7 ms·

So there's a private option that's terrible (WebMD) and a private option that's terrific (Merck Manuals). And it's the terrible one that ranks well at Google.

So there's a private option that's terrible (WebMD) and a private option that's terrific (Merck Manuals). And it's the terrible one that ranks well at Google. Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side, the NHS and (in a different area) MDN are better, more authoritative, etc sources, so Google should promote those. On the other, this would mean that Google can no longer cite neutrality or hide behind "the algorithm", as has been their legal defense against a ton of lawsuits where the suers said one websites should go higher or lower in the rankings.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  If it's a human curating content or an algorithm doing so, I don't see how that helps Google on a lawsuit. Unless they blame sentience. The best algorithms adapt to feedback. Surely Google's own algorithm can accept Google's feedback to adjust for flaws in it.
  - nradov 4y ago
    What lawsuit? There is no legal basis for a lawsuit. As a private corporation, Google is free to rank search results however they like regardless of whether that's done by humans or algorithms.
    - gtirloni 4y ago
      You'd think so but Google has essentially a monopoly depending how you look at it and some countries have stricter rules than others.
      - nradov 4y ago
        So what? You haven't cited a successful lawsuit against Google on that issue, or even a plausible legal theory. Have you discussed this with an actual attorney?
        gtirloni 4y ago
        I wasn't the one mentioning lawsuits. Check OP's message I was replying to. You seem confused.
- david_allison 4y ago
  Google already does this. Searching for "YMYL" (Your Money or Your Life) should produce useful results: > For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards because low quality pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
- lupire 4y ago
  Google chooses to rank "authoritative" sites based on its own notion of authoritativity (which they don't share, but they decide). They implement it as agnostic tuning as much as possible, avoiding single human chery picking sites. They use panels of humans (mturk style) for quality ratings. Could you imagine the outrage if Google said "The government is always the best source about everything?" What even would be the point? Use the government search engine for that use case.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem. I want something like webrings to become A Thing again. A user curated search engine. And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. I don't know if this is even possible, but I get tired of having to come to HN to get a human recommendation that is miles better than the algorithmic crap from the current search engines.
- cecilpl2 4y ago
  > And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. It comes back to the age-old question: Who vets the vetters?
  - echelon 4y ago
    Unsolvable since it's a network of fallible humans we attempt to topologically score. You can make decent attempts, such as academic peer review. Even this system perpetuates its own problems (beta amyloid) and has perverse incentives (publish or perish, falsified results), though. Semantic web had some good ideas about this. Networks of signed FOAF data attached to articles and posts. You could form a side graph of trust information that you could revoke at any time.
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    You do. I imagine people or groups curating lists of pages or sites - they decide what to put on their lists, but you decide to include them in your personal search engine or not. Or you could fork their list and edit as you see fit.
- lupire 4y ago
  Web of trust, not web rings. Post your bookmarks, share to your friends, encourage your friends to do the same. Import those bookmarks into a search engine site fliter extension.
- hattmall 4y ago
  T100 sites and the like seemed to be the peak of discovering interesting and relevant content to me.
ajmurmann 4y ago
That's where I continue to want to see what results in a search engine would look like that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result. All the SEO spam pages are ad-driven, so cutting out anything following that incentive should result in removal of all pages that follow that terrible SEO spam pattern that ruins search results.
- dbcurtis 4y ago
  Imagine a world where the biggest search engine made its money from advertising. In that kind of a world, wouldn’t the search engine primarily be incentivized to show you the results pages with the most advertising, regardless of the quality of the content?
  - lupire 4y ago
    No, because people would stop using the crappy search engine. That's how the world was before Google.
    - dbcurtis 4y ago
      And that differs from today because.... why?
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Punishment/vengeance is a popular idea around here, but you have to also remember that a search engine is supposed to bring you the most relevant results. Filtering out, say, Stack Overflow or Reddit because it has ads doesn't help you when it answers your question and is perhaps the only thing on the internet that truly does. People seem to think there's this ad-less replica of the internet, sitting right behind our ad-riddled internet, where everything they want exists for free, it's just hidden. In reality, the websites making money are the ones providing the vast majority of things people are looking for. Use https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu if you want to severely punish ads.
  - 4y ago
jleyank 4y ago
No, as I suspect the ad revenues are just fine the way they are now. Google isn’t altruistic. They want ad rates.
winternett 4y ago
Google can make or break any online business they want to. It is what it is... We let them get there... That being said, I haven't even tried to use Bing, and it's pretty much impossible to convince me that Microsoft Edge is worth a second look after all the years of MSIE, and how Windows has been slowly devolving over time. If worst comes to worst, just add "reddit" to your search term, and then all you have to do is determine whether he answers you find look like they came from a human, a spammer, or a corporation.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Edge is chromium based now so......
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andrewia 4y ago
I disagree. There is lots of useful information around the internet that is hard to find. A lot of content simply doesn't have the keywords it needs to be discovered. For example, somebody could search for "best rewards credit card for married couple with normal lifestyle" and find some listicle full of referral links that's a few years old. But the best advice might be in a Reddit or Twitter discussion titled "what's a good card for my P2 with no AF, low MSR, and at least 2CPP" whose replies are terse comments like "CSP?" or "BofA Custom; select CNP transactions as the 3% category and order everything online. they give high CL if you want to AU instead". There's enough jargon and levels of understanding that Google can't find the best advice, only good keyword matches. I recently had a similar issue when I searched for something well-phrased and generic ("how to stop wood joints from squeaking"). The results were lackluster, but after a few attempts, I found the most helpful results were actually under a specific application ("how to stop a bed frame from squeaking"). So what's my point? It's not Google's fault. They are trying their best of optimize text search, with some fancy word associations and other stuff to help. But it's going to take a lot of effort to make an efficient, scalable, general-purpose AI that can achieve near-human understanding of text and then find the most relevant articles related to that. This "super-Google" would have to comprehend every post and comment on the internet, contextualize the knowledge ("a squeaky bed is caused by squeaky wood joints or fasteners, so this advice is useful for any kind of squeaking wood furniture"), and quickly generate results for every query. It's not WebMD's fault they have ad revenue that lets them hire writers to SEO their articles with the best keywords. Nor is it Merck's fault that they are using specific language that doesn't cover all the phrases that a person could search. Nor is it Google's for making a search engine without human comprehension. It's just a technological gap that can't be bridged in the present day.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

It's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side, the NHS and (in a different area) MDN are better, more authoritative, etc sources, so Google should promote those. On the other, this would mean that Google can no longer cite neutrality or hide behind "the algorithm", as has been their legal defense against a ton of lawsuits where the suers said one websites should go higher or lower in the rankings.

gtirloni 4y ago
If it's a human curating content or an algorithm doing so, I don't see how that helps Google on a lawsuit. Unless they blame sentience. The best algorithms adapt to feedback. Surely Google's own algorithm can accept Google's feedback to adjust for flaws in it.
- nradov 4y ago
  What lawsuit? There is no legal basis for a lawsuit. As a private corporation, Google is free to rank search results however they like regardless of whether that's done by humans or algorithms.
  - gtirloni 4y ago
    You'd think so but Google has essentially a monopoly depending how you look at it and some countries have stricter rules than others.
    - nradov 4y ago
      So what? You haven't cited a successful lawsuit against Google on that issue, or even a plausible legal theory. Have you discussed this with an actual attorney?
      - gtirloni 4y ago
        I wasn't the one mentioning lawsuits. Check OP's message I was replying to. You seem confused.
david_allison 4y ago
Google already does this. Searching for "YMYL" (Your Money or Your Life) should produce useful results: > For pages about clear YMYL topics, we have very high Page Quality rating standards because low quality pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s health, financial stability, or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
lupire 4y ago
Google chooses to rank "authoritative" sites based on its own notion of authoritativity (which they don't share, but they decide). They implement it as agnostic tuning as much as possible, avoiding single human chery picking sites. They use panels of humans (mturk style) for quality ratings. Could you imagine the outrage if Google said "The government is always the best source about everything?" What even would be the point? Use the government search engine for that use case.

rootusrootus 4y ago

> Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem. I want something like webrings to become A Thing again. A user curated search engine. And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. I don't know if this is even possible, but I get tired of having to come to HN to get a human recommendation that is miles better than the algorithmic crap from the current search engines.

cecilpl2 4y ago
> And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. It comes back to the age-old question: Who vets the vetters?
- echelon 4y ago
  Unsolvable since it's a network of fallible humans we attempt to topologically score. You can make decent attempts, such as academic peer review. Even this system perpetuates its own problems (beta amyloid) and has perverse incentives (publish or perish, falsified results), though. Semantic web had some good ideas about this. Networks of signed FOAF data attached to articles and posts. You could form a side graph of trust information that you could revoke at any time.
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  You do. I imagine people or groups curating lists of pages or sites - they decide what to put on their lists, but you decide to include them in your personal search engine or not. Or you could fork their list and edit as you see fit.
lupire 4y ago
Web of trust, not web rings. Post your bookmarks, share to your friends, encourage your friends to do the same. Import those bookmarks into a search engine site fliter extension.
hattmall 4y ago
T100 sites and the like seemed to be the peak of discovering interesting and relevant content to me.

ajmurmann 4y ago

That's where I continue to want to see what results in a search engine would look like that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result. All the SEO spam pages are ad-driven, so cutting out anything following that incentive should result in removal of all pages that follow that terrible SEO spam pattern that ruins search results.

dbcurtis 4y ago
Imagine a world where the biggest search engine made its money from advertising. In that kind of a world, wouldn’t the search engine primarily be incentivized to show you the results pages with the most advertising, regardless of the quality of the content?
- lupire 4y ago
  No, because people would stop using the crappy search engine. That's how the world was before Google.
  - dbcurtis 4y ago
    And that differs from today because.... why?
hombre_fatal 4y ago
Punishment/vengeance is a popular idea around here, but you have to also remember that a search engine is supposed to bring you the most relevant results. Filtering out, say, Stack Overflow or Reddit because it has ads doesn't help you when it answers your question and is perhaps the only thing on the internet that truly does. People seem to think there's this ad-less replica of the internet, sitting right behind our ad-riddled internet, where everything they want exists for free, it's just hidden. In reality, the websites making money are the ones providing the vast majority of things people are looking for. Use https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu if you want to severely punish ads.
- 4y ago

jleyank 4y ago

No, as I suspect the ad revenues are just fine the way they are now. Google isn’t altruistic. They want ad rates.

winternett 4y ago

Google can make or break any online business they want to. It is what it is... We let them get there... That being said, I haven't even tried to use Bing, and it's pretty much impossible to convince me that Microsoft Edge is worth a second look after all the years of MSIE, and how Windows has been slowly devolving over time. If worst comes to worst, just add "reddit" to your search term, and then all you have to do is determine whether he answers you find look like they came from a human, a spammer, or a corporation.

Melatonic 4y ago
Edge is chromium based now so......

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

andrewia 4y ago

I disagree. There is lots of useful information around the internet that is hard to find. A lot of content simply doesn't have the keywords it needs to be discovered. For example, somebody could search for "best rewards credit card for married couple with normal lifestyle" and find some listicle full of referral links that's a few years old. But the best advice might be in a Reddit or Twitter discussion titled "what's a good card for my P2 with no AF, low MSR, and at least 2CPP" whose replies are terse comments like "CSP?" or "BofA Custom; select CNP transactions as the 3% category and order everything online. they give high CL if you want to AU instead". There's enough jargon and levels of understanding that Google can't find the best advice, only good keyword matches. I recently had a similar issue when I searched for something well-phrased and generic ("how to stop wood joints from squeaking"). The results were lackluster, but after a few attempts, I found the most helpful results were actually under a specific application ("how to stop a bed frame from squeaking"). So what's my point? It's not Google's fault. They are trying their best of optimize text search, with some fancy word associations and other stuff to help. But it's going to take a lot of effort to make an efficient, scalable, general-purpose AI that can achieve near-human understanding of text and then find the most relevant articles related to that. This "super-Google" would have to comprehend every post and comment on the internet, contextualize the knowledge ("a squeaky bed is caused by squeaky wood joints or fasteners, so this advice is useful for any kind of squeaking wood furniture"), and quickly generate results for every query. It's not WebMD's fault they have ad revenue that lets them hire writers to SEO their articles with the best keywords. Nor is it Merck's fault that they are using specific language that doesn't cover all the phrases that a person could search. Nor is it Google's for making a search engine without human comprehension. It's just a technological gap that can't be bridged in the present day.