You Will Not Understand This • Hacker News Board

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#191

Post by MarinReiter » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:23 PM UTC

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…

I dunno buddy, I still seem to search "workshop 3d printer" in and get top results from countries I dont live in. Not to mention, I often search for full phrases that have two keywords way separated from another, but because google is used to seeing them together, it will still display pretty irrelevant results.

Last week I had a copyright discussion, so I looked up "Do I own the copyrights to my art?. First link was "creator or buyer: who owns the art?", second link was "does deviantart own my art?", the third link was a website called "desiring god" about copyright and the scripture...Sure, you can say the first link is relevant, but I never mentioned "buying" in my query, and the fifth link is the one that truly answers my question. It says that artists in the US have automatic copyrights to their work as soon as it is completed. Same things have happened where I search up a more complex query, and google throws me buzzfeed links and other stuff that have nothing to do with it, in its attempt of simplifying what I'm looking for.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#192

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #163

nludd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Web search is literally the wrong place to try to find something that geographic databases were designed for. When you don't know where you are or what's around, you go to a map.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#193

Post by ryacko » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

hzay wrote: post #74

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…

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 wish Google would have a clippy-style avatar so that when I put in takeaway pizza, it will tap my screen and ask, "did you mean 'takeaway pizza chicago'?"

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#194

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:33 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#195

Post by ryacko » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

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…

There is an option for "verbatim" searches.

Anyway, google ignores synonyms if you use double quotes around each word or phrase.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#196

Post by KozmoNau7 » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #180

sametmax wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds a lot like the people saying "wow, you knew you were going on that part of town with that sexy dress and you got harass. Blames on you.". Errr... no.

Besides, that is in reply to a comment that is just trying to make people aware that is a bad part of town. The replies you got are borderline insane.

No, a fair number of the statements in his post were and are demonstrably false.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#197

Post by vincentleeuwen » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:36 PM UTC

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…

Noticed this as well. When I started using DDG it was like stepping 10 years back in time. Lots of interesting niche websites that look straight out of the 00's.

I mostly miss google when searching for physical locations, but the !g comes in handy there.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#198

Post by gerbilly » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:37 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #31

Semaphor wrote: post #27

Can someone explain to me the facebook problem? I'm not talking about privacy problems, just all the people saying everything is so much better for them without it. Is it just me using it too weirdly? I use messenger to chat with people (I'd love to use my jabber account more, but everyone is either on FB, GTalk or WhatsApp), I read a few groups and use events to keep things organized and I post sometimes, either for…

In my experience, some of the nicest people I know also happen to have extremely overwhelming political opinions & behaviors. They're extreme partisans basically. Facebook has shown me a side of them that is very ugly. Plus, we're now culturally living in a time of belligerent identity politics combined with a sort of 'if you are not aggressively with us, you are against us and evil'. It's an incredibly toxic environ…

> they rage non-stop, pretty much every day, about Trump this and Trump that

Sounds to me like you are a Trump supporter then? :-)

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#199

Post by scaryclam » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:37 PM UTC

Tyr42 wrote: post #173

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how this entire thread was spawned and derailed by the original essay being a bit too imprecise. You all are taking this one argument out of context. He wasn't talking about restaurants. But everyone here is. Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. You have to take the argument in the essay and try to think of the most persuasive possible interpretation. Is…

>Obviously restaurants should be personalized. But no one was saying they shouldn't. >>I'd much rather type "takeaway pizza chicago" than have google mind-read where I want the pizza delivered. Some people are saying that restaurants shouldn't be personalized.

This was actually a problem for me recently. I just wanted to know the options for restaurants in an area of London. I didn't want results specific to me, I wanted all of the restaurants. I ended up not using Google since it just wouldn't give me the simple information I was looking for. Googles becoming less and less useful as time goes on, which is a real shame as they were excellent 10 years ago.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#200

Post by gooseus » Wed, Nov 08, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #161

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…

hopefully typing &pws=0 at the end of the query still turns off the personalization.

This is what I was hoping to find... of course knowing how to do that is completely esoteric. I don't know why they couldn't just put another button next to I'm Feeling Lucky that says "Pretend you don't know me".

My problem nowadays is with the idea that Google, et al, all believe they're own myth of being the best at XYZ user experience and if you disagree then you're a curmudgeon or an idiot who "doesn't get it".

Why wouldn't they put a button like that? At what point did optionality and customization of your user experience become undesirable to the point that you need to obfuscate or prevent it?

My guess is that too many people read Don't Make Me Think as dogma and now we're in a world where the tech industry assumes they need to do all the thinking for anyone that touches their product and the users brought up in this world have no idea what it's like to not have their UX dictated to them.