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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

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Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#271

Post by GuB-42 »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #172
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.

Ignoring double brackets drives me crazy. That's the last straw that sent me to DDG, although I have to say that DDG isn't much better either. What made me really angry aboyt Google Search was when they removed their function to search in discussion forums. But even then you could more or less filter out crap. Nowadays it feels very hard. I find myself using the site: flag many times, but you need to know the site be…

I think there is a market here. "Dumb" search engines, that search exactly the words you type, maybe with advanced features like regex, metadata search, etc... It won't replace Google's guesswork, but sometimes, I just want to grep the internet.

All non-Google engines are all about privacy, which is nice, and almost a requirement if you want to compete with Google, but I'd like to see features that actually improve search too. DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#272

Post by zadler »

nullc wrote: post #80
zadler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.

You haven't noticed that reddit has become substantially search inaccessible a number of months back? Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages). Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all…

We seem to be approaching a point where it could be worthwhile to get a distributed index involved even if it is very slow and inefficient to update.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#274

Post by wil421 »

Adrig wrote: post #169
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…

One of the last use case for Google is being a proper search engine for Reddit. But I think they are aware of their downfall, that's why the top of the page is increasingly taken by their widgets to provide directly the information. On the other hand, Youtube is the second most popular search engine and I don't see it slowing down. What an insight they had when they bought it. Edit : I entirely agree to the fact that…

When I’m looking for reviews of a product I usually type XXX review Reddit to avoid the XXX top 10 list blog spam that google returns. I don’t want a review from someone who just jumbled together a top 10 list without ever looking at the product in person.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#275

Post by fukmbas »

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…

You're delusional if you think Google search is going anywhere lol

Google search used to include discussion. They'll bring it back

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#276

Post by lelanthran »

avian wrote: post #177
eru wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might take that stance, to avoid liability and complication. At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.

How is that different from a hosting provider that has to address legal complaints regarding spam, copyright infringement, etc. on their servers? Just like a hosting provider, they specifically have a relationship with the website owner to provide the reverse proxy service. It's not like they can say "we don't know who or how our service is being used". It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they hav…

> How is that different from a hosting provider

If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").

In other words, a common carrier.

Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#277

Post by DoingIsLearning »

account42 wrote: post #204
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.

> gnoring the country website, previously if you wanted to search only local news it was very easy to do Also the opposite: insisting on pushing local and localized results on google.com even when I set my browser language to english.

They used to have google.com/ncr

'ncr' stands for no-country-recognition and it did what it said on the tin.

Of course like all useful power-user features it got deprecated for the natural language query non-sense we have today.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#278

Post by tyingq »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #228
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…

Can I just clarify? There is / are organisations that a) scrape legitimate sites for content, b) host that content on their own 100K domains, c) sit behind cloudflare, d) do some seo??? e) when someone finds their site they then inject an ad or similar rubbish f) do this enough that they make money off the ad / competition / porn ? That seems like a problem that the ”original-source” metatag was supposed to stop?

Canonical urls help with noting your own purposeful duplicated content. But that meta tag goes on the duplicated content. So it doesn't help with scrapers, who strip that out.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#279

Post by mojzu »

kall wrote: post #252
mojzu wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what you’re searching for, for dev related stuff no other search engine I’ve tried comes close. But there are whole industries now that are so heavily SEO’d that finding useful information without knowing the exact keyword to search for is incredibly frustrating

I agree, and I‘ve read the opinion too that it‘s a problem people have with DDG. Yet google doesn’t feel excellent at that. Could it be worth competing with google there? I‘m not gonna say it‘s "easy", but maybe worthwhile and possible? I don‘t think I have used more than 1000 different sites in all development searches ever. It‘s the stack exchange network, github, official documentation, non-github official issue t…

I think a tool like that could be very valuable, as you said in most cases you end up in the same few common locations. Most of the time the reason I fall back on google is because I'm not sure whether what I'm looking for is going to be in a github issue, in a bug tracker, in a forum, in a stackoverflow answer, in a mailing list, etc.

There was a docs aggregation site I tried at one point that was quite useful, but without search across issues/forums etc. I didn't end up sticking with it

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#280

Post by Schnurpel »

If I would run a global infrastructure company like Cloudflare, I also would not take any sides, and leave my service open to anyone. The world is full of people who get upset about something. However, if I declare a hands-off policy, it must be truly hands-off. Cloudflare kicked off Switter https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17256370/switter-cloudfla..., it banned 8Chan https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ , it banned the Hacker News https://mobile.twitter.com/thehackersnews/status/66900183605... . That’s not how hands-off works.
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