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How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

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Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#41

Post by lelanthran »

raincole wrote: post #30
lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. (It would need an AI that is smarter than average human.)

> If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements.

For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now.

> That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience.

Pretty trivial to detect if the content-author (whether ChatGPT or human) is going overboard. A single page exhorting the benefits of 20 different products?

Unless that page is performing a comparison or review, pretty easy to pick it up just from the links alone. And if it is performing a review or comparison, it's going to get excluded from search results for people not looking for reviews or comparisons.

IOW, "working as intended", for me.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#42

Post by amelius »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

There may be a place for a green (climate-friendly) search engine, where every ad for physical products is penalized.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#43

Post by raincole »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #33
raincole wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. (It would need an AI that is smarter than average human.)

"Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.

> "Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'?

This is my point. You can't write an algorithm to filter them out.

> I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.

Perhaps. Personally I'd like my ads to look like ads instead of like contents. I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#44

Post by nicce »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

> allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc.

And then you need a huge anti-bot mechanism if the search engine will get any popularity. There is money-based motivation to affect the rankings.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#45

Post by hoveringhen »

ricardo81 wrote: post #20
succo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are just used to google, it doesn't mean it's better than others. I switched to DDG several years ago, now I'm used to it. Sometimes when I go back to google i think the results are just bad, because I'm used to how DDG works now. Google just shows you always what you'd like to see, this is not good at all, you just live inside a walled garden.

>you are just used to google Worth emphasising IMO. People are conditioned to using Google and its quirks, that can make alternatives engines a little less intuitive. Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

> Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.

Sorry didn't get this, what do you mean exactly?

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#46

Post by nicce »

lelanthran wrote: post #41
raincole wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. (It would need an AI that is smarter than average human.)

> If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements. For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now. > That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience…

> For me, that would be an improvement over the current 'cover content with advertisements', 'interstitials', 'user-tracking', 'privacy-abusing', 'displace legitimate search results' situation we have now.

Now, we have possibility to separate ads and real content.

With product placements, there isn't any way and you are forced to absorb all the content to see what is actually ad and real content, wasting your time endlessly.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#47

Post by cgriswald »

raincole wrote: post #43
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.

> "Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? This is my point. You can't write an algorithm to filter them out. > I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads. Perhaps. Personally I'd like my ads to look like ads instead of like contents. I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant a…

> I'd like to watch a 15-sec irrelevant ads before a tutorial than a video titled like a free tutorial that you need to watch to the middle way to realize a paid plugin is needed.

If I'm going to be wasting my time, I'd rather it be a single direct waste that I can downvote on search results and even block the creator from my future searches, rather than having my time wasted across all videos, forever. (Additionally without ad-driven algorithms videos might be shorter and more to the point.)

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#48

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wczerniak wrote: post #3

Is it worth it? Should we fight against search engine with workarounds like this? Looks like AI is just another problem with Google Search. But maybe I don't feel this pain like you do. I've fixed them all about a year ago by switching to Kagi and never looked back. Well, maybe at the beginning a little bit, but I like Kagi results more than Google now.

It gives some signal that users want a simple web search, but ultimately the HN crowd is a small minority, so it'll be statistically insignificant. I wonder how many strings were pulled to get the web search in in the first place.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#49

Post by pmontra »

triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

DDG is not as good as Google. I made an experiment now. An Italian company I never heard about sent me a commercial email this morning (I'm in Italy.) I looked for it with Google: first result. I looked for it on DDG: not even on the second page, then I stopped looking.

DDG is ok-ish for technical searches, but I remember that I often run those searches again on Google. For anything else it seems confined to the USA. By the way, I'm not logged in into Google even if it probably knows where I am. If DDG knows where I am, it doesn't care or doesn't know how to serve more relevant results.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#50

Post by HWR_14 »

voiceblue wrote: post #7
triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

The entire article is about how there is a new and easy way to get rid of Google's "little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere."
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