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Who determines what is the best ranking? Who was defining what was "good"? There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal t

Who determines what is the best ranking? Who was defining what was "good"? There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Google has always made choices about how to rank that trade off the interests of various groups of users, from the very beginning. The complaints that you and I have about pinterest being ranked so highly come because Google has decided that our desires for how the results should look are not important enough compared to how other, perhaps larger, groups of users want them to look. Maybe Google deranks pinterest tomorrow, but they've made the choice to keep it as such for a couple years now. Whether it's because they think they have better ways to spend their time or because they like it the way it is, it's not really possible for us to know without somebody leaking that information. But, I imagine, there would be a group of people who would be as disappointed as we are elated if Google were to change this.

joe_the_user 6y ago
There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Of course, "quality" applied is a broad term indeed. But there no being a single certain measure of quality doesn't mean there aren't some things that most people would call crap. Google employs a large number of search quality raters and these folks can likely distinguish the terrible from the OK. Google is far from ideal and getting worse but you seem to be exposing a pure democracy of algorithm conformance, which is guaranteed to result in hot, steaming idiocy.
- knuckleheads 6y ago
  I think what I am trying to espouse is two things. The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. And the second is not that Google is or should be a "pure democracy of algorithmic conformance" but that Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion. They are making choices about who to cater to with their results and justify those choices with their own logic that we will likely never know. One company having the power to be the only one making all those choices isn't anything I would call a democracy.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled. But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality and you seem to want to push things to realm of pure subjectivity, any old crap is something someone might want and who I am to deny to them that pnis enlargement pill. I would say that the results Google returns involve a number of factor/filters. A. What's considered mainstream, what appeals to many B. What's could be more or less objectively called quality. C. SEO, What results just slip through based on the page spending a lot of time and money appearing like A or B to the algorithm (but not being that). And Google spends a huge amount of time and money trying to keep C from being the only thing BUT that's still not enough because there's a lot of time and money spent on the other end. At the time, this tug-of-war serves as a moat keeping competitors out. Any Google competitor would have to invest similar amounts of money. Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion.* I'd love to have a decent Google competitor. But I don't think you have won many friend here by implying that Google's discretion is just arbitrary (as a number of your posts here seem to imply to me). Google won, back when they had competition, by caring a lot about the, uh, quality of their search results. Now that they've won, they're slipping into other things and moreover, the SEO trash are nipping their heels. Which is to say you won't build Google alternatives on "democracy" but on some concept of quality people will want.
    - knuckleheads 6y ago
      Many people have been upvoting my comments here so the evidence I am seeing suggests that I haven't lost too many friends here with this line of thinking. Continuing out the logic of your suggestion here, you would seem to imply that every other currently existing search engine besides Google also has bad quality as well in this regard. I say this because if other search engines had better quality that Google, they would be doing better than Google as per your suggestion. But, obviously Google is on top in a big way, so I have to ask, do you think the entire search engine industry, not just Google, has poor quality search results? What do you know that they don't?

joe_the_user 6y ago

There isn't some abstract, mathematically verifiable best ranking, a platonic ideal that all search engines should aspire to. Of course, "quality" applied is a broad term indeed. But there no being a single certain measure of quality doesn't mean there aren't some things that most people would call crap. Google employs a large number of search quality raters and these folks can likely distinguish the terrible from the OK. Google is far from ideal and getting worse but you seem to be exposing a pure democracy of algorithm conformance, which is guaranteed to result in hot, steaming idiocy.

knuckleheads 6y ago
I think what I am trying to espouse is two things. The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. And the second is not that Google is or should be a "pure democracy of algorithmic conformance" but that Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion. They are making choices about who to cater to with their results and justify those choices with their own logic that we will likely never know. One company having the power to be the only one making all those choices isn't anything I would call a democracy.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  The first is that there might be a large group of users unknown to you and I who enjoy looking at pinterest in the image results and that is who Google wants to cater to. The discussion is about Pininterest in text searches. My only objection to Pinterest in image searches is that it's paywalled/login-walled. But larger issue is I'd acknowledge some search results just aren't what I in particular want but I'd claim other results are actually objectively low quality and you seem to want to push things to realm of pure subjectivity, any old crap is something someone might want and who I am to deny to them that pnis enlargement pill. I would say that the results Google returns involve a number of factor/filters. A. What's considered mainstream, what appeals to many B. What's could be more or less objectively called quality. C. SEO, What results just slip through based on the page spending a lot of time and money appearing like A or B to the algorithm (but not being that). And Google spends a huge amount of time and money trying to keep C from being the only thing BUT that's still not enough because there's a lot of time and money spent on the other end. At the time, this tug-of-war serves as a moat keeping competitors out. Any Google competitor would have to invest similar amounts of money. Google has, does and always will make choices about what is best and that the definition of best is up to their discretion.* I'd love to have a decent Google competitor. But I don't think you have won many friend here by implying that Google's discretion is just arbitrary (as a number of your posts here seem to imply to me). Google won, back when they had competition, by caring a lot about the, uh, quality of their search results. Now that they've won, they're slipping into other things and moreover, the SEO trash are nipping their heels. Which is to say you won't build Google alternatives on "democracy" but on some concept of quality people will want.
  - knuckleheads 6y ago
    Many people have been upvoting my comments here so the evidence I am seeing suggests that I haven't lost too many friends here with this line of thinking. Continuing out the logic of your suggestion here, you would seem to imply that every other currently existing search engine besides Google also has bad quality as well in this regard. I say this because if other search engines had better quality that Google, they would be doing better than Google as per your suggestion. But, obviously Google is on top in a big way, so I have to ask, do you think the entire search engine industry, not just Google, has poor quality search results? What do you know that they don't?