The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

Post by remus » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

omega3 wrote: post #147

keyme wrote: post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

Post by stavros » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 9:28 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #200

stavros wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't, that's explicitly their stance. There is no line. They host everyone equally. To do the opposite would require drawing a line.

> They host everyone equally. Everyone except those that are too right wing.

Post by account42 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

kkoncevicius wrote: post #155

keyme wrote: post #140

Google search has progressively deteriorated in quality over the last 10 years, to the point where I see it becoming useless in the relatively near future. And it's mainly not even their fault. I've been using Google search for all kinds of research for 15 years. There used to be a time when you could find the answer to pretty much anything. I could find leaked source codes on public FTP servers, links to pirated sof…

Google seems to also place less emphasis on search phrases. When searching for exact article names I easily find them on DuckDuckGo, but not on Google. Two recent search-term examples: 1. the scientific worldview needs an update 2. from reproducibility to over reproducibility

Post by account42 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

remus wrote: post #201

omega3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's mainly not even their fault. It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. Two examples just from top of my head: ignoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do. Another was ignoring completely the exact phrase search with double brackets.

> It's precisely their fault, they've created an environment that incentivizes low quality, irrelevant content and are actively hostile towards users. I think this is an overly harsh take. I strongly suspect that any algorithm for ranking search results is open to gaming and manipulation by malicious users.

Post by Ueland » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 9:47 AM UTC

ultimoo wrote: post #112

Ueland wrote: post #106

I have some experience on this field. Around two years ago i was a DevOp for the company running Dagbladet, Norways #2 newspaper. One of the things I did was keep an eye on mysterious traffic. I managed to find a huge spam network that set up a proxy service that delivered normal content, but injected "you can win an iPhone!" spam to all users visiting them. Since I was in the position of being able to monitor their…

> By this time, I also got a journalist with me that started to look at the money flow to try and find the organisation behind it. Very curious to know what you found!