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I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve
by canyonero 5y ago
I've been troubled by the just plain awful results being delivered by Google search over the last few years. I think these are just plain hard problems to solve and that Google is not incentivized to solve. Google wants you to click on ads at the end of the day, full-stop.
Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. Other times I'm looking for a music or a book recommendation with some depth. This of course nearly always leads to SEOd trash. There is no relevance nor is there trust. So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links.
These issues often lead to the need in finding trust in real human-centered recommendations that stem from real human interests and needs. I've never found an algorithmic solution to this problem. This is why I think college radio stations or those south-of-the-dial end up being so, so much better. And why beer recommendations from your local brew-shop owner are better than anything you can find on the net.
I think building search vertical that are hand-curated would be very interesting to see. But I also think we need to build more communities which allow recommendations to be shared without an incentive to get hits via search and aren't paid for by large corporations and where community impact/quality _is_ incentivized. I do worry that those days may be gone and there are just not may be enough folks (not in tech) willing to spend so much time online and contributing to niche communities. A lot of folks spend much of their time in walled-gardens like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, so it'll be challenging to be sure.
- ijidak 5y agoIn some ways paid search disincentives Google from delivering quality organic results. The larger the gap between paid results vs organic results, the more users click the paid results. Not sure how to solve this problem.
- topicseed 5y agoBut paid results do not always, if ever, answer the search query better in any shape of form. So this would end up with displeased users and bounce backs.
- visarga 5y ago> Often times I find myself searching for "best ($product|$thing_to_do)" which I think many other people do as well because we all want the best. I do too. I'm wondering why didn't Google invest some effort into "best X" searches? I bet they could extract such information from the web and correlate various sources. They already answer all sorts of semantic knowledge questions.
- allochthon 5y ago> I think building search vertical that are hand-curated would be very interesting to see. That was my inspiration behind a side project I made a few years ago — a decentralized, hand curated "search engine" [0]. Never got beyond the side project stage. But I see promise in this in the future. Eventually we'll figure out that moderated crowd-sourced curation is better than the best machine learning. The filtering capabilities have to be pretty sophisticated to make it work, though. [0] https://github.com/emwalker/digraph https://github.com/emwalker/digraph
- cblconfederate 5y ago> So, I like others to use keywords like "reddit" or "forum" to get to real humans who I trust and intentions are not to sell via affiliate links. And therein lies the problem. Reddit makes very little money. Forums probably make negative money nowadays. Google has decided to demonetize the organic internet and subsidizes SEO crap and AMP or whatever dumb thing their signals consider valuable. We get what we incentivize, and right now the incentives in almost all of tech are pretty atrocious.
- nerdponx 5y agoDid forums ever make money?
- cblconfederate 5y agoyes i think. until they were demonetized
- IndexPointer 5y agoWhat do you mean by demonetizing forums?