Carighan

Carighan , 4 months ago

Excuse me, don't you mean dark orange?

Carighan , 4 months ago

Those "ruined" products handily control huge chunks of the market. So from that perspective, they're not "ruined" at all. They're perfect.

Google search is awful now and there is a very real chance people will stop using it for the first time in like a decade.

Sure, but the one time someone brought actual empirical data into this discussion, it showed that while Google results did get worse, they got less worse than the ones of competing products like DDG (or Bing, which interestingly didn't share results with DDG, indicating that those must have expanded how much they use their own index).

Does that mean Google is better? No, they're still worse off. But if anything they made gains comparatively speaking, and what actually happened is that all search engines got worse because search-engine-spam-avoidance got defeated in huge parts.

Carighan , 4 months ago

But it sounds like they're just removing the ability to disable those features, not the features?

Carighan , 4 months ago

Honestly while Google is far ahead of Amazon here, they still recognize like 9 out of 10 voices as the "owner". Just not 10 out of 10 like Alexa does, which is utterly useless and will happily recognize a cat meowing as its trigger and allow it to unlock the front door. >.>

Carighan , 4 months ago

My point was more that the products aren't ruined from the perspective of their intended design. They're not meant as products to be of maximum usefulness to the customer, rather to capture and control the largest share of the market.

Carighan , 4 months ago

To be fair, I can actually sort-of see a specific point here:

They are legally required to offer you that cookie choice. If you block that choice, are they in violation of the law even if they cannot apply cookies? Just because their site does implement tech for it (even though you're blocking it, but the law cannot know that) and they cannot show you the popup allowing you to reject the tech (since you're blocking it)?

Weird thing. Doubt there'd be a clear answer without someone dragging someone else in front of a court for it, plus that's of course not why CNN is blocking us here, but it's an interesting thought whether they are even allowed to let you on if they cannot present you with the GDPR choice.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Same, works fine. But I don't block cookie popups, I have consentomatic handle them instead, plus Firefox is getting that built-in, anyways.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Damn, that's amazing!

Carighan , 4 months ago

Just one more upside to Firefox, less interruptions during work~

Carighan , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

What I find is that Google is now still better for what I usually search (a mix of programming, gaming and random factoids) compared to Bing or DDG, but no longer by such a wide margin as it used to.

Best as I can tell, it's because in the past Google constantly tweaked the parameters of their scrapers and models, in turn leading to SEO constantly having to re- and re-optimize, and making it difficult to artificially push your spam and crap content high. They must have stopped doing this, leading to this steady rise of generated spammy content, and now Google feels a lot like other search engines in that i have to very actively discard 80%+ of the results including the whole first page.

(edit)
I recommend reading the actual paper. Interesting though Google has gotten worse, it's results are still massively superior to the competition. 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. Damn. That's still a huge difference, shit as nearly-10%-spam is. I would however say its increased percentage of social media results (11% vs 6% respectively 5%) is bad, but eh, I guess there are users to genuinely want to see those results. 🤷

Carighan , 4 months ago

And it started out much worse, so eh, it still works worse for me than Google.

Carighan , 4 months ago

For me the specific question remains unanswered. There are a lot of results about the health effects on respiration, but none about specifically after a sinus surgery. Might be a question so specific that the internet at large has no answer to it.

What I do not get (on Google, search from Germany) is what you describe, my results are all relevant on the first 3 pages barring 2 results about the surgery instead of the fireplace.

Carighan , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Yeah same, they're absolutely unmatched, and by a huge margin. Faster, cheaper, and more consistently arriving both on time and undamaged.

I hate them. They do however easily outperform the competition, that's sadly also something I have to acknowledge.

Carighan , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I have had similar experiences constantly.

I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:

• They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is "This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads", because let's face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
• They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can't even know that if this user puts in "needle", they do mean a physical object. They don't even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.

In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it'll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG's and Bing's equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we'd need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
And in the first case, I wish they'd do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Just putting in "float needle" gets me only relevant results, those being a mix of what a float needle is, what it does, and a few shop results for places where I can buy one.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Can't you ring up your usual doctor to ask? Or well, I guess you'd need to call a lung specialist, but they ought to be able to answer that, no? Or your surgeon who did the surgery.

Carighan , 4 months ago

No but it's my gut feeling, and it matches with the temporal progress in the paper. Cannot truly know of course, but it's what I would suspect.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Interestingly according to the linked paper, DDG (and naturally Bing) are significantly performing worse than Google, even in the face of Google having gotten worse.

I always had a gut feeling about that when using DDG, but interesting to see the numerical difference. (31% vs 23% vs 9% spam)

Carighan , 4 months ago

According to it's Wikipedia entry, it's a genuinely separate index.

I did not know that. Damn. It's a small index, sure (so you might not get very many results for some queries) but they say they do that to avoid spam on it.

That might be a trade-off that is necessary in the future. Such a huge portion of the web has become crap that trying to index the entire web naturally makes the index you build crap, too.

Carighan , 4 months ago

I’ve switched to Ecosia and while it’s not perfect, I now find what I look for, which became impossible with Google somewhere about 2014-2016, I think?

Ecosia's results are pulled from Bing, and as the very paper linked here shows, Bing's results are significantly worse than Google's, even accounting for Google's deteriorating result quality. Notice in particular the percentage of spam.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Yeah, the paper shows a startling lead for Google, more than I would have expected.

I try to swap to DDG every so often (usually once a year, giving it about a month), but every time search ends up being frustrating enough so I don't stick around. Nevermind their boneheaded decision of using Apple Maps over something that actually wants to be useful like OpenStreetMap. But what I didn't expect was just how big the difference between the two is when analyzed, damn.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Not entirely true, they have their own index they use to augment/modify the results with. Like the paper linked in this very post shows, actually.

Carighan , 4 months ago

But on the flipside, if that data were publically owned and anonymized I'd genuinely want that kept. Since the feature is super useful. Same with busses and so on.

Carighan , 4 months ago

And yet the very link you're saying this under is essentially about how much better Google is than DDG or Bing. 😅 Just saying, the headline is garbage, while Google got worse, DDG and Bing (both also analyzed) got worser, faster, harder.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Ecosia is just Bing, and as the link shows Bing got shittier faster than Google and is producing worse results.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Since you say DDG is better, what's your take on the link we're discussing here, then? After all, the paper they talk about shows that DDG (and Bing, which is the vast majority of DDG's input) is signficantly worse than Google.

Or, to quote from the page instead of having to go into the paper:

Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.

Carighan , 4 months ago

So you use Google.

Carighan , 4 months ago

Did you read the paper this thread here is ultimately all about?

Carighan , 5 months ago

I can explain that, it's based on local post compliance laws.

The manufacturer already supplies it in the middle box, which is a valid parcel packaging for their country. However, when it's being delivered in yours, that one is not allowed so they need to pack it up again in another box, the bottom one, that is an allowed packaging in your country.

This stuff can be absurd at times. And go really wild.

Source: Worked in a wine shop for a few years that sent and received a lot of wine internationally via mail.

Carighan , 6 months ago

The wider the TV gets, the more stable a two-feet-at-the-ends design becomes compared to a single central foot.

Plus if you need anything else, VESA mounts are super-standard and you just get whatever you need then use it on every Tv you buy.

Carighan , 6 months ago

the back is for business

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Carighan , 7 months ago

Wikipedia should counter by offering Elon $4 to go towards paying off his massive hole from buying Twitter. 😂