Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Google drank too much of their own koolaid. They were always seen as an "AI company", but they really weren't. As late as 2008, Google's head of AI said they used very little machine learning in search. And actually tried to avoid using it as much as possible. Because they found it very unreliable and it gave weird an unpredictable edge cases. Everything was painstakingly hand engineered.

But now we are at peak AI hype cycle. No wonder it's gone downhill. I'm sure the AI does better on whatever metrics they tell it to maximize. But AIs game the hell out of metrics. And we are still nowhere near human level intelligence. It doesn't understand your query or the content of the websites. All it has to go by is simple keyword matching and meta indicators like the size of the website.

So now basically all searches return the same handful of large websites. When was the last time you got a search that went to some niche forum? Or some small little homemade website by someone passionate about that specific subject? No, it's always a wikipedia link, followed by a bunch of contentless news articles. And there's never any point of going past page 1, because every other page is like that too.

And now the web has become this: https://www.ncta.com/sites/default/files/platform-images/wp-...

The little passionate website in the 2000s used to be the best source of information if properly vetted. Now it's only big websites regurgitating the same superficial content written by paid writers who have no expertise in the subject matter. They instead just copy other superficial sources.

I think this has dumbed down society because it certainly has dumbed down me. Also, complicated topics are dumbed down to 1 sentence answers and it's very difficult to get detailed information about something. Ironically, I've started to go back to purchasing and reading books if I really want to go in depth on a subject.

On the other hand, from my experience:

I wanted to see how Raspberry Pi assembly worked - quite a niche subject (who programs? In assembly? On a Raspberry Pi?).

Yet I found quite a few blogs going through the subject - a tutorial of sorts.

I was also looking up how to write an OS (just for fun) - another fairly niche field. Yet I found tons of tutorials in C, C++, and Rust.

I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

Nada.

You couldn't find nothing. I mean maybe you'll find a basic site with the source-dump of an OS (often without building instructions), but you want to dig into the meat (here is how you get from bootloader to x86-64 in 21 days, and why it works)? Foggetaboutit.

I definitely don't want to go back to pre-google web1.0.

In my experience, it depends a lot on how much competition there is from content farms. If your niche isn't targeted by those, it's easy to find the good blogs. Otherwise, it's very difficult.

I suppose that this is a use case where ML could help a lot to recognize "content farmed + SEO optimized" content. Hopefully Google could improve the situation in the future - supposing they are trying.

One of the most entertaining "bugs" that popped up recently while I was looking around for some opinion content that I would _hope_ is recent was that one of the content farm sites plagiarized a rather good blog post, sentence for sentence, for pages and pages. Instead of "I found that ..." they'd thinly-edited it to "Now, let us find..."

The annoying thing was that the content farm appeared _above_ the original content.

Probably because they employed better SEO than the original author :(

> I remember trying the same in the 1990s.

A major issue, that affected finding "Raspberry Pi assembly" in the 1990s was that the Raspberry Pi didn't exist yet.

A lesser issue, and perhaps one that may have made it difficult to figure out how to "write an OS (just for fun)" is that few people had done this and published tutorial-style material for absolute beginners on the web- and most of those tutorials that did exist weren't on the world wide web (but on e.g. usenet).

Search engines didn't exist until the very end of the 90s. The 00's is the golden age I compare too. And yes there are still some small websites. But they are a lot less common. Especially if you aren't searching for them intentionally. They've made sure you won't accidentally stumble across them. For instance, I just searched "raspberry pi" and most of the results are companies selling them. There's also the official site, official social media accounts, and the wikipedia page.

There was actually a result for a small wiki of pi enthusiasts. But it was buried 10 links down on page 2, and mixed in with all the other noise. There's also a lot of news sites and blogspam (a lot of links have a little indicator that says "x hours ago". As if good articles expire.)

>Search engines didn't exist until the very end of the 90s.

Both Yahoo and AltaVista were started in 95.

That is not related to the search engine itself, this is due to the amount of content available now compared to the 90s.

> And there's never any point of going past page 1, because every other page is like that too.

To be honest, I kind of like that part. Most of the time, if there are no useful links on the first page, I know to refine my search terms right away, instead of wasting my time clicking through pages and pages of useless stuff.

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