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You Will Not Understand This

stanleylieber.com

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Re: You Will Not Understand This

#91

Post by rtpg »

nludd wrote: post #53
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well?

I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites?

What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprecision.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#92

Post by fredley »

jf wrote: post #11

I'm relived that at least some people are leaving social media. "Gamification of personal interaction" certainly degraded my health. Quitting Facebook "cold turkey" is the best decision I've made this year.

I've quit, but not entirely. I just unfollowed everyone. My newsfeed is blank, it doesn't even have ads amazingly. Without the feed, I still get the upsides of Facebook (I can communicate with people on a platform they almost all use, I can organise events easily), but (along with a suite of tracker-blockers) remove almost all the downsides.

https://blog.mamota.net/posts/solving-facebook/

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#93

Post by bufferoverflow »

Facebook is the worst offender. It's basically a group-think echo-chamber creation machine. With the identify politics in full bloom it's become orders of magnitude more insane. I've seen people demand their "friend" to apologise for their beliefs or they will tell their employer, as if there was anything of substance to tell. Most people are now afraid to express their religious/political/social/philosophical beliefs, cause it always ends up in a shitstorm, posturing and offense.

Only after being on FB I realized how thin-skinned most people are online, it's impossible to have a rational conversation on FB anymore. Somehow if you say same things face-to-face, nothing happens.

Maybe I'm desensitized by years of flamewars on various websites, almost nothing triggers me, and it seems like everything triggers most people these days, at least on FB.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#94

Post by sametmax »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #57
sametmax wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take would be: - now it's quite impossible to administrate your own email servers. Anti-spam measures are very effective (and enjoyable for us as users), but so paranoid that being part of the few select nodes that don't have their emails marked as spam (or are even propagated at all) is a full time job. - gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig…

> gmail dicthed IMAP in favor of their own API. Pluging an IMAP client into your email account requires to dig inside your account security settings and change several obscure values with scary names and warnings. Sometime it even doesn't work, and then you do it again later, and it works for no reason. A non tech saavy user will never succeed in doing that, and hence everybody will use the web base version. I went t…

> I went to the settings page, selected "enable IMAP" and used the values in the provided link to set up my Gmail as an IMAP account in Thunderbird. No messing around with account security, no "obscure values" to change.

A.K.A."It works on my machine". Lucky you.

> Why were those documents ever on an Internet-connected device?

Because that's the whole purpose of 0bin.net. The fact it's a good practice or not has nothing to do with the current thread. Google should not follow links in my emails. Browsing links can have a lots of side effects, and given how little my clients knows about IT, their mails provider should not mess with their mails.

> Honestly, if you didn't know back then that Google was primarily an advertising company, and that they would scan your emails to generate targeted ads, you obviously weren't following along, which seems weird considering your obvious focus on security on privacy.

So your argument is that I made bad decisions so I should not criticism Google's behavior ? That's a weird stance.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#95

Post by speedplane »

icebraining wrote: post #84
speedplane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core issue with Google today is that they've backed away from their mission of "organizing the world's information". They killed Google books, Google scholar is an afterthought, and most results either point to wikipedia or spam. They are definitely falling behind.

They killed Google books What does this mean?

Google books is done. Yes, the website is up, but they aren't scanning new books and gave up on the backlog. Try it yourself, go look for any book published since 2016.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#96

Post by lucozade »

meric wrote: post #79
netsharc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your queries would work, but Google wants to be like the secretary in the office. If you ask your secretary "I want some pizza", he would not say "Well this pizza place is the most popular in the world, it's located in Rome.", he would tell you options close to your area.

They could have two services - Google Search and Google Secretary.

They could. Or they could just do Google Secretary (because they think it's better) and let competitors try Google Search under a different brand.

Pretty much what's happened really. Turns out not that many people want Google Search when they have the choice of Google Secretary instead.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#97

Post by akerro »

jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

>Of course Google serves different results to different users, that's why they're the market leader in search. The entire job of a search engine is to return relevant results

yea, yea yea... I moved to DDG when Google stopped returning me relevant results. Not because I'm afraid of Google knowing too much, I mostly search for code/configuration problems. DDG proved to me that it has more relevant and more helpful information than Google for problems I search for.

Plenty of times Google returns me THE SAME results for different, but similar query, I change 3 from 6 words (to synonyms), and I get the same very results, that are irrelevant to my problem and query. I see them because they have best SEO and meta keywords and 5 stars under the title, or because they are similar to what I searched for 15minutes ago.

I found a bug in Android UI. I spent almost a day looking for a solution or tips how to do that thing. Google was literally useless, it could just show me links from SO that people had the same problem, google-based mailing lists, but no fix. I searched for the same thing in DDG - BANG - first result was from some crappy blog that author couldn't spell words properly, it was looking like websites from early 00's. I had a source code solution for my problem. Google shows me what Google wants me to see, well optimized websites, nice looking, fast loading on mobile, sites that cooperate with google big data plan, sites that use GA, Google Ads and AMP.

I don't want magic personalized results based on suggestion of a vibrator I was searching for 2 days ago, I want most relevant results to what I search for now.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#98

Post by nludd »

agroot12 wrote: post #82
nludd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance. Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]". >If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect". >if a British person makes the same search, th…

exactly. un-teaching mankind how to fish.

This. My mother used to teach classes in primary school how to use the computer and the internet, but appears to have forgotten most of this when browser user interfaces started prioritizing Google search. Now it's hard to get her to navigate to a URL and (even using Google) she struggles to find the information she needs because she's not used to accurate queries anymore.

I get the value proposition of Google Search, just like I get the value proposition of Velcro shoes and microwave dinners. The problem is not with the face value of these technologies, but with their assumptions and implications. In spite of Silicon Valley rhetoric, these technologies do not empower and liberate their users but make them dependent on them. The more you outsource your thinking to algorithms, the more vulnerable you are to being controlled by them.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#99

Post by datenwolf »

nurettin wrote: post #83
jdietrich wrote: post #36

>Search quality is no longer a core competency of Google, the Internet’s premiere search engine. For example: Two people type the same search string, each receives different results. While I sympathise with the general anti-social-media stance, it's clear from this phrase that OP does not understand the most basic elements of how internet services function at scale. Of course Google serves different results to differ…

You indeed did not understand this. (Error lies partly in author's lack of specifics) The problem is; we taught Google how to look for whatever information we seek by seeking it. We taught it that we are too stupid to include location information in our searches. We taught it what is spam and what is not. That's our "not spam" choices accumulating as a service over time. That's our own translation suggestions. We gav…

All more the reason, to reimplement these things, this time with strict copyleft licenses applied and rebuild the datasets.

Re: You Will Not Understand This

#100

Post by Tade0 »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #93

Facebook is the worst offender. It's basically a group-think echo-chamber creation machine. With the identify politics in full bloom it's become orders of magnitude more insane. I've seen people demand their "friend" to apologise for their beliefs or they will tell their employer, as if there was anything of substance to tell. Most people are now afraid to express their religious/political/social/philosophical belief…

> Most people are now afraid to express their religious/political/social/philosophical beliefs, cause it always ends up in a shitstorm, posturing and offense.

Or maybe they're somewhat aware that in essence "nobody cares"? All in all this service started out as a socially acceptable way to stalk people.

I have a friend who's wall consists mostly of political commentary. Clearly what he wants is attention, because any reaction to his posts is usually met with a textwall of his views, which anyone acquainted with him is aware of, so no discussion aside from the usual fecal matter throwing is possible.

With time less and less people engaged him and currently his posts get no likes or comments. He became a one-man echo chamber.

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