Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

reasonablypolymorphic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 264 posts

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#71

Post by HeyItsMatt »

vector_spaces wrote: post #69
drivebycomment wrote: post #4

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…

I know that search engines are optimized to facilitate commerce, and yes, depending on the extent to which you're bought into their ecosystem, Google probably knows a lot about you, like, for instance, whether or not you've been to Koh Lanta before as a tourist, but good lord what a self-centered way (for the author of this blog post, not the parent comment) to think about this. Like, Koh Lanta is surely not just a v…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#72

Post by shadowgovt »

FTA:

> Why don’t other search engines compete on search results? It can’t be hard to do better than Google for the long tail.

I think that's the "citation needed" that the author's missing. It's not like Google is unaware of this problem, and a huge piece of their research spend goes into improving search.

It's entirely possible nobody's doing better than Google because nobody knows how. The entire paradigm Google's leading in might be a saddle-point with significant activation energy needed to escape it while still having something as usually-useful as Google.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#73

Post by marcosdumay »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #35
drivebycomment wrote: post #4

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…

Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly…

> But am I overly optimistic about historical Google?

Well, I was about to post a similar reply. It would have taken some messing around with the search string, but I'm confident I would be able to find something like this on Google 18 years ago, and I'm certain that if it exists, I can't find it now (unless it's on some big name site).

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#74

Post by carabiner »

Isn't this just getting older? You could just as well ask why is life so monotonous. There's a finite number of experiences, practically speaking, and as you go through each, subsequent versions lack novelty. This is also why time seems to speed up as we age.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#75

Post by alexalx666 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #29
warning26 wrote: post #22

There's a lot of Google hate on HN, and much of it is deserved, but I think this particular trend of blaming Google for the prevalence of useless clickbait articles is a bit much. The real answer to this question is that walled-garden social media took over everything. The much-pined-for "Old Google" worked because people used to actually create content on their own sites, and not just post it on walled garden monoli…

I disagree. The fact that Google has such a power over the shape of web traffic, along with a few other websites, absolutely re-shapes the Internet to fit whatever its standards make a website rank well. It's in many ways almost exactly the same process as natural selection. Whatever works gets traffic and gets copied by other websites, whatever doesn't fades away.

yes but we can build our own query tools, for ex. Im using `$ so graphql vs sql` and such terminal commands more and more these days

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#77

Post by lotw_dot_site »

Among other things, Linux on the Web can be used to usher in a new paradigm for accessing online resources.

The current document-centric approach has an intensely graphical (attention grabbing) aspect which very much encourages the least common denominator types of results that the author abhors.

Those who want to be more thoughtful about these things need better toolsets to allow them to focus the way that they go about their online lives (including general search).

Google is in indeed more than search. They are also the machine learning framework, Tensorflow. Linux on the Web is in as good a position as anything else to start putting the JavaScript implementation (Tensorflow.js) to very good use.

We don't need new search engines as much as we need new search engine interfaces.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#78

Post by shadowgovt »

Kye wrote: post #50
drivebycomment wrote: post #4

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…

There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get search traffic was to write a quality article tackling questions like this. Google was thirsty for answers to the ever-growing number of queries it had never seen before and would shower traffic on anyone who answered them even if it was a bad answer. A good a…

I was there for it.

It worked for a select group of toy problem domains and the answer for most high-concept searches would be noise or nothing.

The author never manages to convince me that the information they're looking for is on the Internet for Google to index in the first place. The author then asserts "don't just hit me with garbage," which is a fine assertion, except what they're interpreting as 'garbage' is the information other people making the search could actually use. Google A/B tested the hell out of "say nothing" vs. "guess something close to what the requester might care about" and the latter won out every time.

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#79

Post by talkingtab »

yazzku wrote: post #34

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?

Exactly! The top "comment" right now is: "this is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today".

Re: Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google

#80

Post by didip »

warning26 wrote: post #22

There's a lot of Google hate on HN, and much of it is deserved, but I think this particular trend of blaming Google for the prevalence of useless clickbait articles is a bit much. The real answer to this question is that walled-garden social media took over everything. The much-pined-for "Old Google" worked because people used to actually create content on their own sites, and not just post it on walled garden monoli…

I disagree because it’s 100% within Google power to purge junk websites, see Panda in 2011.

But they didn’t want to do that anymore. Why? Because of ads money.

To drive the point home, it is not that difficult for Google to have a junk score and simply phase out the junkiest of junks. But they didn’t even want to do that.

Post reply on HN