181–190 of 438 posts
Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by…
Google any recipe, and there are at least 5 paragraphs (usually a lot more) of copy that no one will ever read, and isn't even meant for human consumption. Google "How to learn x", and you'll usually get copy written by people who know nothing about the subject, and maybe browsed Amazon for 30 minutes as research. Real, useful results that used to be the norm for Google are becoming more and more rare as time goes by…
Search results are so heavily weighted toward commerce, products and services because those are the people that can spend money on SEO. It's made the internet, seen through the eyes of search results, seem like an aggressive, shady market bazaar. I try searching for anything remotely bike related, bike community, mechanical information, or just general cool bike stuff and I can't find the human community underneath a…
Similar to your biking anecdote, I was trying to find any simple trouble shooting help for a home coffee brewer that suddenly stopped working. I couldn't find any results in the first 4-5 pages that weren't trying to sell me a new machine.
The manufacturer is also partly to blame, because I couldn't find anything remotely relevant either on the product page or in the PDF owner's manual.
It's a shame what these tools have become when they could be so much more.
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Its a really nice idea, but I wonder if it would work in practice: 1. Would a significant amount of real humans who actually cared about the content cast a vote (up or down)? 2. Would it be even remotely possible to protect against fraudulent voting at Google scale? (remember they can't even prevent fake business listings on Google Maps, which is at least theoretically closer to verifiable from, for example, business…
I don't think it will work in practice. Reddit and other voting platforms require a login to prevent spam voting and do people want Google to know which articles you like and don't? Reddit works because anonymity which Google will not provide.
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Our culture is a frog nailed to the floor. The nail is commerce. The frog can still sorta function. Wiggle in little circles. It ain't pretty or healthy or free. No hopping. I wonder what it would be like to not have that nail through us.
Commerce -> revenues -> viable businesses -> sustainable jobs -> peaceful livelihood prospects. No commerce -> no jobs -> unrest -> violence and wars (citation: centuries of human history). Maybe, commerce is the nail which constrains humanity both in a good and a bad sense - by providing a peaceful alternative to violent lifestyles and by creating a consumerist culture?
When marketing convinces someone to buy something that ends up being a bad trade (i.e. the person that buys it is not made better off) then there is no such improvement and the world is not made better off.
What would be a good name for a commerce-free search engine?
Wikipedia is basically an information search engine without commerce or social media. The problem is that your results page is the article itself, and you need to scroll to the bottom to get to an external site. It's theoretically possible to change the UI or analyze Wikipedia to make a pretty solid search engine powered by millions of person-years of curation.
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One nice solution would be a search engine that throws out anything related to commerce or linking to commerce.
Not entirely throwing out commerce, but I sometimes use https://millionshort.com/ where you can remove up to the top 1 million websites from the results.
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What you're missing is the fact that larch search engine companies have no profit motive to do this. They get the vast amount of their money from commercial ad sales -- ads for commercial results. Why would they purposefully castrate their highest paying customers? And if you think the answer is to create and host a new, independent engine, you will be hard pressed to develop a good one, and to find the money to keep…
How about a layer over Google? Take Google's search results and filter them. Any obvious barriers to that?