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It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google
by cosheaf 5y ago
It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam that is optimized for serving ads. It's like an ouroboros eating its own tail.
- foobarian 5y agoWonder how we could set up an alt-web without the incentives that cause this problem. Delist any for-profit site? How would the sites keep the lights on without ads?
- endisneigh 5y agoThere’s no better solution - you either have ads or a paywall, which will result in few users. If there were a better solution we’d all already be using it. Certainly you can rely on savvy people to produce free stuff, but the total amount of content will be drastically lower and therefore fewer consumers. The best thing is to just use bookmarks and your favorite sites’ own search. There’s just too much trash on the net
- foxfluff 5y agoPeople could certainly run hand-curated indexes and search engines seeded by such. I think marginalia.nu search behaves somewhat like that. I'm really interested in the idea of decentralized search where everyone has the power to choose for themselves who to trust. > How would the sites keep the lights on without ads? Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there.
- foobarian 5y ago> Making them turn off the lights is the goal. Good riddance I say, once we get there. I wish there was some middle ground. Think of all the useful Youtube videos showing how to play an instrument, do woodworking projects, fix cars... there is a vast amount of knowledge there. Maybe YT should be nationalized :-)
- rileyphone 5y agoYoutubes early success was due to being a free video hosting platform, the monetization just led to the rise of 10:04 long videos. In any case most larger creators will put sponsorships in band like the good ol days. I’m hoping decentralized alternatives can take over like Peertube or Odysee, but I do also appreciate the more traditional business model of Vimeo.
- Lascaille 5y ago> People could certainly run hand-curated indexes Do you think there's a lot of good content out there left to index?
- foxfluff 5y agoYep! There's a massive amount of useful content on the web. A lot of it is just a pain to find right now, because the quality of search is bad and the amount of garbage is a thousandfold greater. It's true that walled gardens have been eating up useful information and that is a real shame, but make no mistake: there's still a ridiculous amount of good stuff on the open web. They're not playing the SEO optimization game so they get buried.
- Lascaille 5y agoThat actually has made me feel a lot more positive than I would have imagined. I have sort of got stuck in this bubble of reddit and not much else and... the way people behave has really sapped my desire to contribute anything to the world. I'm looking around me at the opinions a lot of people are expressing and I think... no, these people don't deserve nice things. It seems sometimes like the whole world is full of venal, bitter and divisive people that do nothing but snap bitterly at the heels of anyone that makes something of themselves or strays too far from safe consensus.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI've had no problem finding sites to index with my search engine. Like it's tiny compared to Google today, but it's about the same size they were when they first started out. Leads me to think there's probably as much, or more now as there ever was. There's just more noise to go with it.
- cosheaf 5y agoFederation is the only reasonable solution at this time but the technical overhead of federated search is high enough that most people won't use it so it won't benefit from network effects like Google did in the beginning. There might be a combination of blockchain juju that could make federation viable but all the thought leaders in that ecosystem are too high on their own supply to realize they could use blockchains for anything other than gambling.
- fsflover 5y agohttps://yacy.net https://yacy.net
- agumonkey 5y agoTo me it's more a sociological problem than technological. Also networks have changed.. somehow the decentralization idea is spreading fast. For ideological, technical, cost .. or other reasons. Some people start neighborhood wireless networks etc. It also seems to me that internet has somehow became a middle man and is not providing human deep enough interactions, especially outside chat-like website (basically any exchange, business).. I could envision a whatsapp like system with quality control for producers and transparent transaction/tracking/accounting management offered by the network so people spend less time on side-loads and just focus into helping each others and doing what they need to.
- ForHackernews 5y agoYou could check out https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ It's a new internet protocol (NOT www) designed to be minimalist and interesting to hobbyists. > How would the sites keep the lights on without ads? The same way they did in the web 1.0 days - somebody would maintain the server themselves, or pay to have it maintained. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072085
- Dogfood_ 5y ago
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI honestly don't think this is the problem, like at all. There are human websites made by humans, still. There's more crap, sure, but the good stuff is largely still out there. The problem begins and ends with the conflict of interest that Google both sells ads and selects search results. If they didn't have a vested interest in people visiting sites with their ads on them, they could decimate the number of spam results.
- cosheaf 5y agoShow me a site made by people with manually instead of algorithmically curated links and content.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI'm not quite sure what you are asking, but this maybe one of these? https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://cheapskatesguide.org/ https://cheapskatesguide.org/ https://indieseek.xyz/ https://indieseek.xyz/ https://www.gameboomers.com/ https://www.gameboomers.com/ https://sadgrl.online/ https://sadgrl.online/
- cosheaf 5y agoGreat, now compare this to all the content generated on content farms for selling ads and gaming search engine rankings.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoRight, but that's pretty trivially identified. I've had great success doing that with my search engine. Here's a thousand domains that are low in farmed contents in no particular order: https://downloads.marginalia.nu/good-domains.txt https://downloads.marginalia.nu/good-domains.txt
- cosheaf 5y ago
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoThis sounds almost like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was. But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out that Google is using it. Google's only choice is to try to stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they're already starting to fail.
- cosheaf 5y agoYes, it's very similar with the added caveat that Google has an interest in serving results that have ads from their own network. This is why Google's metrics can be hacked. Anything that is barely above being classified as spam but serves ads from Google's ad network will be prioritized over other results simply because they have to hit their quarterly revenue targets. SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine but Google is also an ad network so they will always be susceptible to being gamed. This is also the case for social media platforms. They're incentivized to surface content that generates engagement and ad revenue. Basically ads are at the root of all problems when it comes to the internet and the content on it.
- Lascaille 5y ago> SEO hacking is not possible if a search engine is just a search engine Uh, yes it is. If the owner of the site being searched is generating profit from that site being searched then they will game the search engine's algorithm to get them the most clicks.
- cosheaf 5y agoI'm not interested in a pedantic argument. If you didn't understand what I meant then you should have asked for clarification. A search engine designed to surface useful information is not gameable if it is not in the business of generating quarterly profits from its own ad network. A site designed to drive traffic to itself can still try to hack the system by generating spam but without Google's incentives for surfacing such content because it serves ads from its own network there will be fewer such sites and useless content to go along with it. At the moment Google is incentivized to uprank spam because the spam comes with ads from its own ad network.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIt’s not just the links. After the links, google mined facts, like “how much does a german shepherd weigh,” so no on gets those clicks, and the incentive is gone there too. They’re even mining the snippets of the content, lowering the incentives for creating that too.
- cosheaf 5y agoIt's essentially a machine for printing money and people don't really understand what they're giving up in exchange for "free" search results. Google is beholden to market forces, it's no longer in the business of indexing useful information because the market doesn't value useful information, it values ad revenue. This is a structural problem and anything that gets large enough will succumb to the same forces. If the incentives are for optimizing ad revenue then that's what all corporate machines will do at scale, regardless of their initial motives and incentive structure. It doesn't help that Google is also an ad network, hence the ouroboros aspect.
- Lascaille 5y agoYou say it's a machine for printing money in a topic about people complaining that it doesn't work any more. It may have been but it won't be forever if things keep going the way they're going. Quality content is already being locked away.
- cosheaf 5y agoWe're in agreement. I don't think quarterly earnings are the right way to design and build products. Maximizing profits is not correlated with value and is often inversely proportional to it. Google was so successful that they changed the incentive structure of all content on the web. Now they're like the yeast drowning in the byproducts of their own metabolic processes. They exploited whatever nutrients were available (hand curated links) to make them initially successful and now there is no more worthwhile content being generated that is not designed to rank highly on Google (which is not the same thing as quality content and is instead content optimized for generating ad revenue from the Google ad network). It's the same with social networks, upvotes and likes skew the the type of content that is generated to be liked by the people liking and upvoting instead of being insightful. Popularity is not the same thing as insight so the social web is full of mostly useless but popular content.
- notacoward 5y agoSo basically Google is a parasite that killed its host. I really really like that analysis. Thanks!
- cosheaf 5y agoThanks but it's not really my analysis. I learned it from an art project: https://googlewilleatitself.com/ https://googlewilleatitself.com/.