3 ms·

It is almost as if a dam has cracked and we are seeing the first trickles of "Google sucks lately" stories. It is increasingly becoming an arms race - Google tw

It is almost as if a dam has cracked and we are seeing the first trickles of "Google sucks lately" stories. It is increasingly becoming an arms race - Google tweaks its algorithms to defeat SEO, Spam and other Gamers and the gamers tweak their tactics to outwit Google's tweaks. Anybody else see an opportunity in this phenomenon to supplant algorithmic search with curated search?

spooneybarger 16y ago
the problem with curated search the first time around was that it was too hard to keep up. your curated index invariably fell behind. yahoo started out as a curated index of the internet and eventually went to algorithmic search because they couldn't keep up and that was in the 90s. i don't see how anyone could even conceive of keeping up now. perhaps you mean something more like the zero click search that duck duck go has?
- suprgeek 16y ago
  No I did mean curated. You bring up one of the key objections, with the web growing at the rate it is how do you keep up with curation? and I do have several ideas (but no pat single answer) - Google has effectively a cache of the web - These are the people who have figured out how to run rings around large data sets - MapReduce, BigTable, Colossus, etc - there are aspects of information provenance that can help fix some problems (and having a snapshot of the web should help) - Crowdsource some of the curation to improve quality - INVEST MORE in SEARCH and drop some of the other distractions - Resolve the basic conflict of interest with needing Ads to feed the bottom line but needing web users to use Google to get higher quality ad-free results - Few other more focused ideas (Really need to punch up a blog post soon :))
kmfrk 16y ago
What do you mean "lately"? This has been going on for a long time; just search Hacker News for entries related to sluggish performance on YouTube and Gmail for example. Their search being criticized for reasons different that made people switch to DuckDuckGo are, however, somewhat novel.
iwwr 16y ago
Curation predates algorithmics, but things like web directories don't have that much traffic. Although Wikipedia is an example of a successful curated site.

spooneybarger 16y ago

the problem with curated search the first time around was that it was too hard to keep up. your curated index invariably fell behind. yahoo started out as a curated index of the internet and eventually went to algorithmic search because they couldn't keep up and that was in the 90s. i don't see how anyone could even conceive of keeping up now. perhaps you mean something more like the zero click search that duck duck go has?

suprgeek 16y ago
No I did mean curated. You bring up one of the key objections, with the web growing at the rate it is how do you keep up with curation? and I do have several ideas (but no pat single answer) - Google has effectively a cache of the web - These are the people who have figured out how to run rings around large data sets - MapReduce, BigTable, Colossus, etc - there are aspects of information provenance that can help fix some problems (and having a snapshot of the web should help) - Crowdsource some of the curation to improve quality - INVEST MORE in SEARCH and drop some of the other distractions - Resolve the basic conflict of interest with needing Ads to feed the bottom line but needing web users to use Google to get higher quality ad-free results - Few other more focused ideas (Really need to punch up a blog post soon :))

kmfrk 16y ago

What do you mean "lately"? This has been going on for a long time; just search Hacker News for entries related to sluggish performance on YouTube and Gmail for example. Their search being criticized for reasons different that made people switch to DuckDuckGo are, however, somewhat novel.

iwwr 16y ago

Curation predates algorithmics, but things like web directories don't have that much traffic. Although Wikipedia is an example of a successful curated site.