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Your mom will have a better experience and more control if she learns to search for "best burger in <city name>" instead of trying to give the wheel to Google's

by guelo 4y ago

Your mom will have a better experience and more control if she learns to search for "best burger in <city name>" instead of trying to give the wheel to Google's mind reading AIs.

jeffbee 4y ago
My mom is completely satisfied with Google, so we're discussing some theoretical mom. I honestly do not understand the pitch, that's why I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Scare words like "tracking" and "profile" and "targeting" are used by the privacy fear industry to disparage the practice of having implicit terms in your search query. These implicit terms greatly improve search quality, which is why the results on Google are so much better. Advertisements are their own separate search corpus where good ranking is desired and the implicit elements of the search vector are also helpful there. To me there can be no rational case made that omitting the implicit terms improves the quality of the result.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Same. Tried to sell my mom on some privacy stuff, zero care. Tried to sell her on unique passwords and a password manager, zero care. And so on. Lots of people (most people?) want to do the bare minimum with computers. Sacrificing convenience for privacy or whatnot isn’t something they would accept.
- guelo 4y ago
  Google's search engine is awful. In case you hadn't noticed rants about it are increasingly popular. Part of the reason is that Google keeps taking away user's control of the tool, partly in the name of convenience but also to manipulate you, get you to click on favored links, show you ads or extend their search monopoly to other products. I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    > rants about it are increasingly popular. 1. Never heard any rant about it outside tech circles. 2. I've given DDG many chances when Google failed to return satisfactory results. In those many cases DDG results were just about the same or even less relevant. Google changing the query? Well DDG either also changes it or returns irrelevant results not containing the query anyway. The single advantage of DDG I've noticed is that it doesn't CAPTCHA me on a VPN connection.
Invictus0 4y ago
That doesn't sound like a better experience to me.

by guelo 4y ago

Your mom will have a better experience and more control if she learns to search for "best burger in <city name>" instead of trying to give the wheel to Google's mind reading AIs.

jeffbee 4y ago

My mom is completely satisfied with Google, so we're discussing some theoretical mom. I honestly do not understand the pitch, that's why I want to hear it from the horse's mouth. Scare words like "tracking" and "profile" and "targeting" are used by the privacy fear industry to disparage the practice of having implicit terms in your search query. These implicit terms greatly improve search quality, which is why the results on Google are so much better. Advertisements are their own separate search corpus where good ranking is desired and the implicit elements of the search vector are also helpful there. To me there can be no rational case made that omitting the implicit terms improves the quality of the result.

oefrha 4y ago
Same. Tried to sell my mom on some privacy stuff, zero care. Tried to sell her on unique passwords and a password manager, zero care. And so on. Lots of people (most people?) want to do the bare minimum with computers. Sacrificing convenience for privacy or whatnot isn’t something they would accept.
guelo 4y ago
Google's search engine is awful. In case you hadn't noticed rants about it are increasingly popular. Part of the reason is that Google keeps taking away user's control of the tool, partly in the name of convenience but also to manipulate you, get you to click on favored links, show you ads or extend their search monopoly to other products. I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.
- oefrha 4y ago
  > rants about it are increasingly popular. 1. Never heard any rant about it outside tech circles. 2. I've given DDG many chances when Google failed to return satisfactory results. In those many cases DDG results were just about the same or even less relevant. Google changing the query? Well DDG either also changes it or returns irrelevant results not containing the query anyway. The single advantage of DDG I've noticed is that it doesn't CAPTCHA me on a VPN connection.

Invictus0 4y ago

That doesn't sound like a better experience to me.