[HN Gopher] Google Ruined the Internet
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Google Ruined the Internet
Author : midef
Score : 61 points
Date : 2020-03-31 22:00 UTC (59 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.superhighway98.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.superhighway98.com)
| bovermyer wrote:
| Fun experiment - try finding something on the World Wide Web
| without using a search engine.
|
| It's not as impossible as you might think. But it's certainly not
| easy.
| asjw wrote:
| That could be true to some extent, but the best information
| I've found on the internet since 1995 have been tematic forums.
|
| Still nowadays the best use of Google for me is to find those
| tematic forums
|
| And I must say search result quality has declined a lot over
| the years with the past 3 being worse of the sum of the past
| 20.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I came on just around altavista/google so I don't remember, did
| people only use registries before ? or word of mouth ?
|
| must be weird to buy a domain name and still be mostly
| anonymous and invisible :)
| jbritton wrote:
| Out of curiosity I have no idea how to approach this. Are there
| indexes of websites available to the public that you are
| suggesting that can be searched via grep or some simple
| scripting? Or are you suggesting writing a web crawler to build
| our own index? Or are you suggesting finding curated links to
| sites?
| takeda wrote:
| I miss the time when Internet was so small that a curated
| list was possible (Yahoo was priding itself to be biggest
| curated list[1])
|
| [1]
| http://web.archive.org/web/19990208021747/http://yahoo.com/
| bovermyer wrote:
| There are multiple ways that I know of to approach this
| problem, but part of the experiment is to explore for
| yourself.
| 101404 wrote:
| There was the Open Directory Project. Then AOL bought it and
| killed it. This is the archived remains:
|
| https://www.dmoz-odp.org/
| maps7 wrote:
| Does searching articles on wikipedia count?
| ehsankia wrote:
| I would say that using a website's own internal search is
| fair game, but good luck trying to find, for example, the
| link to a blog you forgot the name to. You can try Wikipedia,
| Youtube, StackOverflow, WaPo's article, but I doubt you'll
| ever make your way to that blog without the URL to it.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and
| push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you
| say you are.
|
| What does this even mean?
|
| The web wasn't "supposed to" be anything. Though I'm not sure
| what magic search engine OP actually has in mind and how it's
| supposed to work.
|
| Besides, one of the modern mysteries is that we're in the age of
| instant information yet you'll notice how many people will write
| up an entire comment online or bicker IRL instead of doing a
| cursory search. I don't think it's the internet creating human
| stupidity / laziness. Unfortunately we had that long before, and
| search engines simply try to show the best results with minimal
| context.
|
| Also, I think discussion around tech would be much improved if we
| tried to come up with a better idea whenever we go through the
| trouble of complaining about something. Anyone can enumerate why
| things are suboptimal, and usually when you try to come up with
| alternatives, you find out it's just trade-offs with no ideal
| solution.
|
| Trying to pitch an alternative solution (like how a search engine
| should work) helps drill down into real conversational bedrock
| that's much more interesting.
| basch wrote:
| I support the author here. There was a promise of a marketplace
| of ideas, making the world a better place, that being
| interconnected would make the world smarter and democratize
| knowledge. All that may be true, it may be out there, but it's
| damn hard to find.
|
| Google, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook all prioritize freshness.
| Instead of being exposed to things outside our comfort zones,
| we take solace protected inside filter bubbles.
|
| Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the top is
| the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the most
| politically correct.
|
| Google's results are considerably worse than they were and part
| of that is google trying too hard to think what we want instead
| of guiding us to ask better questions.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > google trying too hard to think what we want instead of
| guiding us to ask better questions.
|
| Can you explain what this means?
|
| I see people saying this wrt to Duck Duck Go: "No, the
| results aren't worse, you just have to re-learn how to search
| with it" and all they really mean is that you need to stack
| more context into the search input which is strictly worse
| since you can already do that in Google if you need to put a
| finer point on your search.
|
| And they mean that since DDG doesn't know "Elm" is a
| programming language most of the time, by "re-learning
| search" they seem to mean adding "lang" to the input. Where
| "re-learn" seems like a romantic way to phrase this obvious
| problem of the search engine needing more context. In the
| same way I had to "re-learn how to use a keyboard" when my
| crappy 2017 Macbook Pro keys started coming off.
|
| How does your complaint differ from this?
| ehsankia wrote:
| > There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas
|
| Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of
| ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
|
| The internet is a tool, not a solution. I absolutely disagree
| that it's hard to find for anyone looking for it. The issue
| is that most people aren't looking for it, and you can't
| force them.
|
| A lot of people are just looking for entertainment, and
| that's perfectly fine. They spent their whole day working
| hard, come home, and now you want to force them to spend
| their night studying and discovering new ideas? That may be
| the internet _you_ want but it 's not what people want. The
| internet can be for more than one thing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Instead of the best answer, what usually floats to the
| top is the most repeated, the most seod, the newest, the
| most politically correct.
|
| This happens quite often on Hacker News. One of the fastest
| and easiest ways to accumulate karma is to be the first to
| post something like "$hated_company has always been doing
| $horrible_thing, they need to change", which most people
| agree with, every time a popular story about them shows up.
| (Thankfully, usually only a couple of these appear in most
| discussions, and usually people don't spam this.)
|
| > Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace
| of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.
|
| Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but it's
| not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
| danem wrote:
| > Hacker News can be great for complex discussions, but
| it's not free of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
|
| Nothing on or off the internet is. That is why it is
| important to keep an open mind and read widely and
| voraciously.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Right. I think Hacker News does pretty well for itself,
| and it shows: the users that accumulate karma the fastest
| usually have insightful comments, which is rarely true
| elsewhere.
| dzonga wrote:
| which are some interesting search engines, do ya folks recommend.
| I recently ran into dogpile.com. really relevant results. please
| don't recommend ddg | bing as ddg simply mirrors bing.
| tcbasche wrote:
| The irony of the big 'gmail' address at the bottom of the blog
| post...
| miked85 wrote:
| It always seems odd to me when owners of a domain don't use
| their own domain for email.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Not everyone knows how to set up forwarding.
| CM30 wrote:
| Have to be honest, I'm surprised the article wasn't about SEO.
| That gets a lot of blame for ruining the internet, especially on
| tech sites.
|
| But Google's propensity to reward sites/pages that are popular or
| new rather than those which are actually more accurate/better in
| terms of quality is definitely an issue.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure site
| accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much like
| to chat.
|
| Well, no, I don't. But I highly suspect that they exist and
| would want to chat.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > If you have a good suggestion on how to rapidly measure
| site accuracy and quality I know some VCs who would very much
| like to chat.
|
| Bring back some variety of DMOZ, perhaps in a federated (easy
| to fork) version. That was quite successful at surfacing the
| best-quality online resources by topic, and even the early
| Google index seemed to rely on it quite a bit. But it wasn't
| a VC-funded project, of course.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| SEO is behind many of these dynamics, though. The "more
| accurate"/"better quality" signal is getting so noisy that
| rewarding freshness and hoping the user meant to search a very
| current topic is perhaps the best you can do. Quite
| disappointing of course (since we'd rather have good-quality
| content be easily reachable) but not entirely unexpected.
| remir wrote:
| It's all perspective.
|
| Google didn't ruined the internet. In fact, the internet isn't in
| ruin. Perhaps the author should reconsider treating Google, or
| any search engine, as sources of truth.
|
| And if Google ruined the internet, then why give them more power
| by using Gmail?
| gscott wrote:
| When I first starting making websites in 1996 I would market them
| by going to other similar websites and we would link to each
| other. Also, there were webrings and directories. Now if you link
| to each other Google thinks you are gaming their search engine
| and will demote your link and possibly your entire site.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| ITYM Google ruined Google?
| tomaszs wrote:
| Some years ago when i wanted to search for something, my only
| concern was to guess how it may be written dont on a page, so
| Google can find it for me.
|
| I could click next as long as i needed. I could refine query to
| get better results.
|
| But now result list is extremely limited. Refining query gives
| the same result.
|
| Google was once a search engine that allowed to discover content.
| Now, it is not.
|
| You could write an article and Google indexed it and showed it if
| people searched for it. Now it does not work that way. If your
| audience visits other pages than yours, it will show irrelevant
| info from these pages rather than perfect match from yours.
|
| And also Patelisms. Once, a short post was enought for Google to
| index it. Now it has to be essencially a book. It does not need
| to answer any question, as long as it has a length of a book and
| thousands of illustrations.
|
| I wished there was a search engine that finds pages matching
| query, not guessing answers. Giving the freedom to explore rather
| than giving cheap crappy answers.
| qeternity wrote:
| A lesson in optimizing the wrong cost function. The internet set
| information free. And like the millennia before, the masses
| congregated to gossip, laugh, fight, and whatever else helps pass
| the time.
| manigandham wrote:
| Seems like the hidden complaint is that online news media is
| mostly bullshit.
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(page generated 2020-03-31 23:00 UTC)