321–330 of 412 posts
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and reddit has gotten much less useful with all their push for login and using their app...
This in no way absolves their god awful mobile experience but if you're logged into Reddit with the new UI turned off or use the Old Reddit Redirect add-on it's basically as if nothing on Reddit changed since 2011.
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I don't think the "problem" here is bad search results -- I think the lack of clicks is thanks to search results becoming much richer. The "card" style answers that show up more and more often mean I don't have to actually visit the site where the information originated (which publishers despise, for good reason). Take a common search I made last year as an example, "covid king county" -- I almost never ended up visi…
It sucks at searching for exact things, it would often subtly by essentially change the meaning of the search. Like confusing searches for the desired "weight of scooter" with the max "weight of rider" on the scooter. What a shame, it was even a shopping related search, where the money are. They could have led me to a sale. When people are trying variations on a search it's a clear sign of failure. They should do som…
Undeniably they are the largest, most successful at search and they spend huge amounts of money on it.
And google is probably the biggest producer of ML research including? including a TON of NLP as it's a driver of their profit.
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IMO Google Image search has gone down hill significantly too. Getting full pages of pinterest results was bad enough but now on my phone you have to scroll past multiple screens worth of Google Shopping ads or images tagged with the "Product" icon before you see any actual, organic photos of the thing you're looking for.
For my money, yandex.com now has the best search results. Beware though, yandex allows NSFW by default. You have to enable safe/family search. This is the opposite of Google and Bing, so it could get you in trouble at work. Those crazy Russians.
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I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For individual content owners as well.
You don't have to put your content on google, you can add yourself to robots txt and google will respect that. You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND force them to pay for being forced to take it. A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid content with.
The observation is that Google makes money from eyeballs on ads. The reason they make money is that they can lead people to the content that they want.
The content that they want comes from websites, which benefit from the traffic google sends their way. If Google stops sending traffic their way, they won't block google in robots.txt: they'll simply shut down, because they're not making money off the eyeballs on their site.
So, it's a symbiotic relationship: Google sends traffic to sites. Sites send their contents to Google. If Google tries too hard to keep eyeballs on their own ads, then they become a strangler vine on their own ecosystem, depriving it of the resources that it needs to grow.
There needs to be a balance between the traffic that it sends to sites, and what it surfaces directly on the SERP.
I would not be surprised if the vast majority of today’s Google searches are not being made by machines, scripts, etc.
Desktop vs mobile was mentioned but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the traffic is “human”.
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It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now.
> It drives me crazy how Google never fails to remove the most unique and yet most important words of my search term. It basically does this 99% of the time now. Which is ironic, because one of Google's original innovations was to make a space an AND connector instead of OR (which its competitors used to maximize result counts). Back then, they understood that fewer, more specific results were better.
"when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me.
The real problem in searching is how to sort the results. In defense of the computer scientists, this is something nobody even noticed until they starting indexing gigantic corpora the size of the Internet.
But somebody noticed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin over at Google realized that ranking the pages in the right order was more important than grabbing every possible page. Their PageRank algorithm is a great way to sort the zillions of results so that the one you want is probably in the top ten. Indeed, search for Joel on Software on Google and you’ll see that it comes up first. On Altavista, it’s not even on the first five pages, after which I gave up looking for it."
- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-...
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Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishe…
I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the majority of search results to be utterly useless.
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…
Google has become a really bad search engine for anything besides the most superficial information about a broad range of topics, especially ones that are commercial in nature (which it is extremely good at... go figure). I spent a while trying to find the name of a contemporary artist whose name I forgot by querying those key words along with various things about the thematic etc qualities of their work and all Goog…
I've had similar issues quite a bit recently and have resorted to trying other search engines. Sadly DuckDuckGo, Bing, Wiby.me (!) and others aren't really better. Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems on the web.
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You don't have to put your content on google, you can add yourself to robots txt and google will respect that. You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND force them to pay for being forced to take it. A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid content with.
You missed the point. The observation is that Google makes money from eyeballs on ads. The reason they make money is that they can lead people to the content that they want. The content that they want comes from websites, which benefit from the traffic google sends their way. If Google stops sending traffic their way, they won't block google in robots.txt: they'll simply shut down, because they're not making money of…
There is no need to have governments force companies to pay each other when they are free to share content or not share. The government should however ensure there are no monopolies which prevent this kind of action.