7 ms·

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 smart

by basch 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > 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 Hum, not exactly. Google will ignore extra context that doesn't match your profile. People coped very well when it didn't.
ehsankia 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      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.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
Yup. one thing I hate about google search is that it gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm actually asking for. Also, the "politically correct" bubble mask is in full effect. Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore. There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are really well done.
- abruzzi 7y ago
  I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest frustration on the web. Lots of different search engines think it is better to return lots of unrelated garbage rather than returning no hits. No hits has actual meaning to me about my search, changing my search to return stuff I don’t want is just noise.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    Just add '+' sign before each keyword- seems to be working. I tried a sequence of 10 or so random and made-up words to see if it will find anything.while it returns results, it does it on a shorter search and it also says at the top that no results were found for this query.Then I started removing one keyword at the time and return the search. Eventually it found a matching result and it contains all four words from my query.
    - nkurz 7y ago
      Are you sure this is on Google? I just tried with a three word query, and it failed for me.[1] If true, this would be big news, as the "+" qualifier on search terms stopped being obeyed about a decade ago with the launch of... whatever that now-forgotten Facebook competitor Google used to have. The workaround was to use quotes around individual words, which mostly worked, unless it didn't. But the combination of using quotes and "verbatim" (under Tools/All Results") almost always worked. [1] The way it failed is sort of interesting. I randomly tried "+rhino +cereal +gm", and the first result didn't include the word "rhino", and considered "gm" to be a synonym for General Mills. Quotes around the individual terms seems to work for this query, even without verbatim.
kursus 7y ago
> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place I have been there since the old times of IRC and I have never seen anything promised.
Barrin92 7y ago
>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 Did anyone really believe this other than middle aged libertarian hackers from the 90s who kept repeating this in prayer like fashion? The internet is, as the name suggests, a network. Google also is a sort of network, one that is semantically searchable. But Google Search is not a fact checker. It doesn't have an editorial room for every piece of content it exposes, it doesn't have deep knowledge about everything it throws back at us, and it could not have those things at the scale it operates. That's not Google's fault either. It's not a search engine's job to correct wrong reporting. It's the job of journalists and news outlets to fact-check information, it's the job of citizens to be critical of the information they consume, and it's the job of governments to facilitate that this happens. It's our fault that our civic institutions have degraded, and not the fault of Google that it spits our own stupidity back at us. It's not Google's fault that we don't like what we see when we look in the mirror and techno utopianism isn't going to save us either.
- basch 7y ago
  >Google mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It does not succeed as well as it did in the past at its current mission. It has regressed.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I think it’s mostly the average quality of the information available has regressed. I’m fairly certain they’re doing the best they can with what’s available to them, but right now they probably get more accurate results by focusing on what is popular than by blindly accepting the contents of the websites.
    - basch 7y ago
      That goes back to them upranking fresher results. If the old results were better, they should keep them at the top and ignore fresher but worse quality content. Google exists to rank content, and it should be by quality not age.
enneff 7y ago
> 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. I vividly remember the promise, and believing in that promise, but there was never a time that the Internet was this. In retrospect I don't see why we should have believed in it in the first place.
huffmsa 7y ago
This is correct. Try filtering Google news by date. It doesn't work.
- basch 7y ago
  I just had one today, said the result was from 3 days ago, result was from more than a decade ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617635
  - gre 7y ago
    It used to work well for Reddit, but now you can't trust the date filter. Something changed less than a year ago.
    - basch 7y ago
      It's like sites are modifying their templates, and it refreshes the published date, and google goes off that page change date and not the date on the page. It's terrible and googles search by date is now nearly useless. Sometimes it helps filter out old results, but it is impossible to keep new results from bleeding into the past.
threatofrain 7y ago
Politically correct is what people like, IMO, as measured by Disney products. I don’t believe Disney is politically correct as a matter of whim, as opposed to well measured brand strategy.
eyegor 7y ago
> 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. Wikipedia does a damn fine job in my opinion. You can find decent, democratized knowledge on almost any topic complete with translation into your preferred language (if not on wiki, then through google translate). Or efforts like MIT's open course ware, which hosts lectures and syllabus materials on a variety of topics. There's also arxiv derivatives and a thriving black market (scihub, libgen, etc) of open access to research papers on any topic you'd like. Social media =/ the internet.
rdiddly 7y ago
The funny part about democratizing knowledge is that it happens on the supply side too. In a knowledge democracy, knowledge comes not just from the knowledge elite, but from the knowledge poor as well! ;) No but in all seriousness, the mistake was in relying so heavily on private corporations motivated by profit. An unpopular idea is an unprofitable one. I'm not sure what a non-profit Google would look like... maybe the same... but I feel pretty confident that a non-profit YouTube for example would likely have a totally different recommendation algorithm.
cosmodisk 7y ago
The tech has changed,not humans. Back in the day, Romans were happily watching gladiators slaughtering each other and all they cared was 'bread and entertainment'. Obviously not everyone, some tried to invent things,do commerce,medicine and etc. Those were the curious ones. It was a small percentage then and it is a small percentage now. The majority are much simpler people. The internet is bursting at its seams with amounts of knowledge available one click away from potential users( yes,you may need to look deeper to find it) but majority don't need it,they want entertainment and they get it.
- caetris1 7y ago
  You're spot on. But really... all people are basically the same. And like Google, they're incentivized by the system to be horrible to each other and/or horrible to the environment. I think people all have a choice. But I think the good choices are really hard to make when you're only surrounded by bad choices.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    Human life is usually too short to care too much and we also get bogged down with stuff like work and family,so all those 'great ideas' quickly turn into distant dreams for many.
    - caetris1 7y ago
      Yes, absolutely. And it's completely the right idea to focus on building a great life and family. Things will get better. People never stop dreaming.
UnpossibleJim 7y ago
What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of people or make the same amount of money as MacDonald's. You can't always scale up a BBS to serve 2.5 billion people and expect it to have the same charm and not expect companies to charge for services to getting results. Dial up services and bulletin boards had their charms, but this internet is way better =)
- basch 7y ago
  Personally I just think google is losing to seo because google is playing it too neutral and not opinionated enough. Like facebook, they want decisions to look like math chose the answer, and not people, because they want to deflect accusations of bias. Google would be better if it were more opinionated. I go there because I WANT them to rank results and tell me what they think are the best quality answers. Google may also be lost in an A/B testing catch 22 feedback loop, where what gets clicked gets elevated, and whats elevated gets clicked. The less straightforward, more clickbait cryptic results get clicked to see what they are. The result that spells out all the answers might not get a click at all. Ive noticed in the last year or two wikipedia not even being on the first page of searches it should be the top two or three results for.
  - UnpossibleJim 7y ago
    They can put in optimization and skew the results with opinion, but not doing that might have more to do with lawyers than desire. There is a keen eye on their search results as far as political and business results are concerned.
  - dbuder 7y ago
    Except that Google is quite happy to manually adjust things for their own ends, they just lie about it. They arrange search to make them money, not to help us find what we want.
vkou 7y ago
> 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. There was never any such promise, no contract signed in blood. It was just the wishful thinking of a group of people sharing a particular political persuasion. Just because a monocultural group of pioneers who are all radical thinkers (But not too radical) build something, doesn't mean that the people moving into what they build are interested in sharing, or even tolerating their idiosyncratic culture or politics. The web is supposed to be a way to route a bit of information from one computer to another. This is so low-level, and so broad, that it proscribes nothing about the outcome.
geofft 7y ago
I strongly disagree that the democratization of knowledge is hard to find / that what floats at the top is the most popular, and I strongly disagree that Google is doing anything to make it so. Imagine in 1995 asking someone whether MSG is harmful or whether razor blades were ever found in Halloween candies. You would hear fairly confident answers of yes to both. Perhaps someone would feel like checking things, and they'd pull out a book of popular facts or an encyclopedia that happily answered yes (or perhaps no) without much discussion, and that would be the end of it. (The Encarta College Dictionary, which awkwardly straddled the transition from books to the internet, had an entirely uncritical definition of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" as a real thing, for instance.) Go to Google and type in "is msg harmful" and the featured snippet says that while some people have a sensitivity to it, it's definitely not harmful in anywhere near the amounts used in food. Go to Google and type in "razors in halloween candy" and the top result is a Wikipedia page debunking the urban legends of the '80s. After it is a YouTube video reporting on an actual case of razor blades being found in candy this past Halloween, which Wikipedia hasn't been updated for. In a single Google SERP above the fold, you already have a more accurate synthesis of multiple sources than any single publication has. (And no, I didn't plan this, I didn't even know about the 2019 cases until just now!) What about political correctness? There's no shortage of content criticizing either the current president or his political opponents past and present. Or, say, search for "puberty blockers" and you get YouTube videos both in favor of them and against them, an handout from Seattle Children's Hospital on how to get them, an article from The Federalist on why they're clearly dangerous, a paywalled article from The Economist discussing it, an article from NBC News saying they've lowered the suicide rate among trans kids... basically any viewpoint you want or don't want, you can find it. It's all there.

by basch 7y ago

hombre_fatal 7y ago

> 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?

marcosdumay 7y ago
> 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 Hum, not exactly. Google will ignore extra context that doesn't match your profile. People coped very well when it didn't.

ehsankia 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

Yup. one thing I hate about google search is that it gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I'm actually asking for. Also, the "politically correct" bubble mask is in full effect. Furthermore, it's so heavily weighted to only show results from sites with lots of SEO juice. I can't find what I'm looking for anymore. There are some areas where google really excels and that's in technical searches. Those are really well done.

abruzzi 7y ago
I don’t know about the “politically correct” comment, but the one thing I would ask of google if I could ask for something that they would deliver is to ALWAYS return results where ALL of my search terms are included. It doesn’t have to be verbatim, I’m good with them doing conjugations and maybe synonym matching, but if I add a qualifier to my search query, I didn’t add it because I don’t need it. This is my biggest frustration on the web. Lots of different search engines think it is better to return lots of unrelated garbage rather than returning no hits. No hits has actual meaning to me about my search, changing my search to return stuff I don’t want is just noise.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Just add '+' sign before each keyword- seems to be working. I tried a sequence of 10 or so random and made-up words to see if it will find anything.while it returns results, it does it on a shorter search and it also says at the top that no results were found for this query.Then I started removing one keyword at the time and return the search. Eventually it found a matching result and it contains all four words from my query.
  - nkurz 7y ago
    Are you sure this is on Google? I just tried with a three word query, and it failed for me.[1] If true, this would be big news, as the "+" qualifier on search terms stopped being obeyed about a decade ago with the launch of... whatever that now-forgotten Facebook competitor Google used to have. The workaround was to use quotes around individual words, which mostly worked, unless it didn't. But the combination of using quotes and "verbatim" (under Tools/All Results") almost always worked. [1] The way it failed is sort of interesting. I randomly tried "+rhino +cereal +gm", and the first result didn't include the word "rhino", and considered "gm" to be a synonym for General Mills. Quotes around the individual terms seems to work for this query, even without verbatim.

kursus 7y ago

> There was a promise of a marketplace of ideas, making the world a better place I have been there since the old times of IRC and I have never seen anything promised.

Barrin92 7y ago

>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 Did anyone really believe this other than middle aged libertarian hackers from the 90s who kept repeating this in prayer like fashion? The internet is, as the name suggests, a network. Google also is a sort of network, one that is semantically searchable. But Google Search is not a fact checker. It doesn't have an editorial room for every piece of content it exposes, it doesn't have deep knowledge about everything it throws back at us, and it could not have those things at the scale it operates. That's not Google's fault either. It's not a search engine's job to correct wrong reporting. It's the job of journalists and news outlets to fact-check information, it's the job of citizens to be critical of the information they consume, and it's the job of governments to facilitate that this happens. It's our fault that our civic institutions have degraded, and not the fault of Google that it spits our own stupidity back at us. It's not Google's fault that we don't like what we see when we look in the mirror and techno utopianism isn't going to save us either.

basch 7y ago
>Google mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It does not succeed as well as it did in the past at its current mission. It has regressed.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I think it’s mostly the average quality of the information available has regressed. I’m fairly certain they’re doing the best they can with what’s available to them, but right now they probably get more accurate results by focusing on what is popular than by blindly accepting the contents of the websites.
  - basch 7y ago
    That goes back to them upranking fresher results. If the old results were better, they should keep them at the top and ignore fresher but worse quality content. Google exists to rank content, and it should be by quality not age.

enneff 7y ago

> 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. I vividly remember the promise, and believing in that promise, but there was never a time that the Internet was this. In retrospect I don't see why we should have believed in it in the first place.

huffmsa 7y ago

This is correct. Try filtering Google news by date. It doesn't work.

basch 7y ago
I just had one today, said the result was from 3 days ago, result was from more than a decade ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22617635
- gre 7y ago
  It used to work well for Reddit, but now you can't trust the date filter. Something changed less than a year ago.
  - basch 7y ago
    It's like sites are modifying their templates, and it refreshes the published date, and google goes off that page change date and not the date on the page. It's terrible and googles search by date is now nearly useless. Sometimes it helps filter out old results, but it is impossible to keep new results from bleeding into the past.

threatofrain 7y ago

Politically correct is what people like, IMO, as measured by Disney products. I don’t believe Disney is politically correct as a matter of whim, as opposed to well measured brand strategy.

eyegor 7y ago

> 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. Wikipedia does a damn fine job in my opinion. You can find decent, democratized knowledge on almost any topic complete with translation into your preferred language (if not on wiki, then through google translate). Or efforts like MIT's open course ware, which hosts lectures and syllabus materials on a variety of topics. There's also arxiv derivatives and a thriving black market (scihub, libgen, etc) of open access to research papers on any topic you'd like. Social media =/ the internet.

rdiddly 7y ago

The funny part about democratizing knowledge is that it happens on the supply side too. In a knowledge democracy, knowledge comes not just from the knowledge elite, but from the knowledge poor as well! ;) No but in all seriousness, the mistake was in relying so heavily on private corporations motivated by profit. An unpopular idea is an unprofitable one. I'm not sure what a non-profit Google would look like... maybe the same... but I feel pretty confident that a non-profit YouTube for example would likely have a totally different recommendation algorithm.

cosmodisk 7y ago

The tech has changed,not humans. Back in the day, Romans were happily watching gladiators slaughtering each other and all they cared was 'bread and entertainment'. Obviously not everyone, some tried to invent things,do commerce,medicine and etc. Those were the curious ones. It was a small percentage then and it is a small percentage now. The majority are much simpler people. The internet is bursting at its seams with amounts of knowledge available one click away from potential users( yes,you may need to look deeper to find it) but majority don't need it,they want entertainment and they get it.

caetris1 7y ago
You're spot on. But really... all people are basically the same. And like Google, they're incentivized by the system to be horrible to each other and/or horrible to the environment. I think people all have a choice. But I think the good choices are really hard to make when you're only surrounded by bad choices.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Human life is usually too short to care too much and we also get bogged down with stuff like work and family,so all those 'great ideas' quickly turn into distant dreams for many.
  - caetris1 7y ago
    Yes, absolutely. And it's completely the right idea to focus on building a great life and family. Things will get better. People never stop dreaming.

UnpossibleJim 7y ago

What people don't like to admit is that Google, YouTube, Reddit and Facebook all prioritize market share above some odd gatekeeping ideal that people have decided an idealized internet should be. They've turned it into a MacDonald's instead of a Tavern on the Green, because that's what most people find accessable even though it's worse in almost every way. But, Tavern on the Green could not serve the same number of people or make the same amount of money as MacDonald's. You can't always scale up a BBS to serve 2.5 billion people and expect it to have the same charm and not expect companies to charge for services to getting results. Dial up services and bulletin boards had their charms, but this internet is way better =)

basch 7y ago
Personally I just think google is losing to seo because google is playing it too neutral and not opinionated enough. Like facebook, they want decisions to look like math chose the answer, and not people, because they want to deflect accusations of bias. Google would be better if it were more opinionated. I go there because I WANT them to rank results and tell me what they think are the best quality answers. Google may also be lost in an A/B testing catch 22 feedback loop, where what gets clicked gets elevated, and whats elevated gets clicked. The less straightforward, more clickbait cryptic results get clicked to see what they are. The result that spells out all the answers might not get a click at all. Ive noticed in the last year or two wikipedia not even being on the first page of searches it should be the top two or three results for.
- UnpossibleJim 7y ago
  They can put in optimization and skew the results with opinion, but not doing that might have more to do with lawyers than desire. There is a keen eye on their search results as far as political and business results are concerned.
- dbuder 7y ago
  Except that Google is quite happy to manually adjust things for their own ends, they just lie about it. They arrange search to make them money, not to help us find what we want.

vkou 7y ago

> 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. There was never any such promise, no contract signed in blood. It was just the wishful thinking of a group of people sharing a particular political persuasion. Just because a monocultural group of pioneers who are all radical thinkers (But not too radical) build something, doesn't mean that the people moving into what they build are interested in sharing, or even tolerating their idiosyncratic culture or politics. The web is supposed to be a way to route a bit of information from one computer to another. This is so low-level, and so broad, that it proscribes nothing about the outcome.

geofft 7y ago

I strongly disagree that the democratization of knowledge is hard to find / that what floats at the top is the most popular, and I strongly disagree that Google is doing anything to make it so. Imagine in 1995 asking someone whether MSG is harmful or whether razor blades were ever found in Halloween candies. You would hear fairly confident answers of yes to both. Perhaps someone would feel like checking things, and they'd pull out a book of popular facts or an encyclopedia that happily answered yes (or perhaps no) without much discussion, and that would be the end of it. (The Encarta College Dictionary, which awkwardly straddled the transition from books to the internet, had an entirely uncritical definition of "Chinese restaurant syndrome" as a real thing, for instance.) Go to Google and type in "is msg harmful" and the featured snippet says that while some people have a sensitivity to it, it's definitely not harmful in anywhere near the amounts used in food. Go to Google and type in "razors in halloween candy" and the top result is a Wikipedia page debunking the urban legends of the '80s. After it is a YouTube video reporting on an actual case of razor blades being found in candy this past Halloween, which Wikipedia hasn't been updated for. In a single Google SERP above the fold, you already have a more accurate synthesis of multiple sources than any single publication has. (And no, I didn't plan this, I didn't even know about the 2019 cases until just now!) What about political correctness? There's no shortage of content criticizing either the current president or his political opponents past and present. Or, say, search for "puberty blockers" and you get YouTube videos both in favor of them and against them, an handout from Seattle Children's Hospital on how to get them, an article from The Federalist on why they're clearly dangerous, a paywalled article from The Economist discussing it, an article from NBC News saying they've lowered the suicide rate among trans kids... basically any viewpoint you want or don't want, you can find it. It's all there.