41–50 of 62 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, and your files you got via FTP. You searched for them using Archie. There was no web; but there was Gopher, and Veronica was the search engine for Gopherspace. Instead of Twittering, everybody was chatting on IRC. And the internet wasn't corrupted by commercials yet, as the Web is today.
"Instead of"? People still chat on IRC. I'm on IRC right now.
The central problem, I believe, is that we don't have a good model to predict a piece of information's relevance to a given reader. So far in human history the mechanisms that solve this problem have been ad hoc and error-prone - only by luck do you ever 'fall in with the right crowd' and start to get the information that you craved all along. Personally I feel strongly that this is a solvable problem, and when it is solved it will change human society forever.
I see a site like Mashable as totally optimized for social and ads. I remember a point in time when the site was interesting--when APIs seemed like new thing and hackers were "mashing" sites together on a scale like had never been done before. It chronicled the new web 2.0 trends (which I have to admit were really powerful--no one can deny that the landscape of the Internet was changing).
But now it's just a bunch of crap. Top ten lists (which, of course, make you click through each item so you'll refresh ads). And infographics: they used to be cool. Now they're just stupid charts with a graphical background and font. Every time I click one I think to myself, this didn't have to be graphical and it's not very informational. Like a movie trailer the headlines of these traffic-hoarders are catchy just to get you to click on it and once you arrive you're disappointed and 10 cookies have been dropped on you. Or you see some modal covering the content asking you to do something that will help the site proliferate itself. If you can stomach all this deception and read the meat of the article most of the time you don't feel very satisfied. You click the back button unless you're tricked into clicking another of their links.
I think the only real way to stop this is to significantly demote sites that have one than one or 2 ad units on the site.
This is the failure of google. I stopped using google about 6 months ago and started using duckduckgo. But at the time I stopped using google, one of the reasons I stopped was that the quality was so low. Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing. Of course this isn't scientific at all, but my point is-- no big scandal has erup…
This is the failure of google. I stopped using google about 6 months ago and started using duckduckgo. But at the time I stopped using google, one of the reasons I stopped was that the quality was so low. Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing. Of course this isn't scientific at all, but my point is-- no big scandal has erup…
Your focus on pagerank is at least somewhat off base, considering that it's only a factor in ranking as noted by someone below, and it's a ranking that pretty much all the search engines use as well ("The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes many factors, including but not limited to: ... the number, relevance, and authoritative quality of websites that link to your webpages").
There is something to be said for no-follow links being a symptom of something broken, but, OTOH, page rank is still a good indicator of what people out on the web find to be useful and relevant content, allowing you to find popular content, cluster it by subject, etc...essentially crowd sourcing (a portion of) relevancy via something people do anyways. Gaming was inevitable, and no-follow is really more of a way to disincentivize spammers...the fact that with no-follow you get the spammers anyways (to get human eyeballs instead of crawlers') demonstrates that the motivation is always there. If a search engine trusts wikipedia's outbound links they don't have to obey no-follow in any case, but you still have the situation that everyone will have their own favorite "impartial" external links to add, not to mention people with a vested interest in the subject.
The possibility you forget in your "microsoft can plausibly compete with [google]" point (leaving aside the fact that most people are just ignoring it) was that bing has improved, and that has nothing to do with google breaking anything.
This is the failure of google. I stopped using google about 6 months ago and started using duckduckgo. But at the time I stopped using google, one of the reasons I stopped was that the quality was so low. Hell, the quality of Google is so low that Bing is actually running ads right now with blind taste tests where people preferred bing. Of course this isn't scientific at all, but my point is-- no big scandal has erup…