Re:Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Friday January 22, 2021 @05:32PM
(#25877135)
Yes, I can imagine that search engine folks always thought the web would be some oracle. But if you have been using the web since its debut you know that it isn't. Search results are a list of results (links, i.e., addresses/locations of the sources), not an "answer". The oracle idea (that all searches are questions with an "answer") is only realistic to some programmers. When I go to the library and search for sources (books, journals, etc), I might have a question in mind to which I seek an answer, but at the library I am only searching for the location of the sources. I do not expect an "instant answer" from the library's search terminals. In any event, not all searches are questions. Does Google Scholar return "instant answers".
For the query you tested, I could only retrieve 101 results. Could you get more than that. If you can retrieve more than 300 results (the actual results pages with the links, not just a line about how many results were "found"), I would like to know what headers you sent. I do not think this is possible anymore.
Interesting if you believe critical thinking skills are not on the decline.
Re:Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations
by PaulDavisThe1st on Friday January 22, 2021 @05:56PM
(#25877346)
Google does provide answers to simple questions, and its capabilities grow over time. Wolfram Alpha has operated in a similar domain, but using different technology (i.e. not inherently a search engine) for some time now.
request with arbitrary results accessible out of 927M: https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png
I didn't suggest that critical thinking was declining. I don't have a position on whether it is or is not - I can think of several different factors that would (collectively) push in both directions.
Sorry, but I think this is totally wrong.
I knew the guy who wrote the very first web crawler/search engine, and even then, the intent was to find answers, not websites.
Moreover, I don't see any limit on what google returns when you search. I just searched for "the trend with google today" and it told me there were 927,000,000 results. When I got to page 22 of those results, it told me that the rest were all very similar but gave me a link to fetch them anyway. I could get to an arbitrary Nth result.
The reality is that search engines actually are, by any historical standard "some sort of oracle that can provide answers".
And when they can't/don't, they still function as tools that provide you with links to help you explore the question more.
Recognizing whether or not you've actually found the answer (from a book, from deductive processes, from a human oracle or from a search engine) has always required critical thinking skills, and that has not changed.