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Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

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Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#221

Post by darinf »

BLanen wrote: post #157

The reason that cookies are not a browser setting is NOT because of a technical limitation. Besides, if it was a browser setting, I would hope most people would have default "no, you can't store cookies except for the functional ones" and not "yes, store a thousand tracking cookies". It is because of a power issue. It would have to be a protocol change. Google owns the largest browser. Google doesn't want it to be a…

Check out cookie cutter by Neeva: https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-cookie-cutter-by-neeva-a-...

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#222

Post by rg111 »

deelly wrote: post #178
greybox wrote: post #70

I switched to using kagi.com a while ago, and I've never looked back. I've tried to use duckduckgo before but just ended up using '!g' most of the time. Kagi is in a whole other league. It's on par with, if not better than google search. I highly recommend it. When they introduce the paid tier I'm sure as hell going to subscribe to it. At this point I would trade my Netflix subscription for it.

Could you show some examples of search results?

I remember these from yesterday:

    1. Quotes on abstraction
    2. How does jpeg represent images
Google gave me bunch of spam, but Kagi gave me sites I could actually learn from.

In case of code.you.com vs. Google: 1. Write a recursive max function for lists in Scala

Not much different from Google, but surely a search dedicated for code only feels better.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#223

Post by davedx »

marricks wrote: post #193
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years ago there were some serious Warnings issued from Google: Make your website fast and small! Popups will be PUNISHED! as will mobile-unfriendliness! But in hindsight, this was a ploy from them to try and upsell AMP, which was in a lot of cases heavier than non-AMP websites, and it was a means to keep people inside of their ecosystem - and inside of their advertising network, because not all websites Google l…

They own the web through Chrome, it’s one of their best investments. They’re killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed IE with it (rest in piss). We’re getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.

I use Safari for everything except front-end web development on MacOS now. I started because it's more energy efficient but I got quite used to the UX and now I'm glad I switched.

I'm hopeful there are a lot of Mac users like me out there.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#224

Post by technothrasher »

chongli wrote: post #195
Beltiras wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?

Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the…

> based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).

Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#225

Post by quadcore »

deelly wrote: post #191
quadcore wrote: post #170

So I will reiterate my little theory, this is not entirely Google's fault, regulations, especially KYC are responsible for this. KYC is incompatible with having a free zone. This is actually the aim of KYC, to remove free zones. If you dont get it, let's take an example. The flat tire mustard-yellow webpage. This page is not KYC'd. Are they laundering money through their website? Are they rallying people for a bloody…

Sorry, I still don't get it. How exactly KYC is responsible to crappy web search results? Should it be other way around?

Regulators dont want mustard-yellow webpage anymore. They dont want anything they don't Know.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#226

Post by mlom »

"Nothing wrong with that, making money is noble"

this right here is why you never make any progress and never fix anything and you never understand why everything sucks, you keep rewarding perverse incentives and greed and then try to work around it as if greed were not the central problem.

making money is not noble, making money does not represent increasing value, it only represents cornering tokens of others' labor time, which you have just observed takes the form of profiteers intentionally seeking ways to waste your time.

improving the world is noble, and whether you make money or not, you get to live in a better world.

linus was awarded a salary because people were EMBARRASSED that they were profiting so much off his free work.

you all should be a lot more ashamed.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#229

Post by marginalia_nu »

chongli wrote: post #195
Beltiras wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?

Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the…

I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech.

There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint.

My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on.

As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.

Re: Why Google is so unbearable, and how to fix it

#230

Post by JKCalhoun »

BurningFrog wrote: post #179
mrweasel wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two choices. Either Google are no longer interested in finding the best answers to your queries. Or as you point out: They don't care, that is no longer what they do. I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try searching for anything related to health and get a usef…

My thought is that the Web has adapted to Search. When Google started, the web was honest and innocent. People linked to the pages they liked, and Google could crowd source those links and raise up the most popular pages. Now most of the web is lies meant to confuse search engines. Figuring out what pages are good is no longer a feasible task for software.

I don't doubt the narrative as you relay it, but I question how hard this can be for one of the largest corporations with one of the largest engineering pools in the world.
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