7 ms·
Sounds a lot like Google Search results. It’s almost as if advertising dollars are an addictive drug that ultimately kills the company.
by voisin 4y ago
Sounds a lot like Google Search results. It’s almost as if advertising dollars are an addictive drug that ultimately kills the company.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoExcept Search volume and MAUs are still growing like a weed, whereas FB's growth has slowed dramatically. Search is not perfect, for sure. It has different problems.
- mtgx 4y ago
- scarmig 4y agoIt actively makes the product worse. E.g. from yesterday, if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.
- JustLurking2022 4y agoIn fairness, reading your search term, I had no idea what you were talking about so it's not entirely surprising the organic content producers don't match those terms well. Looks like the SEO folks do though.
- ericraio 4y agoGoogle is supposed to be able to understand this given how much data they collect on individuals and the web.
- blowski 4y agoPerhaps there are multiple groups searching with the same terms, but expecting completely different results. Google takes its best guess at which group you're in. To get better at that they have to gather more info about you personally. I'd prefer to change my search query than give lots of extra personal data to Google.
- jacobolus 4y agoWorks fine in DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22high+tc%22+record https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22high+tc%22+record Edit: and also Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record
- ipaddr 4y agoWhat are we looking for here? The results seem equally as confusing as the query
- jacobolus 4y agoThe other commenter was obviously interested in the record for high-temperature superconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... Or perhaps more generally for materials with a high Curie temperature, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this field.
- topaz0 4y agoThen again, Tc means different things in different fields. E.g. critical temperatures for all kinds of critical phase transitions. Note that the google search you posted above gives results for various phase transitions many of which are not superconducting phase transitions. I also was lost when I saw the original query.
- callmeal 4y agoTc is the high temperature for superconductivity. I noticed this about google a long time ago - they started "dumbing" down their search results. Don't blame them because that's where the money is, but it is annoying when you're searching for something and the results are full of celebrities because someone famous happened to say something like your search term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...
- deleted 4y ago
- antisthenes 4y ago> Looks like the SEO folks do though. Pretty sure at least 80% (probably 95%+) of low-quality SEO content is generated by computers, or at least by very low-skill outsourced labor in a machine-assisted way. It then makes sense that the mature Internet can probably match any search query in a manner that leads to a site that sells something vaguely matching the query, through sheer quantity of available content. In other words - there is enough SEO content generated and indexed that most queries will be able to be monetized by a search engine like Google.
- lizknope 4y agoI have no idea what you are expecting from "high tc record" I'm getting links about the highest temperature on earth and it is listing it in Fahrenheit so if the "tc" means "temperature celsius" it is failing for me. All the other links are about high temperature superconductors.
- kidme5 4y agohttps://wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature
- lizknope 4y agoThese are the top 2 links I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... "High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc" Seems like google search is working quite well if the second link is what the person wanted.
- mindcrime 4y agoif I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads. FWIW, I would also have no idea what that search is supposed to return.
- reaperducer 4y agoBut you don't have a 20-year dossier of almost every web site he's visited; a list of 90% of his credit card purchases; an AI scrutinizing every photo he's ever been in that's been in, or in the background of, on the internet; a list of his previous searches; and a list of the places he's brought his cell phone. To improve user experience.
- nomat 4y agoKen Liu's "The Perfect Match" is a sci-fi short story about this topic. https://gizmodo.com/lightspeed-presents-the-perfect-match-by-ken-liu-5966398 https://gizmodo.com/lightspeed-presents-the-perfect-match-by...
- Arnt 4y agoGoogle says it spends about 0.3Wh per search, of which roughly one third is for scraping and two thirds for the search. I think you may be overestimating how much processing they could do with that budget (assuming they want to do that significant user-based tweaking, which is IMO not a given).
- actually_a_dog 4y agoYou know you spend/have spent too much time on Blind when you immediately think "TC" means "total compensation."
- llbeansandrice 4y ago> high tc record I don't know what you are trying to search for. A record for total compensation? Something related to Tesla coils? Turing Complete? Thread Count is a totally valid interpretation.
- drcongo 4y agoMy next single, High TC, doesn't come out for another month. You'll be able to search for it then.
- Invictus0 4y agoBut at least now a few MBAs can put "increased revenue at Meta by X%" on their resume!
- rolph 4y ago--that coupled with inability to realize that blasting ads at people doesnt make your product look better, it makes your product a source of frustration, and a daily/hourly annoyance, your product is associated with bad, and is avoided. the answer to the problem includes the concept of less is more.
- edgyquant 4y agoNot really since no one’s cares about the annoyances-if they did no company would run ads but the exact opposite is true
- ManlyBread 4y ago>no one cares about the annoyances Then why is adblocking so popular?
- jqgatsby 4y agoI agree. More generally, any business model where your users and your customers are disjoint sets will cause a misalignment of interests that generates an ever-increasing negative feedback loop. It seems like it can take a long time to play out though.
- edgyquant 4y agoIt’s the resource curse in corporate form
- duped 4y agoWhich companies were killed by ads?
- timr 4y agoYahoo comes to mind.
- bikson 4y agoDigg?
- ycta2334209 4y agoTumblr - banned 18+ content in 2018(?) in an attempt to make their site more advertiser-friendly and lost most of their userbase within a couple of months. Site was thriving before that.
- edgyquant 4y agoThis is a dishonest answer. Tumblr died because it’s niche was adult content. Banning your niche is choosing to fail.
- monocasa 4y agoIt doesn't seem dishonest to me; chasing those ad dollars are what led to the supremely stupid decision of banning one of their core niches.
- edgyquant 4y agoWe are talking about platforms where the ads themselves caused users to leave. This is not what happened with Tumblr and it is not a good faith view to say so.
- monocasa 4y agoI only see you attempting to constrain the topic that far, rather than just the ways that advertising based models in general can pervert a company's incentives by turning away their core user base. Sometimes it's just changing the UX until your userbase no longer wants to show up. Sometimes it's literally just banning a huge chunk of your userbase for some reason.
- csw-001 4y agoI'm not sure it's the advertising dollars that are addictive as much as it is "growth". To keep the stock price up you have sustain a PE that reflects revenue growth, and once you are done signing up new users... Well... Something's got to give. I see the ads as a lot like cutting timber out of a finite forest - it's profitable, but potentially harmful to the ecosystem in a way that can make it unsustainable. As long as you don't cut too much, replant aggressively, then you can make a sustainable business out of it - but it doesn't scale past the point where your harm to the ecosystem causes collapse. Once people exit FB because it's all ads, then the network benefits begin to evaporate, a little bit at first, then all at once... Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-)
- dylan604 4y ago>Then again I don't run a social media company, so what do I know. ;-) Maybe not a little as you think. Just because the social media companies are "runing", running into the ground is still running. They just have so much momentum that the ship is going to keep moving along.
- nostromo 4y agoAmazon seems to have taken a different route. Keep margins low and don’t make too much money in order to starve any potential competitors of capital. Of course - you still need to grow revenue for this to work - just not profits.
- danudey 4y agoDoesn't help that their recommendations are always "Oh, you bought an air conditioner? Come look at this wide variety of other air conditioners we have!" rather than, say, adapters for connecting air conditioners to different window types or home electricity usage monitoring or something.
- nostromo 4y agoThis is a common complaint. The reason they do it is because... it works! It can be counter-intuitive but this is often seen in recommendation systems. In music for example, the song most likely to be played after a song is... that same song again.
- in3d 4y agoExactly. By adding more and more ads, their own widgets, and pushing down smaller sites in the search results to favor brands, Google made it very hard for smaller sites with user-generated content to grow and profit organically. And then fewer people searched for them or expected to find them. I’m kind of enjoying the fact that newer sites and apps like Discord don’t let Google index them after Google killed off a large part of the independent Internet. We’re missing out on a lot of good content that would be put up in an alternate universe with a less greedy and shortsighted Google.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fullsend 4y agoUsers click more on big brands. The average internet user doesn’t want to browse hobby websites, they use the top 10 sites and never leave them. Accept it. Some of them never leave only Reddit or TikTok.
- mrtesthah 4y agoCynical proclamations tend to sound authoritative, but that’s not the same as being true. Sources?
- spiralx 4y agoI was interested as well, but couldn't find anything specifically answering the question. According to the link below social media, email and watching videos counts for about three-quarters of most people's internet usage, which could easily mean they spend most time on just three or four sites. The two smallest categories - searching and shopping - could also just mean Google and Amazon for the most part, so it's the "Surfing content (19%)" that's ambiguous... although even then I assume that Google is a big part of that, and otherwise surfing for content is pretty much the opposite of visiting a site regularly, although I guess it probably includes news websites, which probably are a regular visit. I'd guess that it is possible most people visit a dozen or fewer websites regularly, of which half a dozen or so are in the Top 10, and the rest include things like news/media sites that are most likely to be popular (if only nationally). Seems likely the older the person the narrower range of things they do online, apparently the most common activities for the over-60s are email and checking the weather lol. https://www.creditloan.com/blog/how-the-world-spends-its-time-online/ https://www.creditloan.com/blog/how-the-world-spends-its-tim...
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoNever thought I’d see the day, but I actually use Yandex for image search now because they basically deliver the google image search experience of a decade ago. While Google Images has had no one with Vision in charge and been tweaked, buffed and downgraded to the point of uselessness. And you can tell no one on the team actually uses it. Google Search could honestly be dethroned if someone really wanted to. The usage at this point is habit, not because it’s still a good search engine.
- krferriter 4y agoI've noticed recently Google image search has gotten surprisingly terrible for some things. I use Bing image search when the Google image search lets me down. Haven't tried Yandex.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoYandex in particular is good with reverse image search is the main thing that won me over. It uses the same system Google used before they replaced it with machine learning and made it useless. Google Image search these days seems to be "Oh that image you sent me is an Apple, here are pictures of other Apples" rather than showing me other sizes of the same image, and other images that are very similar looking.
- 6510 4y agoI still weekly make the mistake to try to find something that I know to exist. Sometimes I know there are hundreds of pages on the topic. I type query after query, again and again, nothing shows up. It's like in the 90's, I tell stories about.. I forget his name and the place, when it happened but it was something like this and that. pfft! edit: I just attempted to look up what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations. I cant carve out a query that gives me anything other than tax deductible donations. The "receiving" part is completely ignored.
- BridgetJones 4y agoI find it very fascinating: I'm in Switzerland, and the 4th result to [what kind of taxes on has to pay if one receives donations] links me to a good result: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/money-received-through-crowdfunding-may-be-taxable-taxpayers-should-understand-their-obligations-and-the-benefits-of-good-recordkeeping https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/money-received-through-crowdfun.... But when I connect to Google on VPN "from the US", I can't find it in the first 3 pages. Very strange.
- topaz0 4y agoOr maybe profit is an addictive drug that kills the company
- jpalomaki 4y agoFor those annyoyed with ads on Google search, Kagi [1] is worth trying. It's not free, but does not show ads and uses the Google index behind the scenes. I've been using it on desktop for few months and have no complaints. [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- JohnFen 4y ago> uses the Google index behind the scenes Does it give better results than Google? I find Google's results to be pretty horrible, and worry that if Kagi is using Google's index, then I wouldn't get better results with them.
- Liquix 4y agoIt does give better results. The filters can also be quite powerful. The problem is paying a steep fee to proxy Google's index... It benefits you and Kagi in the short term, but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly [0] long term. Bad search results are the symptom - scarcity and opaqueness of viable indices is the root cause https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
- freediver 4y ago> but strengthens the Google/Bing/Yandex index oligopoly The way we look at it as that it gives Google a non-ad based source of revenue, which is a good thing for the future of the web. If one day that revenue could displace all ad-based revenue, by Google selling data to providers like Kagi, we would reverse the current state of the web.