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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#221

Post by beefield »

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…

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google

There should be some "wiki/stackoverflow" type search engine, where would be no other algorithm but users voting the goodness or badness of a link for a given search term. (and of course, some housekeeping) Maybe also a way to indicate that hey, you are using an ambiguous search term. Do you maybe mean washington the state, dc or president?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#222

Post by astura »

jawilson2 wrote: post #205
astura wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Say you are on the west end of Springfield near the east end of Shelbyville. You don't know that area or what the surrounding towns are.

You Google "pizza Springfield." For a very literal ("stupid computer") search your results are all the pizza places on the east end of Springfield. There's no pizza in the west end of Springfield.

You waste your time calling all the pizza places on Springfield just to find out none deliver to your location.

Your results do not include all the pizza places on the east end of Shelbyville that do deliver to the west end of Springfield.

You go hungry.

This isn't an uncommon situation if you're outside of the downtown. In your example you're going to assume that every pizza restaurant near your location is a national chain that has locations in every town. Completely and totally unrealistic unless you are in a very densely packed suburbia - there is only one chain pizza restaurant within ~20 miles of my house but there's independent ones everywhere.

>People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

Google provides a useful service. So I shouldn't use it because...? Because why? it's more "manly" not to? Because search should be hard because that's the way nature intended? or... ?

What kind of logic is that? Following that logic nobody should use the web at all because it makes things easier. Or you shouldn't get delivery at all because it's convenient, you should just drive around aimlessly until you find pizza.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#224

Post by moultano »

ddnb wrote: post #214
moultano wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, this sort of pigeon-holing is mostly a problem with treating query text literally (or syntactically.) Language is full of shibboleths, and people indicate their worldview by the words they choose to use. The more naively a search engine treats the query, the more likely they are to find pages that only agree with them.

I honestly doubt the use of certain words are going to limit your search results more than the way google is 'personalizing' search results by looking at your history/interests and basing it's results around that, do you have any sources for your claim?

If you know the language to use, you can get into that world yourself. For instance [did dinosaurs exist]. Only creationists talk about dinosaurs that way, and so you only get creationist content returned. People with a conventional view of natural history never put "dinosaur" and "exist" together.

Contrast that with [did dinosaurs live] which has a mix of creationist and normal results, despite meaning the same thing.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#226

Post by mustacheemperor »

Jtsummers wrote: post #192
astura wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And, of course, Google Maps will be quite happy to serve you a litany of personalized advertisements for the restaurants in your area, but is devoid of any real route-planning tools, or information about places not worth advertising to you.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#227

Post by PaulRobinson »

corford wrote: post #155
toomanybeersies wrote: post #140

Is there anyone who's moved overseas and quit Facebook, and benefited from it? Because for me it's my primary link between my home country, where I live now, and all my other international friends. Sure, I could use email to keep in touch, but the problem with email is that it's an active communications medium, unless you have a mailing list and email everyone what you're up to, you don't keep up to date with what yo…

Yep. Not sure how old you are, maybe it's an age thing? I'm in my early thirties, live abroad and don't have an FB account. I stay in touch with my friends and family back home with phone, sms, whatsapp, skype, email and birthday/christmas cards in the post. Works fine.

You should be aware that WhatsApp _is_ Facebook, or at least is owned by them.

It'll become crap over time. Watch this space.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#228

Post by TheCoelacanth »

camiller wrote: post #189
astura wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"takeaway pizza near me" Google knows where I am right now after all, I used waze on the drive here, and have an android phone. but even using the employers PC in front of me it knows where it is. Note: I have hast a few instances where "near me" didn't work as expected.

Where else would I be trying to find takeaway pizza? Are you suggesting that if I just search for takeaway pizza Google should point me to the best takeaway pizza place in the world and only if I specify "near me" should it provide me with information that might actually be useful?

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#229

Post by gre »

fredley wrote: post #92
jf wrote: post #11

I'm relived that at least some people are leaving social media. "Gamification of personal interaction" certainly degraded my health. Quitting Facebook "cold turkey" is the best decision I've made this year.

I've quit, but not entirely. I just unfollowed everyone . My newsfeed is blank, it doesn't even have ads amazingly. Without the feed, I still get the upsides of Facebook (I can communicate with people on a platform they almost all use, I can organise events easily), but (along with a suite of tracker-blockers) remove almost all the downsides. https://blog.mamota.net/posts/solving-facebook/

You can use News Feed Eradicator Chrome plugin and Facebook becomes a chat app without having to unfollow everyone.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#230

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jbb67 wrote: post #131
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…

No. If I search for "takeaway pizza" then it's probably because I'm going to be somewhere else later. Why would I ever want to search for takeaway pizza when I'm at home. I already know where to get pizza there. Searching for my current location is probably the worst possible default

Or more likely I am already somewhere other than home and am trying to get pizza there. Who plans out where they are going to get takeaway pizza in preparation for going on a trip?
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