61–70 of 264 posts
I would also ask, why is HN so monotonous? If you compare 'new' vs what goes on the wall, you'll see a non-trivial amount of Big Tech bias and very good posts (often criticisms) effectively getting censored. Is the paycheck that good?
A bazaar of boutique search indexes provided by People seems like it would be nice to have. Better than Google constantly trying to sell me shit.
[1] https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/048293268d4ed4254659c3cd6abe67...
Google is not the front page of my internet. I recently decided to create my own landing page, stored locally on disk, with a funny gif and favicon.ico, and a shortlist of my most used work and personal links (including this site!). No ads, no tracking. Shockingly - I had to install browser extensions to override the new tab page in both Edge and Chrome. This used to be a built in setting! Shady guys. Very shady. Alt…
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>The correct result is to return pages containing "Croatia" AND "Koh Lanta". But that isn't the correct result. "Koh Lanta" is being used by the OP to describe the vibe of a place "having tourist amenities without being touristy." It isn't a common English idiom, but one they made up based on their personal experiences as a tourist in Thailand. Results which simply contain the text "Croatia" and "Koh Lanta" aren't go…
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
It did used to be possible to craft searches that'd find that kind of thing, with Google. Not in natural language, but you could guess enough unusual words that might show up on a page that had that info to zero in on it. Their apparently paying a lot less attention to certain things (like link text—"what might someone use to describe a link to this resource, but which might not appear on the resource itself?" used t…
That being said, I remember my cousin had a blog where he was writing utter nonsense about trending topics and he was actually able to pull enough money from Ad Sense to afford a pub crawl once a month.
Now of course all of this is streamlined - one button website generators with AI content and posts for given topic and self optimising for engagement and advert clicks etc.
But I see Google has thrown in the towel and no longer cares for search results.
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost.
Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist.
The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran. So what do you think is going to happen to some place that 300+ million wealthy people around the world can search in a few seconds and find out it's cheap an empty. The answer is "become busy and expensive".
The only reason places like this still exist is Google can't find them.
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
>having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost. Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist. The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran.…
This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap…
Like, Koh Lanta is surely not just a vacation destination, it's also a place where people live their lives, go to work and school, are homeless, deal with illness. The expectation that Google will assume that by "koh lanta of croatia" you're really asking "vacation destinations in Croatia that are similar to Koh Lanta, Thailand" really rubs me the wrong way
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> Not as shady as the fact that Chrome by default sends your entire browsing history to Google for analysis. Citation needed. Are you saying that, as I click around the site here, Google knows what comments threads I'm interested in? Edit: I think they're talking about the History sync, which does indeed by default send Google every link you visit, but only if you explicitly enable it. We should get access to this da…
Yes. And I can prove it to you. Settings > Sync and Google Services > Other Google Services > Make Searches and Browsing Better. Underneath the setting it explains, "Send URLs of pages you visit to Google".