The problem is really not that google is doing a bad job, it’s that the incentives to get views on pages ruins the internet.
Or boost or even pin sites that I feel are extra valuable.
Back in the old days I had a txt-file on my desktop containing domains with a minus in front, llke -example.com -example.org for all the worst offenders, so that I could post them on the end of every contested search.
After a while I think Google found a way to ignore those as well as every other filter I had - at least I gave it up.
Well startpage has the same results as google, but i stopped using it for reasons I forgot.
What made you chose Kagi?
That was it.
And the first time I saw a reported bug in the search results getting serious attention and a fix I was sold.
That assumes there's a single, canonical idea of what a "good result" looks like. I imagine that's dependent on a lot of factors, from the context of why the user is searching, their demographic, and their biases. When I search for "chocolate chip cookie recipe" I want straight facts - ingredients and bullet point steps and nothing else. My mother would want some background about the recipe, where it's from, and what makes it different. You can't get that from the search term alone. You need a lot more context.
It's exactly what the promise of 'personalized search' based on tracking everyone around the internet told us it would give us but it doesn't seem to work very well.
Maybe we can't agree on what people want, but what I'm sure we can agree on is what people don't want. I don't recall anyone ever saying "I wish there were more ads in the content I'm consuming".
So we could at least start with that.
At first it was click-through rate, but that turned SEO into sites into clickbait to get high click scores. Then they switched to time spent on the site, and as a consequence we get recipes that are filled with 2h of prose above them just so people stay longer on the site.
Baking is a science, not art... so recipes calling for a cup of flour and two teaspoons of butter are useless to me, while recipes with ingredients in grams are useless to many american grandmas.
On the other hand, a pinterest page with a photo and a large overlay asking me to register is useless to both of us.
And once you start measuring some things by weight, you quickly realize that most things are easier to measure out by weight than volume (particularly sticky ingredients like honey), so you start wanting to measure everything that isn't a tiny amount by weight.
I convert all of the recipes I collect to gram measurements for this reason.
But this does not sustain the chocolate factory.
Site offers extra paid content or services, or takes donations? Rank up. Ads? Neutral or rank down based on type of ads. Affiliate links? Rank way down.
Those are more and more the same person - especially when it comes to online ventures.
They're already pushing out content to replace it with more fucking ads!
There is legitimately nothing good about them. At all.
But I don't want to "consume content", I want to "get information". Most "content creators" don't provide any info. Or at best there is some info there but you have to watch an hour worth of video for the 20 useful seconds.
People who don't have enough intrinsic motivation to create regardless of financial reward probably aren't producing anything of value. That basically excludes every for profit website out there that would be "killed" by less monetization. Killing them off is a good thing.
If you put the cart (making money) before the horse (creating value) then you are not really a productive member of society. Takers are like irresponsible children, they take without any awareness of the ramifications their behavior has on society.
This kind of attitude is similar to colonialism, an attitude representative of most of commercial enterprises today. Givers give value knowing that when they give, they receive, without any need to unnaturally focus on the end result.
If you want to live in that world, you can today by running an adblocker. All major browsers enable you to use one. Even on mobile, vast majority of ads are easily defeated with a simple DNS-based blocking. I only see a handful of ads on Tik Tok and mobile Twitter. They're still mostly bad.
That misses the entire point: Google search results will still be manipulated to push those low quality results higher because even if you don't see the ads enough people do that investing in SEO is worth for those sites.
As long as there are any ads, the incentives stay the same. You're saying an internet completely free of monetary incentives would be better. I doubt that's true but it really doesn't matter, because it won't be happening.
How to unclog a toilet is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views.
That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.
- to gather compressed information quickly
- to navigate the web
The first point is best served by sources that I like and trust, often authoritative to some degree. If they already have a good search (like MDN or Wikipedia) I will often use that directly or go via DDG: !mdn keyords..., !wiki keywords... If not, I type the name of the website as a keyword in front (like reddit...)
The second is really more about finding specific types of websites. For example John Smith's blog that I don't remember etc.
What I'm saying is that to fix the web, we need more sites that can act as the first point above. Whether they are wikis or not is more of a practical consideration. The point is that they don't suck and that there's not enough of them IMO.
I've found that a mix of search engines give me the best results, I'm trying my best to incentivize competition. If I want super local results anywhere outside the US, I'll use Google+uBlock because that's what it works, but everything else I use Kagi or DDG.
That is true to the extent that the "anything" is only a proxy for quality. Keywords, reputation, etc are all proxies.
But now with these AI models Google should be able to assess the true value of a page. Does it provide useful information? In what area? Etc. Then invert that in order to answer queries. I really hope this is where page ranking is headed.
That'd be nice, but I am skeptical for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that where Google has already applied AI, it has seemed to make things worse, not better.
Which metrics can proxy user satisfaction without turning into clickbait-land?
AI AdBlock is going to kill whatever is left of Google within the year.
AI content spam is absolutely going to kill social media and search results, but AI adblock will be worse to Google's bottom line.
It's coming, and it's going to be brutal.
But the bit of social media where people are listening to celebrities, getting their news, sharing memes, discussing common interests? It might get flooded with bots so convincing as to be indistinguishable from normal users.
Then folks will learn not to trust it just because it is a computer once everyone is announced dead, and everyone will have to make claims that they aren't.
Yeah... i prefer text. It's even wors with tech stuff.... do they expect me to retype the commands/code from the video?!
We've been conditioned into thinking text is better because we've all been through schooling, which consists of text books and a person yelling in front of a blackboard. If you let kids watch high quality YouTube videos instead, they would get a much better education.
Videos aren't dense enough, information-wise. I can't just put them up on a screen as a reference, and they require too much interaction as I have to back up, play, back up, play, back up, etc. in order to use the information being relayed.
If I only have a video telling me something, it's better than nothing, but it's going to slow me down and will inevitably leave out detail that is important to me.
Not that everything on YouTube is crap, just most things. Sometimes seeing a video of someone doing something is the only way I can figure it out. There are many particularly useful videos of how to use complicated test and measurement gear. And tying knots. But the video isn't efficient enough for me to start there.
This is what I'm trying to say: Sometimes you don't have better things to do, because you need the knowledge that is in the video. If you're doing something important and somebody comes up to offer to show you a much better way of doing the task, does this have to be the response? "I have better things to do".
Some YouTube videos are worth the time to watch, and I would argue that for recipes you'll spend your time better starting with videos vs search engines. Unless it's something you already know how to make and just need a reminder of the measurements of the recipe.
Talking about cooking, you have the BBQ channels on YouTube, with people showing you how to best cut and prepare different cuts of meat. If you don't personally know somebody to show you these techniques you'd be lost with only text content and no video.
I think it's easier for people to rage at an annoying YouTube video when trying to find information, than to rage at worthless SEO spam. But the solution is the same: close the tab and go back. It doesn't take many seconds to notice if a YouTube presenter is an idiot.
Sifting videos is tedious and time-consuming. Sifting text is much more efficient.
I have, and I really dislike it a lot. I think video is one of the worst formats to convey a recipe in.
I have seen some that write the recipe in the video description, and that's fine. But not enough do it to make YouTube a place I go to get recipes.
I'm finding some value in live chats with the repo maintainers, but that's not really viable for everything, plus won't be easy for juniors to do either.
They have enough information when yiu clock back and select a different result. And this hasnt killed SEO spam.
Nowadays, with the results being entirely spam for multiple pages, I think a return of the server-side filtering would be necessary if it's to be at all useful. Otherwise you'll get page after page of blank SERPs.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-brings-back-blocking-sit...
[1] https://searchengineland.com/googles-more-personalized-resul...
I really loved the first paragraph of the article about Reddit: "Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit". I want to add this that just happened at my company, that shows really bad execution on the Reddit side. Bad as if the current Reddit management is surfing tiny waves in some paradise.
Our company tried to use Reddit Ads for years. We are not US based and there was problems using every credit or debit card. The ones that work everywhere and. obviously, in Google Adwords.
We retried a few months ago and it worked but our Reddit ads were not approved because they were in the crypto space where indeed we are in the security auditing and research side and also work for Web3 projects.
Then, they assigned a higher level Reddit contact, they gave us several forms to fill to show that we were not in the wrong Web3 side. We completed every form over several weeks, until they say they don't have an account manager for our account. At this point I don't know if the right thing is to talk to the CXO level directly. Yes, Reddit management doesn't understand their own business and most probably loosing a lot of money.
BTW: I specifically ranted about ways of challenging Google back in 2013 in the same vein [1].
[1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
And to be clear, I think large parts of Reddit is of no interest to government agencies.
You know that is impossible to prove or disprove so that argument is worthless.
Individual topic sub Reddit’s are okay if they are strict about keeping on topic.
Anything front page is insanity.
Could you please elaborate on your question? Since our issue was supposely solved filling all the requirements there is no difference about the different spaces. This is bad execution by the book.
Which is funny as builtin search is so utter shit you pretty much need to use google to find anything
Imagine you're one of the few remaining sources of human content on the Internet, and you look at the terrible cat and mouse game google plays forever with spam, you don't really envy it. So imagine telling the world hey, reddit is the new google, everyone come do your searches (and spam) here, gl mods.
The fact that unpaid volunteers (mods) are handling the spam problem is an upside.
Yup, Google and it's main result set has for quite a while been dead to me (ya, I use DDG, and pretty much threat the main result set that way too). Finding valid detailed comments on Reddit, HN, or SE is what I use for primary clues.
Sadly, this has a predictably limited shelf-life.
When using Amazon for product search, for a short while, it worked really well to sort results by avg review grade. Very short while, as the reviews rapidly filled with fakes. Now, I need to go manually into each review set and compare the quantities and qualities of 1_Star + 2_Star reviews as a primary filter for scam products (& ignoring the idiot posts giving 1_Star for a shipping problem). Now, even using Fakespot and those tactics, the well of Amazon Reviews is quite fully poisoned, to the extent that I now specifically avoid shopping there for entire categories.
Now that this is being discovered about Reddit, HN, & SE, we can expect the inevitable "flooding of the zone with shit".
Each subreddit is controlled by a few essentially random people that likely have personal gain as one of their motivations.
If you think you aren't being advertised to on reddit just because the spam isn't as obvious as elsewhere, think again. The advertising there is more sophisticated than bots dropping links in comments.
There was a leak a while ago showed one of the moderators of wallstreetbets that was posting fake options gains, and it still gave him a massive following which he used to sell them a newsletter or something.
There are many subreddits where there will be a link in the sidebar to a monetized website affiliated with one of the mods.
And even 10 years ago, I remember at least 1 moderator of the programming subreddit somehow always had his blog posts highly voted and ending up on the front page, while any other submissions, especially ones that might counter his claims, would end up being stuck in the "spam filter". And if you messaged to have it unblocked, they'd only respond 1 day later, which means it would never show up on the front page due to the age factor of the ranking algorithm.
It's more that it's the current blogsphere. All those things that were there at the organic distributed web didn't completely go away, they just became walled, and Reddit is the only one with walls low enough to be discoverable.
It's not a search engine, it's only the place with a full link quality enumeration.
I would love something like swurl [1] but just with those three!
If you have an amazing recipe you want to keep control of, trade secret is the way. And then it can’t very well be posted to the internet.
How challenging would it be to just check common searches and generate a page that hits all relevant wordings by including those words right in the page.
I tried several different variations like "How to convert ACT score to IQ", etc. Same stupid page.
The majority of things that come up on search nowadays consist of computer-generated essays. The only way around this is to limit your search to Reddit. And I fear that soon Reddit will be flooded with AI generated fluff to take advantage of the residual "real-user" SEO.