261–270 of 329 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With Google featuring progressively more ads and Google content at the top of the results page, it's not clear if it's still in Google's self interest to give users the best results anymore.
This is why there's an aggressive firewall between the ads and search organizations. The ranking team isn't even aware of revenue numbers by ACL.
Pintrest has the worst UI/UX of any website. It is a cancer of the internet, contributes nothing and allows re-aggregation and front-running in Google search as a feature. It baffles me why people use this piece of shit.
An image bookmarking app that can suggest similar images is a genuinely useful thing. That allows a user to rapidly collate a set of images based on some theme (so for example I use it for design/illustration projects). Despite the UI, it works, and I can't think of any other apps that do the same thing and have a better UI, so :shrug:. However I'd still agree with you 100% on its cancerous nature: it's an app with a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what the pathway for this is but just -pinterest does it for me.
-pinterest removes pages that contain the term pinterest, so pages from a pinterest.* domain, plus articles about pinterest, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> making Google’s index of the web available for use by competitors That does seem like a good idea since it amounts essentially to a database of stuff that Google does not own (by construction) and is of public utility.
Exactly. Everybody always talks about turning tech companies into public utilities without really explaining what the utility would be. A public index of the web would be an amazing utility for many of the reasons in this thread and would spur on a ton of new innovation and businesses. If you would like to read more about all this, please checkout https://knuckleheads.club
Some feedback:
- A cost of membership runs contrary to establishing this group, especially at such a high recurring charge.
- I'm not sure what your software/AWS situation looks like, but 20 million robots.txt files acquired from Common Crawl is something I can analyze on my PC. It doesn't seem to presently justify such high costs.
- Prioritize building a mockup index with an intuitive frontend. This is essential for non-technical people to understand
- Exclusively talk with EU legislators (they are motivated, whereas nothing will happen in the US).
Related: in the last several years, there started appearing these StackOverflow mirrors. It's gotten to the point that you can't google a programming question without running into at least one. Some copy the questions and answers verbatim, some use machine translation to (crappily) translate them into my native language. Sometimes they even rank higher than the real StackOverflow. I really wish there was a non-hacky…
They're pretty old. I remember when Google added an option to block domains (the option you want) around 2011 and they were the first thing I removed from my results, along with Wikipedia mirrors. After the option to block domains was removed around 2014-2015, I rarely came across those anymore, but it seems they're back...
Like: personal blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
There's no intentional or manual effort at Google to promote pinterest. Pinterest shows up because they understand how the Google algorithm works and built their website to display all the signals that Google looks for in relevant image content. They understand user intent and generate URLs that present content in a way that google expects to see. Examples of how they do this from their engineering team: https://medi…
Google should be asking from a product perspective if they are providing the search results the user is most likely seeking. I seriously doubt that most pinterest results are what users are seeking. As such, Google probably should consider changes to their algorithm to compensate (cat and mouse) for pinterest's gaming. That is assuming how pinterest does it is not against any google rules... because if it were agains…
In practice, losing customers means less money for Google. Pinterest is a large Google customer. As individual users, we are very tiny bits of a very large target, but we are not customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the risk of web scrapers getting their proprietary data That's some weird logic, to me at least. That data is literally given away to everyone but some people or organizations can't have it? If you want to control access to it, maybe at least require people to register before they can see it? Is it even proprietary if it's public with no access control whatsoever? This for-profit internet is just really such a para…
> This for-profit internet is just really such a parallel universe to me. I know I have been a contrary commentor in this thread, but I hear you with this. What a monster we have built, and what always gets me is how trivial everything is. So much capital is flowing through these ephemeral software systems that, if gone tomorrow, would be ultimately inconsequential to mankind.
> and what always gets me is how trivial everything is
Whenever I read about corporations and how they work, I always inevitably ask myself the question "where the hell does enough work to keep this many people busy even come from". Everything is ridiculously overengineered to meet imaginary deadlines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think making Google’s index public would be sufficient. Their real core asset is not the index but the historical engagement data they have of searchers’ interactions with the index (both on the results page and offsite analytics Google has access to, eg Google Analytics/display ad network). Making that historical engagement data public is not feasible/realistic, IMO.
I think it is necessary though. Other search engine operators have cited this as one of the reasons their search engines fail or struggle to provide as good results. As far as the engagement data goes, it’s something that the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK has looked at as part of their investigation into google. See here for a very interesting analysis of Google’s and Bings click and query data: https:/…
I have never worked for a search engine company (or devoted much time to SEO), but I would suggest the click-and-query data advantage is invaluable to cementing Google's supremacy over any newcomers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn’t there an option at one time to tell Google to hide results from a certain domain? I feel like I haven’t seen that in years though
There use to be an easy way to configure your account to always block certain domains, but that's gone now, so you have to use -site per-query. Maybe there are browser plugins that help? I miss the old functionality. I only had to block about a dozen sites to get great search results. Maybe it'd be less viable now; I'd probably have to block hundreds or thousands of sites, and they'd keep breeding new ones.
Then save it as a bookmark.
e.g.
"-site:foo.* -site:bar.* ..."