401–410 of 555 posts
>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? >You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (Th…
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> Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) Are there any search engines that do this? It's a great, simple idea.
Not really that simple, I see a lot of potential for abuse - using bots and brigading to mass downvote your competitors or political opponents. Couple of positions up or down in google results for somewhat popular and valuable keywords can mean the difference in thousands of dollars per day of ad or affiliate revenue. I suspect it would get pretty wild if google launched something like this. There already are black-h…
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Bang on. Saying that "there isn't anything out there anymore" is missing the point: Google's algorithms created this situation , intentionally or not. Before Google, people linked to what they wanted and communities would naturally cluster around topics of interest. Google came in and made reputation into a currency which effectively destroyed all these communities through incentivizing selfishness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -- Goodhart's Law. Google's algorithms didn't create this situation; people chasing high Google rankings did. Had Google used completely different algorithms yet became equally dominant, people still would have poured their hearts and souls into getting higher rankings. Basically, an application of the tragedy of the commons. Or: "why we can't have nic…
Then Google came along and we all found it a lot more convenient than the bad search engines we were used to. And of course, we all know where that led. In some sense, Google built an 8-lane superhighway and bypassed all the small towns.
We all traded away paradise in exchange for convenience. Now we have neither.
I'm seeing a lot of comments along the lines of, "Google shows ads on the SEO-gamed sites that show up in results, so their incentive is to give spammy results". But wouldn't this predict that results would be much better on Bing and other search engines that don't have much presence in the "put ads on random sites" market? (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
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I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search. So from an individual developer perspective, it's very hard to get people to change their habits. And Google/duck/Bing is the one stop shop. It's still out there, but I haven't worked on it much lately. I always think that if I had some good a…
> I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search. Link please
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I tried creating a search engine for recipes. It works well and people like it, but the struggle is no one remembers that it exists and Google is just their default for search. So from an individual developer perspective, it's very hard to get people to change their habits. And Google/duck/Bing is the one stop shop. It's still out there, but I haven't worked on it much lately. I always think that if I had some good a…
(1) What is it? (2) Do you have a bang on DuckDuckGo? I'm pretty aggressive with bangs, and I suspect a lot of DDG users end up being aggressive with them as well.
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There aren't as many blogs now as there used to be.
I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all. Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.
Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome.
What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web.
It's even noticeable in a lot of online discussions with text outside of these communities; The average length of forum posts feels like it's gotten way shorter over the decades. People have less attention to read anything that looks longer than a few sentences, often declaring it a "wall of text" based on quantity of text alone.
Imho it's a big part of what drives misinformation; Doing any kind of online research on a small phone screen is extremely bothersome compared to the workspace an actual computer/laptop, particularly with multi-monitor, gives.
There's also the difference in attention; When I sit down at my laptop/desktop, I actively decide to spend and focus my attention on that task and device.
While smartphone usage is mostly dominated by short bursts of "can't do anything else right now", I don't chose to take out my phone and surf the web, it's something I do when I'm stuck in some place with nothing else to do and no access to an actual computer.
But for the majority of web-users [0], that smartphone access to the web is all they know, which then ends up heavily shaping the ways they consume and contribute to it.
[0] https://techjury.net/blog/what-percentage-of-internet-traffi...
To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find…
It’s a bit funny because this we sort of done by Jason Calcanis’ Mahalo back in the day - but maybe he was just ahead of the SEO curve.