4 ms·

ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users pr

ironically, what you describe today happened because those central points were the ones producing the content (portals) that everyone wanted. Now that users produce the content, they kept the distribution and revenue model (i.e. you go to the central places and they sell you to advertisers) but they have zero cost for content since everyone is a producer and consumer, which was the use case for the non-centralized portals in the first place.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  > 2. The trend today with Google Sorry, but I think this is totally wrong. I knew the guy who wrote the very first web crawler/search engine, and even then, the intent was to find answers, not websites. Moreover, I don't see any limit on what google returns when you search. I just searched for "the trend with google today" and it told me there were 927,000,000 results. When I got to page 22 of those results, it told me that the rest were all very similar but gave me a link to fetch them anyway. I could get to an arbitrary Nth result. The reality is that search engines actually are, by any historical standard "some sort of oracle that can provide answers". And when they can't/don't, they still function as tools that provide you with links to help you explore the question more. Recognizing whether or not you've actually found the answer (from a book, from deductive processes, from a human oracle or from a search engine) has always required critical thinking skills, and that has not changed.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Yes, I can imagine that search engine folks always thought the web would be some oracle. But if you have been using the web since its debut you know that it isn't. Search results are a list of results (links, i.e., addresses/locations of the sources), not an "answer". The oracle idea (that all searches are questions with an "answer") is only realistic to some programmers. When I go to the library and search for sources (books, journals, etc), I might have a question in mind to which I seek an answer, but at the library I am only searching for the location of the sources. I do not expect an "instant answer" from the library's search terminals. In any event, not all searches are questions. Does Google Scholar return "instant answers". For the query you tested, I could only retrieve 101 results. Could you get more than that. If you can retrieve more than 300 results (the actual results pages with the links, not just a line about how many results were "found"), I would like to know what headers you sent. I do not think this is possible anymore. Interesting if you believe critical thinking skills are not on the decline.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Google does provide answers to simple questions, and its capabilities grow over time. Wolfram Alpha has operated in a similar domain, but using different technology (i.e. not inherently a search engine) for some time now. request with arbitrary results accessible out of 927M: https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png I didn't suggest that critical thinking was declining. I don't have a position on whether it is or is not - I can think of several different factors that would (collectively) push in both directions.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

An astute observation. In an ideal "web" (as imagined in the 1990's), every business might have a website, there would be news sources[1], and many nerds would have websites, but beyond that, to the non-nerd, after a while, it's not very interesting. Despite what people once might have thought in the early-mid 90's, every living person is not going to create their own website. (Or even a blog, as people thought in the 2000's). The web is finite and that is bad news for search engines.[2] UGC and "social media" have been a way for certain companies to mask this truth. 1. As I remember it, news was one of the early internet centralisation points. As dial-up telephone charges were expensive, we patiently waited for someone at a large university to download the news and forward it. I am not a great source of internet history, others will may correct me here, but one of the largest operations like this, downloading Usenet news and making it available, ended up becoming what some called the first "ISP". That was UUNet. The takeway from this footnote is that "news" showed to be an early centralisation point, high traffic. Everyone wants "the news". 2. The trend today with Google and Bing, and those who use their feeds, is to limit the number of unique search results any user can retrieve. Around 250-300 max but with many searches one is lucky to get 50-100. The search engines are trying to market themselves as a way to "get answers" instead of a way to discover what websites exist on the web today. We all know what this looks like on Google and Bing. The companies place their own "web properties" in the results, i.e., many of the "results" are links to the companies own servers, and they scrape other websites to provide "instant" answers. The user never leaves the search results page, never even visits another website. DDG, following the lead of Google, calls this "instant answers" and "zero-click info". This statement from DDG sums up the present day popular search engines: "When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links." source: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... (Personally I do want "just links". I have written scripts to get them.) It is up to the reader to decide whether this is intentional or not, but either way, unlike in the 1990's and early 2000's, search engines are limiting how much of the web users can actually "see" at one time. Regardless of intent, that is the effect. If, hypothetically, the web was not growing very much, no one could detect that using a search engine. The web today is portrayed by search engines as some sort of oracle that can provide answers. For easy questions, sure. For more difficult ones, we can fabricate answers but that does not mean they are good ones. Than add in "AI" hype. What happens when people lose all critical thinking ability. They just accept the oracle's answer as "good enough". We can already see this happenig with young people. You can end up with a Wizard of Oz scenario, but no one ever discovers the tiny man behind the curtain. The truth is that the web is still a motley collection of websites, along with some very large "walled gardens" of UGC that draw the lion's share of daily traffic.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
> 2. The trend today with Google Sorry, but I think this is totally wrong. I knew the guy who wrote the very first web crawler/search engine, and even then, the intent was to find answers, not websites. Moreover, I don't see any limit on what google returns when you search. I just searched for "the trend with google today" and it told me there were 927,000,000 results. When I got to page 22 of those results, it told me that the rest were all very similar but gave me a link to fetch them anyway. I could get to an arbitrary Nth result. The reality is that search engines actually are, by any historical standard "some sort of oracle that can provide answers". And when they can't/don't, they still function as tools that provide you with links to help you explore the question more. Recognizing whether or not you've actually found the answer (from a book, from deductive processes, from a human oracle or from a search engine) has always required critical thinking skills, and that has not changed.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Yes, I can imagine that search engine folks always thought the web would be some oracle. But if you have been using the web since its debut you know that it isn't. Search results are a list of results (links, i.e., addresses/locations of the sources), not an "answer". The oracle idea (that all searches are questions with an "answer") is only realistic to some programmers. When I go to the library and search for sources (books, journals, etc), I might have a question in mind to which I seek an answer, but at the library I am only searching for the location of the sources. I do not expect an "instant answer" from the library's search terminals. In any event, not all searches are questions. Does Google Scholar return "instant answers". For the query you tested, I could only retrieve 101 results. Could you get more than that. If you can retrieve more than 300 results (the actual results pages with the links, not just a line about how many results were "found"), I would like to know what headers you sent. I do not think this is possible anymore. Interesting if you believe critical thinking skills are not on the decline.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Google does provide answers to simple questions, and its capabilities grow over time. Wolfram Alpha has operated in a similar domain, but using different technology (i.e. not inherently a search engine) for some time now. request with arbitrary results accessible out of 927M: https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png https://i.imgur.com/PHzrXSu.png I didn't suggest that critical thinking was declining. I don't have a position on whether it is or is not - I can think of several different factors that would (collectively) push in both directions.