4 ms·

I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing. I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we

by jrm4 3y ago

I'm interested in this idea, as possibly a good thing. I'm definitely pro "personal data poisoning," e.g, absent legislation and/or incentives with teeth - we should all be working on ways to confound and confuse and generally screw up the companies who are sucking up all the personal info. This kind of runs parallel to that. Google search has been pretty bad for some time now, might be worth "burning this thing down to save it."

bobthepanda 3y ago
The problem generally speaking is that any successor search engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling. I don’t know that making the web less usable in general is worth it.
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
  I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a lot better.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Are they doing nothing, or is the current state of the spam arms race resulting in running just to stay in the same place? And would anyone be better once they became the primary target?
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      They are standing in the middle of it and picking everyone's digital pockets while claiming that they can't possibly help in the fight because it's too hard to pick a side. In an alternate universe they would be a Nazi Switzerland. Google makes money off of SEO spam. They get ad revenue from sellers and then give some pocket change to the scammers from the sellers. All of the money goes through their hands first. They're evil, they've sold whatever soul they might have had to the god of "money at any cost", and the current shitshow of their terrible search results is what you get when a soulless wreck is left to shamble the earth until its heart stops beating.
imglorp 3y ago
The resolution to burning it down is replacing it with something that works. Quality, human curated, perhaps niche, search is what we should be encouraging and paying for with actual money, and not by renting our brains out.
- TillE 3y ago
  It's gonna be really funny if we've looped all the way back to the Yahoo Directory circa 1998. It's hard to argue against the basic idea of human curation as a necessary component. I'm envisioning something like a search engine on top of a community-curated, categorized list of sites. I'd prefer something that works like Wikipedia, rather than a service controlled by a private company.

by jrm4 3y ago

bobthepanda 3y ago

The problem generally speaking is that any successor search engine will become a target of the massive spam firehose when sufficiently popular enough, and probably less well equipped to deal with it; Google is well resourced and already struggling. I don’t know that making the web less usable in general is worth it.

worldofmatthew 3y ago
I've seen SEO spam sites that have been running for years without Google doing anything about them. Google could do a lot better.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Are they doing nothing, or is the current state of the spam arms race resulting in running just to stay in the same place? And would anyone be better once they became the primary target?
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    They are standing in the middle of it and picking everyone's digital pockets while claiming that they can't possibly help in the fight because it's too hard to pick a side. In an alternate universe they would be a Nazi Switzerland. Google makes money off of SEO spam. They get ad revenue from sellers and then give some pocket change to the scammers from the sellers. All of the money goes through their hands first. They're evil, they've sold whatever soul they might have had to the god of "money at any cost", and the current shitshow of their terrible search results is what you get when a soulless wreck is left to shamble the earth until its heart stops beating.

imglorp 3y ago

The resolution to burning it down is replacing it with something that works. Quality, human curated, perhaps niche, search is what we should be encouraging and paying for with actual money, and not by renting our brains out.

TillE 3y ago
It's gonna be really funny if we've looped all the way back to the Yahoo Directory circa 1998. It's hard to argue against the basic idea of human curation as a necessary component. I'm envisioning something like a search engine on top of a community-curated, categorized list of sites. I'd prefer something that works like Wikipedia, rather than a service controlled by a private company.