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Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

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Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#361

Post by wildrhythms »

elorant wrote: post #277
allendoerfer wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did. In your above post.

A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?

Never thought I'd see a pro-advertising industry "hacker" on this site.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#362

Post by yifanl »

elorant wrote: post #277
allendoerfer wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did. In your above post.

A SEO company represents a plastic surgeon. They offer money to a news site to publish an advertorial. How's that spam? And that article about how to properly wash your clothes that suggests a few washing machines is also paid. That's how news media works for ages. So by your definition all these legitimate companies are spammers? Would you care to inform me how should PR be performed then?

Correct.

If you're offering me money to link you, then presumably you believe your content is not of high enough quality for me to link you otherwise.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#363

Post by wildrhythms »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #347
speleding wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For queries like that I now turn to Gemini / ChatGPT first. Of course, this is only a good idea if I have some way of sanity checking the answer. If I doubt the answer I get back I try Google search instead.

You can ask a model to provided an analysis of its answer including a probability that it is correct as part of the prompt, helps with doublechecking a lot.

Is there any evidence that these probabilities are based on any real calculated heuristic?

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#364

Post by wildrhythms »

larodi wrote: post #183
samdung wrote: post #165

The internet is an SEO landfill ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20256764 ) This is a related discussion from about 5 years ago about how SEO is ruining search. Google still seems to have a thick enough skin and a monopoly to get away with crap even after so many years of ruining search.

With the forthcoming winter of synthetic content, we may easily find ourselves, in the coming few years, forced to resort once again to directories a-la AltaVista and Mozilla's. I really see no way Google would stop their ads activities, as these provide the financial backbone. In a sense we resorted to the searchable message board, once an university homework assignment, in the form of HN here.

Rest assured the existing tech monopolies who are flooding the internet with hallucinated AI garbage will be there to sell us our own "Verified Human-Written Content" back to us.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#366

Post by skeeter2020 »

egeozcan wrote: post #317
isodev wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, webrings?

Webrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one). Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.

>> Nobody has time to do this anymore

By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#367

Post by sojournerc »

agileAlligator wrote: post #233
chillfox wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the problem is trying to turn human experience into a metric. Probably the better approach would be to have a well staffed QA team.

I honestly don't think it's possible to have a QA team large enough to handle the gajillions of websites that come up and disappear every day. They just have to come up with better and better metrics until they find one that approximates the human experience the best.

You don't have to cover the long tail... Maybe just top 10% of topics would be a big improvement.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#368

Post by skeeter2020 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #338
FullstakBlogger wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it. I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't l…

Before people knew the web was vast and required digging through. Now people think google is the web, so if it doesn't come up by the third search it might as well not exist.

You're not wrong, but this is also a great acid test. We need to work to help people understand google is most definitely not the internet, and where we fail or don't get through leave them behind. I don't know what comes next, but there's not room for everyone, and I include many here (and likely myself) in those who won't make the transition. We love to imagine people physically leaving Earth for Mars and beyond, but what follows the internet is going to happen far sooner.

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#369

Post by jorvi »

mft_ wrote: post #226
pyinstallwoes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?

I've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoeve…

> 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload.

> 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive.

These are solved by being transparent and surfacing the agent (maybe even the sub-agents) for ranking, and allowing us to choose.

This way, if someone/something is gaming the system, I can just say "this recommender is garbage", and consequently it and all its sub-choices are heavily downranked for me.

This'll make filter bubbles even worse, but that ship has sailed. And I'm sort of a progressive-libertarian-centrist (in the classical sense, not in the American sense). If I get put in a bubble with people who have similar balanced tastes: yes please!

Re: Google made me ruin a perfectly good website (2023)

#370

Post by CuriouslyC »

wildrhythms wrote: post #363
CuriouslyC wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ask a model to provided an analysis of its answer including a probability that it is correct as part of the prompt, helps with doublechecking a lot.

Is there any evidence that these probabilities are based on any real calculated heuristic?

They're consistent to the model, particularly if you ask the model to rationalize its rating. You will get plenty of hallucinated answers that the model can recognize as hallucinations and give a low rating to in the same response.
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