Although I could semi understand that rant, I didn't understand the rest of the guy's blog posts. At all. What is he going on about in that blog?
You Will Not Understand This
201–210 of 265 posts
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#202Earlier 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…
The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language. I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc. Similarly, having som…
you imply that when someone that is not a programmer, and say works in the rare stones industry, goes to google to search for ruby gems, that they are not shown a bunch of programmer garbage?
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's definitely a scale I think — showing me local pizza places is great. What about guessing my budget & ruling out places it thinks I won't book? That's getting into a grey area & personally I'd find that uncomfortable/undesirable. What about applying it to non-transactional stuff like news? Should it personalise results based on what it thinks I like? Again with subjective/objective distinction — I know my frie…
What bothers me is the attempt at omniscience. Give me an option! Let me have a checkbox for "tailor results to my location". Heck, turn it on by default. Just give me the damn choice.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#204> "Mandatory non-linear curation of user contributed content."
I always forget how much this bugs me. I get wall posts from friends saying they are going out if anyone wants to join them, 24 hours after they post it.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#205Earlier 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…
So, you call the pizza place and say "Do you deliver to X? No? Oh, but your other location does! Thanks!" Or, go to the company's website and figure it out.
People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Google's spam filters block an IP or subnet that happens to be where you host your self-hosted mail server, it will be almost impossible for your mail server reputation to ever recover. Your emails to gmail users (a vast percentage of all email users in many places) will never be delivered and maintaining your own mail server will become a nightmare. Google has very good spam filtering, but their lack of human con…
I've been hosting my own mail server since 1997, at its current colo since 2007 or so. I've never had any issues with delivering email to gmail users. So, I'm curious, am I just extremely lucky to have competent sysadmins as neighbours on the colo subnet, or is my IP address' reputation so good that it never gets affected by collateral damage?
Me too, for almost as long. Never a problem with gmail, although I do suppose that's partly luck. If my IP block ever got blacklisted, I would move the mail server to another IP - I'm sure that would be easier than trying to reason with Google. I do get a bounce from Hotmail every couple of years, but my attitude has become "your fault for using Hotmail".
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#207Earlier 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…
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 '?"
This makes so much more sense. People are so lazy to type in their location that Google had to spend millions/billions of dollars on technology to stalk you and figure it out for you? I don't buy it.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#208> 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. Yes, I am aware that this is likewise no accident. This is not an example of low search quality and can easily be the opposite. If I search for ruby gems, I probably want code. If someone else does, they may want actual gems. > The qual…
> If I search for ruby gems, I probably want code. If someone else does, they may want actual gems.
So they search for "ruby gems" and you search for "ruby gems code." This nails in OP's point:
> Insight: Google does not want you to know or remember. Anything, if at all possible.
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#209Earlier 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…
The personalization seems to help if only because you need to disambiguate the english language. I'm often searching for "ruby" (the programming language not the gemstone) and need to find "gems" (modules for the "ruby" language) and often these have names that have other meanings like "devise", "pundit", "ransack", "bootstrap", "carrierwave", "paperclip", "fog", "cucumber", "refinery", etc etc. Similarly, having som…
That's at least partially the fault of that particular language getting cute with their naming and not considering the impact that has a on trying to disambiguate things without having to introduce further context. Ruby isn't the only one who commits that particular sin (looking at you Chef). Java arguably commits the same sin with regard to the core language, but considering how rarely "java" is used on its own in reference to the coffee based beverage that's fairly harmless. Moral of the story, stop getting cute with the names of your stuff and naming a bunch of different tools/concepts/frameworks with ambiguous names. If you must do so at least use some clever portmanteaus and don't just straight up steal other words that already have specific completely unrelated meanings.
grumble grumble chef knife, chef cookbook, chef recipe, chef cucumber incoherent mumbling
Re: You Will Not Understand This
#210I disagree with mostly everything here, which surprises me since I'm usually in line with most highly voted opinion pieces on here. I'd like to say something in particular about Facebook. I maintain a strict rule of only being friends with people I care about. It allows me to keep up with my family and friends, discuss local community events and news, and keep up with the local music scene. My belief is that a lot of…
I agree that too much negativity is unhealthy and makes living needlessly less enjoyable, but what you're advocating here is willful ignorance. Ignoring bad aspects of certain services or people does not make them magically disappear; it's a short-term solution at best. By refusing to face the issues right now, you make them harder or downright impossible to solve later, or even cause more serious problems. And Facebook's data collection and gamification of social interactions is one such issue.