this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
335 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
68526 readers
4734 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it though.
There is plenty they can do. They created this mess with their algorithm. They can undo it by changing it, again.
Google does not objectively score or rank a site based on what you are actually looking for. They rank based on how much time other people spend on the site. How many other sites link back to the site. They rank based on how many words are on the page, regardless of if that actually matters.
This is why when you google a recipe, all the top results are blog posts from soccer moms telling a life story about food. You don't care about that stuff - you just want the recipe. But that's what google cares about.
Google can change this.
I don’t think the algorithm is the problem. The problem is that sites started to capitalize on your attention. Everybody wants your sweet little attention so they can earn money from it. Internet also moved into walled gardens of money making machines (like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok).
It doesn’t matter which algorithm is used. Somebody will crack it and abuse it for their own good.
There’s no reversing this.
If the algorithm gives a bigger shit about giving the answer people are actually looking for, and doesn't emphasize length, formatting, and other bullshit... And people crack the algorithm by giving exactly that answer I'm looking for, I'd be ok with that.
But it all starts with the algorithm
That’s easily abused. Search engines before Google were pure keyword search, but those were quickly abused. People just made websites with all types of keywords just to get on top of search results. Google’s PageRank fixed this - temporarily. People were quick to abuse it too.
It doesn’t matter what you try to do. Somebody will figure out how to abuse it.
This is exactly right but assumes the nature of the internet must remain the same. The problem is the content and people wanting your sweet little attention. The internet described in the article - the blogosphere and Usenet and the rest, was an internet created by people for people and existed for its own sake. What google has access to now is 3 billion people all trying to scam the others for money. Its a fundamentally different user base and there's no way a better algorithm can find content that isn't there
Just out of curiosity what google products do you use?
I guess it's gmail, drive, calendar and YouTube mainly