: post #135
yakubin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Random ad vs targeted ad" is a false dichotomy. There are also contextual ads. For example, the audience of Linus Tech Tips regularly gets their fair share of contextual ads delivered by Linus in-band. You're not going to see an ad of a toilet paper on LTT. Instead you're going to see ads of hard drives, Squarespace, online shopping platforms, etc. The ads are the same for all viewers (i.e. definitely not targeted)…

Everyone wins except the viewer who now has to manually skip through ads because adblockers don't block those type of ads

I don't mind sponsor slots - they directly pay the content creators and don't involved me to be stalked as I go about my life.

If the sponsored segments get irritating, and in some cases they have, I just go elsewhere. If I don't want the content enough to put of with the sponsor segment then I simply don't want the content enough.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#175

Post by marginalia_nu »

I think people give too SEO too much credit. SEO is a big problem as long as there is only one big search engine, with one algorithm. That allows absurd specialization to abuse the idiosyncrasies of that search engine. That's just how it goes with monocultures though.

I've had very little problem identifying SEO spam by just not being Google and promoting other values than they do. Since the search engine spammers are very mindful to follow every one of google's best practices, then you can effectively find the rest of the internet by just punishing sites that do not, in some way, follow Google's rules.

Unencrypted HTTP? Bring it. Poorly optimized for mobile? Don't mind if I do. Weird looking URL? This is gonna be good! Et cetera etc.

You can also weed out a lot of this nonsense by looking at where websites created by humans link. Rarely do they link to spam.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#176

Post by dspillett »

sasaf5 wrote: post #128

> I’d still prefer a targeted ad over a random ad that is unrelated to me. No, a million times no. A targeted ad requires my personal information being collected, and the resulting assumption of my needs may be offensive and even dangerous. I prefer a random ad. Or better, a place where I can just search the product I want in detail.

It depends how you define targetted. An advert for Intel while I'm looking at a technical site is targetted in the traditional sense, like advertising sports equipment and beer in TV broadcasts of football (where the audience is likely to be interested in one, the other, or both), and I'm fine with that.

Like you I object to adverts that are targetted by stalking me as I go about my daily life, or buying & selling information gleaned about me by an entity performing such stalking. Targetting based on what I'm actively doing right now seems fine.

(and away from the targetting question, I also object to other dark patterns like pop-ups/-unders, auto-playing audio & video, etc.)

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#177

Post by bullen »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #175

I think people give too SEO too much credit. SEO is a big problem as long as there is only one big search engine, with one algorithm. That allows absurd specialization to abuse the idiosyncrasies of that search engine. That's just how it goes with monocultures though. I've had very little problem identifying SEO spam by just not being Google and promoting other values than they do. Since the search engine spammers ar…

I think Google is over because the problems we have now are harder and harder to google.

That combined with stagnation of constructive and/or simple progress, all caused by lack of energy.

Means there is less and less you don't know that Google can teach you. I haven't googled anything important since around 2016.

Reddit gives you a narrow subject with people that care about said subject, much much better!

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#178

Post by bbbobbb »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #167
sasaf5 wrote: post #128

> I’d still prefer a targeted ad over a random ad that is unrelated to me. No, a million times no. A targeted ad requires my personal information being collected, and the resulting assumption of my needs may be offensive and even dangerous. I prefer a random ad. Or better, a place where I can just search the product I want in detail.

Ads are not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is tracking. The internet has not been broken by ads. It’s been broken by data harvesting and monopolies. Contextual ads are no problem IMO, and can sometimes be a helpful (economic) signal. Without ads how can challengers get some awareness? So yes for targeted ads, but only if it does not require personal data. Contextual ads can be targeted without engag…

I hope you realize this is just your perspective.

To offer the alternative, to me ads are the fundamental problem. As much as I don't want to be tracked and avoid providing my information in any way possible, I just assume I am being tracked. It does not "annoy me" while consuming some content.

On the other hand, any random ad / paid promotion that gets through the blocking does annoy me immensely and I do consider nearly any form of advertisement harmful.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#179

Post by streamofdigits »

Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way.

> The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge

This doesn't immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.

There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client/user

Post reply on HN