Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?
To the original replyer: you could wait for Google to do something, but if they were going to fix the listicle issue, and it were fixable on their end, they'd probably have done it by now. I'm disappointed in the situation too but if there is a workable solution on our end it would be silly to ignore it because fixing the problem is someone else's job.
To the OP: I worry that the number of domains pumping out crap might be far greater than we know, and that might hamper the effectiveness of this. If the collaborative block list ever got big enough you might also have to deal with spam. But I think it would be a great thing to try. This is one of those issues that annoys me, but it's just below my action potential threshold. My biggest objection right now is the spammy recipe websites.
Or somewhat related, the "if you touch it you own it" problem.
So to overcome this learned helplessness effect, we'd need a good strategy to prevent the deterioration of duty of whoever is "supposed" to be fixing a problem, and/or a way to cut out the derelicts entirely.
I'm sure you're right about the number of spam domains, but Pareto suggests that blocking even a small percentage of them might provide a large gain.
If we manage to block them, we might be able to get a results page with good sites upfront and the other meaningless content below it. I assume Google will also surface good content along with the bad, so our blacklist might enable the good stuff to reach the top.
The spam problem, I'm sure of yet, but we might either be able to block enough of it to be satisfied or it won't pose a problem for most searches that are currently giving bad results.
* code-search-blacklist based on this jhchabran's repo [1]
* pinterest.com based on SwiftOnSecurity's interesting seo analysis [2]
Maybe your repo could be an opinionated list of things developers find annoying about google search results, where others might value sites like pinterest in their results.
[1]: https://github.com/jhchabran/code-search-blacklist
[2]: https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/12588753334467174...
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I call it "socialist", since they spend their lives telling others what to do or what is good or not for the rest of us but they rarely do anything about it. Surprisingly, this is the group that is really worried about poverty and climate change and do as much as I do for it, with the difference that I do it by myself, the few times I do it, not requiring the rest to do it.
It is always someone else who will do it. Though the other day I had a conversation with a non-socialist person that had that same attitude ("other should do it") towards what OTHERS should do. I really dislike that attitude, no matter where it comes from.
Point at hand: when I want or promote something, I am the first one to do it no matter others do it or not. The rest, no matter the ideology, all b*llshit.
As imperfect as I am, I try to do what I think is good (and sometimes my imperfection prevents me from doing it) but I do not spend my life telling other people why they are worse than me and telling them what they should do or not. The most I have for someone is good suggestions, never requirements.
I cannot see how that would be a vice of capitalism since capitalism is basically non-intervention and freedom.
I don't think socialism is the word you're looking for. If you're trying to say that the described behaviour ("it's everyone else's job") is common in, or a byproduct of, a socialist system then it would make more sense (though it could be argued).
But that doesn't make it a correct "approximation" of socialism. Socialism is:
>a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
I did not mean anywhere every socialist is like that or that all peopple that do that are socialist.
On top of that, that is just a personal opinion. Nothing else.
I described an attitude I dislike and I often find, like it or not, at that side of the spectrum: we have to eliminate poverty, stop the climate change and do all good things in the world. At the same time I write from my big luxury Iphones, my big house (as I promote equality) and, of course, tell the rich to pay the bill as if their money belonged to everyone else. Mine no, I am no rich... I am socialist to point to who should do it, not to do it.
I have never, ever seen a person with a capitalist mindset pointing to the wealth of others or saying that everyone should have the same be equal for the sake of being and they are quite more restrained about telling all the others what to do. Also, they are often quite more frugal people.
A centralized economy is not flexible enough to supply the changing demand or to readjust.
The big leap forward was created, for example, to overtake England (I recall, correct me if I am wrong) in Steel production. In practice what happened is that people run desperate for their lives and died of hunger. Because they did not have the means to do it.
There are way more examples, being this one maybe the biggest disaster, but in essence there is an impossibility to calculate prices and gather information of good quality in a socialist system.
Not with public capital and under coercion, which is how a socialist system works.
It’s often possible to work around issues in lower layers, but it's usually at least worth raising it upstream to get it fixed 'properly'.
It'll help me when I dont have a blocklist active, and it'll help new programmers who arent familiar. It'll reward good sites with extra traffic and discourage new spammers entering the market.
In the worst case, if Google really can't or won't address tge issue, understanding the upstream problem more fully can help make a better workaround.
Have you searched anything on Google lately? The answer is "no". Their new job seems to be to stuff your results with anything even remotely related (and sometimes related in a way that only machine learning can see) so you have things to click on.
Edit: with the lone exception of "find me this bussiness nearby".
It's very noticeable if your search contains a short keyword that has to interpreted in the context of the other keywords. As an example, if I search for 'ARM assembly' plus another keyword (macro, syntax etc) it will see 'ARM assembly' without the extra keyword has way more high ranking results and happily show me how much it knows about armchairs that don't require assembly. Ignoring the fact that the extra keywords are there specifically to limit the search results.
It's tiring, a lot of time I previously spent browsing the limited but valuable results it returned I now have to spend mangling the keywords enough to outsmart their ML/NLP interpretation and get it to admit I am actually asking for the thing I am asking for so I can finally get to the part where I have to solve the modern captcha: click all the results that are:
1. Not stolen/rehosted 2. Not a "Hello World" level Medium blog 3. Written by an actual human
This reminds me of the Linux gamers who claim that they can influence game development companies by purchasing games with Linux ports, but wind up being less than 0.5% of sales of most games with Linux ports, which leads manufacturers to ignore that customer base almost completely.
I personally am kinda happy where Linux gaming has come to be. Sure it could always be better but I remember times where there were only like 3 games for Linux and you had to compile them yourself..
I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I think Google is now fully in the 'optimize for engagement' camp. If that's what they're doing, it's by definition not spam (from their point of view) if people are clicking on it more than the non-spam results.
Again, only my guess as to what's going on. I don't see another good explanation for them only serving cloned Stackoverflow and top X lists for basically everything now.
That hasn't been true for a long while.
Users are there for an answer to their query, not to be directed anywhere. Frequently this comes in the form of search vertical response that doesn't lead the user anywhere.
From Google's point of view, you want the user where you can show them ads, full stop. Google does not exist to provide you with answers to your queries, it exists to make money for shareholders.
> When you don’t have viable competitors both of those are improved by worse search results.
I don't think "worse search results" is the way to think of it. From G's point of view they're better because they make them more money.
> Can we just nudge them to do so under the threat of an influential minority leaving due to their use case being affected?
Many influential people have tried and nothing seems to have transpired from it.
Google.com is the most popular website. I don't think the leaving of any minority group we manage to create would even matter to Google, let alone force them to fix the issue. Not that I discourage using alternatives.
No. This is a classic mistake of intellectual types, who are impressed by each others' cogent arguments. But there is a much wider pool of people who are not, and among whom the intellectual types actual have very little influence, due to being boring and hard to understand (plus, it has to be said, kind of snobbish about how smart they are).
Now, you might reason that Google is full of smart people who should care about cogent arguments. But that assumes as an unspoken premise that Google's internal goal is to maximize the quality of the service and profit from being The Best. They passed that goal years ago are now so awash in money that it's cheaper to just squash competition than to innovate. They can be moved by threats to advertising revenue got up by angry crowds on social media (a market when they have little direct power), but Google would probably be delighted if grumpy nerds wandered off somewhere else. If they need talent or access to some compelling technology they can just throw a pile of cash at the problem.
I sense Google is too big to cater to us like this. Despite a steady decline in quality, Google is still the dominant search engine and the competition isn’t even close to its market share. Not only would they not notice many of “us” leaving, the amount of change they would have to implement in order to satisfy our desires would end up changing the product for the rest of the market. On some level, the product managers must be satisfied with the metrics as they stand since Google is continuing with their current course.
Or more fundamentally perhaps this is just the system working as Google intended?
I doubt many advertisers like the status quo very much either. They basically have to pay for ad placement to ensure the first results for their product aren't ads for competing products. On mobile when I search for Boox the first result linking to them is an ad. Same for Kobo. In other instances I'll search for company or product and a competitor ad is the first to show. So vendors get stuck paying for ads when their own site should probably be the first organic result, above the ads.
Google doesn't make money from people finding what they're searching for. Google makes money by keeping people searching.
Start with changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo or something else, install uBlockOrigin and Privacy Badger to disable tracking, and gradualy reduce using every Google or application, starting with Chrome.
Be the change you want to see.
1. DuckDuckGo too is affected by these SEO-gaming sites, so maintaining a blacklist will help us make that experience better too.
2. There are times when only Google can find us what we're looking for, so this will prove useful when we go back to it.