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That they said they will manipulate the results was enough for me to start using Yandex.

by usrn 5y ago

m-p-3 5y ago
It's a tight-rope for any search engine. Either you rank/filter nothing and everything showing up at the top is stuff abusing SEO and spam, or you try to get rid of the junk and ultimately piss someone who values it.
- trdtaylor1 5y ago
  Agreed; but certainly the red line is sites which some people believe are scum and others believe are holy (thepiratebay, fox news, RT, DDGs direct competitors). If anything this story/non-story has taught us is, there still exists potential cursed product changes which can sink large internet phenomena, like Digg was sunk.
  - V__ 5y ago
    But you will always find people who believe one or the other and who would consider it a red line? In my opinion that's an impossible task to solve. The only solution would be for everyone to preset what kind of information bubble they want to be a part of... which would result in a myriad of other problems.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
How would it be possible for them to not manipulate results? The very definition of a search engine is ranking and filtering sites based on a query.
- yucky 5y ago
  Manipulation in this context means modifying the results after the search algorithm ranks the relevant results for the query. A good recent example of this on Google was all during March Madness, any searches for "NCAA tournament schedule, "March Madness schedule" etc. would deliver the women's basketball tournament schedule (and results) above the men's, despite all of the interest being around the men's games. Google would say this was a noble thing, hoping to remind people that women's basketball exists, knowing how many queries were pouring in non-stop to find out what time a specific men's game was on. That is manipulation. You see the same "noble lies" surrounding political, news, & covid related searches as well.
sidibe 5y ago
Lol Yandex is about to be the Russian Baidu if it hasn't started already. Dodging a little censorship to dive headfirst into a government controlled search engine.

That they said they will manipulate the results was enough for me to start using Yandex.

by usrn 5y ago

That they said they will manipulate the results was enough for me to start using Yandex.

It's a tight-rope for any search engine. Either you rank/filter nothing and everything showing up at the top is stuff abusing SEO and spam, or you try to get rid of the junk and ultimately piss someone who values it.

trdtaylor1 5y ago
Agreed; but certainly the red line is sites which some people believe are scum and others believe are holy (thepiratebay, fox news, RT, DDGs direct competitors). If anything this story/non-story has taught us is, there still exists potential cursed product changes which can sink large internet phenomena, like Digg was sunk.
- V__ 5y ago
  But you will always find people who believe one or the other and who would consider it a red line? In my opinion that's an impossible task to solve. The only solution would be for everyone to preset what kind of information bubble they want to be a part of... which would result in a myriad of other problems.

jakelazaroff 5y ago

How would it be possible for them to not manipulate results? The very definition of a search engine is ranking and filtering sites based on a query.

yucky 5y ago
Manipulation in this context means modifying the results after the search algorithm ranks the relevant results for the query. A good recent example of this on Google was all during March Madness, any searches for "NCAA tournament schedule, "March Madness schedule" etc. would deliver the women's basketball tournament schedule (and results) above the men's, despite all of the interest being around the men's games. Google would say this was a noble thing, hoping to remind people that women's basketball exists, knowing how many queries were pouring in non-stop to find out what time a specific men's game was on. That is manipulation. You see the same "noble lies" surrounding political, news, & covid related searches as well.

sidibe 5y ago

Lol Yandex is about to be the Russian Baidu if it hasn't started already. Dodging a little censorship to dive headfirst into a government controlled search engine.