31–40 of 416 posts
[reddit phone to buy]
What is astonishing, is that the most obvious part of the non-progress in search over the last two decades, is just accepted as the starting point to the way things are.
It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.
However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings.
A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.
This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.
Given how relevant forums and discussion spaces are. One would think there would be some standardized structure for it so you can search for comments or posts with criteria all over the internet.
Google does use it, last time I used it there was even tooling for it in the 'check how my site is to crawl' console, whatever it's called.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ` `, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely…
I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ` `, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely…
I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. There are currently multiple competing microdata formats out there than enable you to specify any kind of metadata but they still won't help if spammers fill those too.
Maybe some sort of webring of trust where trusted people can endorse other sites and the chain breaks if somebody is found endorsing crap? (as in, you lose trust and everybody under you too)
1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace.
2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in.
3. It tries to be smarter than me, which it fails in understanding what I am searching for. And by “understanding” I basically mean to honor what I typed and not replacing it with other words.
I try to use DDG more often but Google gives me the best results most of the time if I put in more time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ` `, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely…
It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.
You don't think we'd have rich tooling to support it and make it easy to author?
Once people are using it with success, others will follow.
This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.
Which is... reasonable.
1. SEO has totally warped result rankings. Now instead of getting results which naturally match my keywords because of content, I'm presented with almost exclusively commercial websites which are trying to sell me something. Gone are the days where you could search for technical terms and not be bombarded by marketing websites.
2. Google's AI is far too aggressive for technical searching. It is clear that Google is using NLP to parse queries and substitute synonyms based on some sort of BERT-like encoding. The problem is that a given word may have synonyms that are actually orthogonal in meaning space. For example, if I search for trunk, Google may return results for "boot" as in car trunk, instead of anything related to SVN. Contrived example, sure - but here's where the real problem is: Google's AI is regressing to the layman's mean. It is effectively overfitting to Grandma's average search query. Think of it as the endless summer of search...and since there's no way to usefully customize your search now (can't give people too many options or they might get confused!), you're stuck combing through unrelated results and it is increasingly difficult to disambiguate your search query. Remember when advanced search existed and typing in a question to search was terrible practice? That shouldn't have changed - but as more and more non-technical people started searching, Google (rightly, from a marketing perspective) seized the opportunity aggressively.
3. Primarily because of a combination of points 1 and 2 above, and the endless summer of non-technical users, informative websites have all but disappeared in search results, replaced by shitty SEO optimized blog spam and commercial websites which offer high level summaries primarily to generate traffic and sell you shit. Curious about how to repair your own roof in detail? Well don't bother searching "roof repair" (and quotes seem to be broken too btw) because the first two pages will be full of roof repair company websites.
So what is the result? The portal to the greatest asset in the history of the civilization, the internet, has gradually turned into a neutered, commercialized corporate service where users are a product. It's tragic to see all of that empowerment thrown away in the name of profit. As they say, if the user doesn't see it, it isn't there, and for this reason Google is effectively killing the internet.
I haven't even gotten into the demonstrated potential for search curation and autocomplete abuse, where Google becomes an effective, centralized arbiter of truth as the defacto portal to the internet, and how dangerous such a concentrated power over society can be.
Google really was admirable when it wasn't evil - now I'm about convinced that it needs to die.