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The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

alexskra.com

71–80 of 359 posts

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#71
post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

I have been struggling with the same issue recently. Results are much more narrower and they seemed to be leaning towards consumer goods items. Though I don’t remember when I ever bought something coming from Google search.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#72
post #24

Somewhat related: has anyone else noticed a massive change in breadth of results? I was searching for reviews for diving equipment and some less niche items and I feel like I'm being spoonfed results from the same comparison engines. Since when did algo content become king?

Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords). Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showi…

I searched diving suit thickness and it provides to correct information as the first result...the diving suit thickness for different temperatures. Not sure why you are not getting that information

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#73
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do a slightly more difficult, less direct sequence check on the specific user. If they circle back around to Yandex in N time and go hunting for the same query or similar query, then you can rank the prior attempts as not having been ideally helpful (downrank the result/s they clicked through to when they last searched for that query two minutes ago).

Makes sense, does DDG do the same? If yes isn't that against their "We don't track users" mantra? If no how do they improve their results while missing such a powerful signal?

I would be fairly certain that DDG isn't itself tracking users in a manner that they can use that ranking approach. They don't need to.

If you do a search for the same terms in DDG vs Bing, you'll find that the results are very similar. DDG lets Microsoft do the dirty work of abusively tracking users to max out on ranking factors, and then DDG reaps the benefit. DDG doesn't need to get its hands dirty, because someone else is doing so much of that for them.

By leaning so heavily on Bing, DDG is a blood diamond merchant of privacy. They might not own the mines or directly command the labor, however they're quite happy to buy the blood diamonds to further their own profit afterward. And DDG's users go along with the scheme, because buying into the con helps them sleep better at night. It works like this mentally: those users over there (at Bing) are having their human right to privacy violated, I know it's going on, and I directly benefit from the search data training as I use DDG, but hey at least it's not me being abused, so I can do my virtue signal dance and sleep well at night comfortable in my compartmentalization.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords). Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showi…

I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs' And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example. Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'! Even putting something opposite or unrelated to…

There is an actual term defined for this. Not search high-jacking...I can't remember.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. Looking for specialized topics with Google is now very difficult. Now is impossible to look for phones, uncommon words or looking for anything that is not the mainstream result. I'm not sure if the culprit is BERT or using neural ranking. But in the last years I feel that is more common that I leave Google search without useful information. The worse part is that all the competing search engines are…

I find that using another search engine in that kind of situation is extremely useful! If I'm searching for more mainstream stuff google usually is great but when I'm going for more specialized topics duck duck go will usually bring up some different links!

Pretty much the only alternative to Google Search is Bing. That's even what DuckDuckGo uses behind the scenes.

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atleast you get the results you are looking for... I search for three keywords, and it chooses to ignore the two specific one, and show only the one general one (while puting a line under the search result, that the result does not contain some keywords). Basically, like searching diving suit thickness, and google ignoring "suit" and "thickness" (until i specifically put those two words in quotemarks), and only showi…

I play a game with google search: I take something very mainstream like a movie title, let's say 'Reservoir Dogs' And change something in it, to say 'Reservoir Cats' for example. Google search 'reservoir cats' and it will completely ignore what you actually search for in favor of the mainstream result. The effect is basically that you can't sesrch for 'reservoir cats'! Even putting something opposite or unrelated to…

I’ve noticed this but only recently began to feel like the behavior was different, I wonder how strong the correction is now relative to the past

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#79
post #23

I've seen the same here in Germany but they do appear only if you use the results within the last 24h functionality. It looks like the German content is generated through GPT2 or 3. It makes no real sense if you read it. If you go on the page you are immediately redirected to a scam just like the article mentions. Interestingly they use ".it" domains here. It also looks like the domains might have been hacked or are…

Seems like not a new thing. Here is a warning tweet from beginning July from Danish Cybersec guy @peterkruse who saw his name coming up for a different domain owned by the same registrant as havfruen4220.dk

https://twitter.com/peterkruse/status/1410895961803665410

Re: The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

#80
post #54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. I’ve been researching specific house repair issues and just get nothing but content spam. Whenever I want specific information I find myself adding “reddit” to the query string, which will usually turn up a thread with links out to the actual answer.

Said it before and I’ll say it again, when Reddit finally becomes inaccesible via searches we will have lost a huge and very useful database of succinct information.

You haven't noticed that reddit has become substantially search inaccessible a number of months back?

Every reddit page while not logged in is full of hidden content from other unrelated pages. When you search, you'll get hits in these unrelated pages-- but when you follow the link it's not there (because it's on the unrelated pages).

Worse, the pages with the correct content aren't necessarily in the results at all because it was low enough in the thread that it was collapsed and wasn't visible to the search indexer.

It's not a total loss, but I'd say about 80% of my own comments are now difficult-to-impossible to find via search when they were easy previously.

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