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Nah, you need some way to consider the quality of your text. No way around that. Let's say I publish a page -- nothing fancy to it, no dark patterns at all --
by nkoren 2y ago
Nah, you need some way to consider the quality of your text. No way around that.
Let's say I publish a page -- nothing fancy to it, no dark patterns at all -- just the word "architecture". For anybody searching for the term "architecture", this is now the perfect page -- a 100% match to their search, with no dark patterns at all. Completely useless, but perfect.
What would my motivation be for doing something like this? Well, imagine that I now deploy 100,000 identical or very similar pages. Your search engine is now fully _nuked_ for those terms. Does your competitor have a product that you don't want being found via the search engine? I'll happily nuke its search terms for you, for a fee of course. That's my motivation. Remember that advertising is not just a competition for you to be seen, but also for your competitors to not be seen. Your search engine, as-is, would be great at enabling the latter.
(Maybe you could fix this by allowing down-votes from logged-in, IP-logged users... but with 100k pages to downvote, that's not gonna help. So maybe you take pages which have been downvoted and do similarity comparisons to pages which haven't. A simple Levenshtein distance is too crude and easily-gamed, but maybe you could feed the downvotes into a neural-network classification system... and down the rabbit hole you go.)
- animuchan 2y agoDoing this only makes sense if the search engine gained some nontrivial traction, at which point it becomes feasible to hire a small number of students to manually delist obvious garbage. I guess this will hold up as long as you're not the №1 default search engine.