31–40 of 168 posts
Google doesn't want to index the web, it wants to index what it can monetize. It is a business after all, and storage space costs money.
Google will also happily surface a stackoverflow article from 2010 about how to solve a js problem... frustrating the top 3 answers will be with jquery, when its not the approach someone would take in the last 5 years. Definitely frustrating, but also showing some need to retire specific pieces of the past away from the top recommendations.
Take for example the 'how do I centre a div' type of question. You will get to find an answer with thousands of up-votes that will be some horrendous margin hack type of thing where you set the width of the content and have some counter intuitive CSS.
In 2019 (or even 2017) the answer isn't the same, you do 'display: grid' and use justify/align: center depending on axis. The code makes sense it is not a hack.
Actually you also get rid of the div as the wrapper is not needed if using CSS grid.
Now, if you try to put that as an updated answer you find there are already 95 wrong answers there for 'how do I center a div' and that the question is 'protected' so you need some decent XP to be able to add an answer anyway.
The out-dated answer meanwhile continues to get more up-votes so anyone new to HTML and wanting to perform the simple task of centering their content just learns how to do it wrongly. And it is then hard for them to unlearn the hack to learn the easy, elegant modern way that works in all browsers.
Note that the top answer will have had many moderated edits and there is nothing to indicate that it is wrong.
SO used to be amazing, the greatest website ever. But the more you learn about a topic the more you realise that there is some cargo cult copying and pasting going on that is stopping people actually thinking.
With 'good enough' search results and 'good enough' content most people are okay - the example I cite will work - but we are sort of stuck.
I liken Google search results to a Blockbuster store of old. Sure there are hundreds of videos to choose from but it is an illusion of choice. There is a universe of stuff out there - including the really good stuff - that isn't on the shelves that month.
Google are not really that good. They might have clever AI projects and many wonderful things but they have lost the ball and are not really the true trustees of an accessible web.
Folks please use startpage.com just give it a chance. It has worked out very well for me in terms of privacy and equal search results compared to the big g.
Folks please use startpage.com just give it a chance. It has worked out very well for me in terms of privacy and equal search results compared to the big g.
> You can't beat Google when it comes to online search . So we're paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is an easy heuristic, bias against ads. Google can’t do this. Original sources very likely don’t have ads, scrapes will have tons. But good results are good results. Big g has done an admirable job. They can’t exploit the best metric for quality.
No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.
Google doesn't want to index the web, it wants to index what it can monetize. It is a business after all, and storage space costs money.
If that were true, they wouldn't index any long tail content at all. The reality is, predicting what is valuable is difficult, and the cost of storage is relatively cheap.
It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…
Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)
Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters.
We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.
It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…
Google got where it was by being the best at finding what you wanted. I remember those days. Google has a hard time getting me what I want these days, and sites I do find do things to get found that make me like content a lot less (that's you, inane story on top of every recipe required to get ranked)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.
Hmm. I keep getting warnings about responding to quickly. Perhaps my account is under attack. Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different. I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.
I've been getting those too, lately. I thought maybe that my touchpad finger is developing tremor ;)