181–190 of 265 posts
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Your queries would work, but Google wants to be like the secretary in the office. If you ask your secretary "I want some pizza", he would not say "Well this pizza place is the most popular in the world, it's located in Rome.", he would tell you options close to your area.
They could have two services - Google Search and Google Secretary.
>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…
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…
And so would most HN readers. However, the rest of the world outside of the tech industry cares more about convenience and simplicity than exploration. Most people are willfully ignorant, driven from dawn to dusk by their own habits, rather than some intrinsic desire for self-actualization and the acquisition of knowledge.
Give them more convenience, even at the cost of flexibility, and non-technologists love it.
That doesn't make us better than them, or vice versa. We've chosen to be a little different is all.
Beautiful! I agree 100% with it. Commercial web sucks, and what it's worse: it's boring and predictable. The resistance has started. So many people share the same feelings, that's why things like the tildeverse (tilde.club, tilde.town, neocities) do exist. Revolution won't use JavaScript.
Thanks for the javascript part. By the way, here on HN there's been plenty of post about "websites" been cool lately. Please let's not confuse healthy individual control over the web with purely subjective old technology nostalgia. Tbh, 90s pure html was UGLY lol.
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>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…
It used to be that when I don't find something with DDG, I would go into Google and find it. But currently my impression is that any remotely useful page that Google would show is also there in DDG results, the "!g" switch just adds a bunch of spam and unrelated stuff.
Some of this may be the “what I’m used to” factor though. Maybe I’ve just habituated to expect the results I’ve gotten from DDG. Either way, I don’t miss Google. I used to DDG out of principle; now I DDG because it works better.
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As far as I can tell, your essential complaint is that Google is sometimes providing results that are too relevant . You're OK with Google doing some amount of personalisation, but there's a line that they shouldn't cross. How do you distinguish between "good" and "bad" personalisation at scale? How do their algorithms know what should and shouldn't be personalised? Do humans even agree on where to draw the line? Goo…
Sometimes you just want the top results by PageRank, like in 1998 when Google was miraculous. I don't know how to get that anymore. I want information from out in the world - I generally don't want the contents of my own head reflected back at me.
https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...
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>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…
>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the to…
We've been so conditioned to use Google Search as our one stop oracle that we fail to stop and think whether a text-based query is actually appropriate.
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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.
Health information should not be considered political stuff. Unfortunately, it is ... at least in some countries.
Facebook is the worst offender. It's basically a group-think echo-chamber creation machine. With the identify politics in full bloom it's become orders of magnitude more insane. I've seen people demand their "friend" to apologise for their beliefs or they will tell their employer, as if there was anything of substance to tell. Most people are now afraid to express their religious/political/social/philosophical belief…
> Most people are now afraid to express their religious/political/social/philosophical beliefs, cause it always ends up in a shitstorm, posturing and offense. Or maybe they're somewhat aware that in essence "nobody cares"? All in all this service started out as a socially acceptable way to stalk people. I have a friend who's wall consists mostly of political commentary. Clearly what he wants is attention, because any…
If nobody cared, the reaction would be a collective yawn. But since it creates a shitstorm, some people obviously care and are offended, that you are daring to have another opinion.
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>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…
>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the to…
Note: I have hast a few instances where "near me" didn't work as expected.
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But there is another side to the story. I quit Facebook many years ago in 2008 because I disagree with their ToS. However, since then I lost contact to many friends far-away. Sure, FB feeds are not really "contact" in any meaningful sense, but they still allow you to get a glimpse at what's going on in their lives. Another things is that I've lost the opportunity to use FB to market my German sci-fi novels to friends…
Link to novels, pls. :-P
There's much better to come, this is a kind of weird side product, so you probably won't like it. Also, people tell me that I'm bad at self-marketing. :p