Google Removes Sort by Date options in search
reclaimthenet.org
reclaimthenet.org
But no, now that the market has been oligopolized, it's more profitable to show you what you don't want, and you'll have to be satisfied with whatever incidental successes you manage while wading through the output of the Search^h^h^h^h^h Sell-You-Things Engine.
I also often use the date filter so find older news about some topic. But I have never sorted by date to do that, I use the filter instead.
The most annoying new “feature” is that every for sale search on my local CL also returns “more from nearby areas” results from New York, which is hundreds of miles away.
The problem is the meaning of distance is relative by culture. 250 miles is nearby in American west. Some people drive that far for groceries, a date, work even. Without leaving the county.
Meanwhile from say [checks map] Springfield Massachusetts, same 250 miles spans eight states. Half of which hate each other.
Now try buying a car on Craigslist in Hawaii, where half the listings are on the wrong islands. Part of this is CL's fault and part is the spammers mislabeling location (which is also CL's fault, indirectly).
In the parts of UK or EU where people don't have cars, search radius of 250 miles is worse than useless. Some people don't travel that far their entire lives, unless there's a war on. It makes the whole site feel like buggy American crap.
californian: it is not. that's a 3-4 hour drive and can get you from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. If I'm driving that far to meet someone, it better be some crazy rare item that can't be shipped, not for groceries.
Even as someone raised in the rual parts of California, the nearest walmart was "only" 40 miles away or so in the 90's.
I still remember the gmail announcement: it was on April 1st and near everyone just thought it was an April fools joke that they promised a GB of space when Hotmail gave 5 MB. And their conversation UI, no delete button, labels: they innovated on every single aspect of how you could do email. Oh did I forget to mention it was the first true web application that was mass market end user focused? And did a killer job at it too?
At one point Google was a true innovators company. Failing to acknowledge that shows Cory’s own biases and continues to relegate him to one loud corner of the internet. We get it Cory, you loooove GNU. Doesn’t mean you can’t objective about other things.
/added never mind, seen the post below!
"you don't need that" is being taken to the extreme. Designers with simple needs, not imagining that somebody would need more?
Recommendation algorithms are another field. Presumably they have tons of parameters. And how many do they expose? 0. Leading the algorithm to be mis-tuned for how I feel at a given moment ("give me new stuff" vs "show me something familiar").
YouTube's "related videos" have recently completely gone down the drain too. They've always mixed not actually relevant videos in there, but now they're ONLY showing them, leaving me without a way to actually find related videos.
Am I just an old man lamenting the world changing or does this type of stuff seriously feel inhibiting to anyone else?
This trend is one of the major reasons I prefer free software - some kind of respect for users' needs and the theoretical option to change these things.
Also few months ago or more, they were experimenting with being able to sort videos' comments by "Timestamped comments", which is actually quite smart because people timestamp videos in comments a lot and viewers are indeed interested in clicking timestamps when they see them in comments.
Despite the web app looking almost identical, save for the presence of the date drop down.
I take it this is looking more widespread and/or permanent?
Maybe even with a user-specific model, yay!
On the upside, the self petrification of giant redwood companies creates space for new businesses to create actual search engines.
Over the last few years it's became an outright necessity to use search operators to find what you want on Google. Back in the day the only skill you needed was how to phrase questions to find the best results, but nowadays I spend a lot of my time telling those around me about site:, before:, etc.
Speaking of recommended videos and their corresponding algorithms. One huge thing for YouTube would be feature that would allow you to tweak your recommendation settings. For example filters like: Recommend me only videos in English or recommend me only Gaming and Music videos etc. There is a lot of room for improvement but Google is public profit driven company so they have to balance their expenses and chase revenue which in return means serving users "en masse" and not focusing exclusively on the quality of the product.
So to some extent the value of the date function was already being destroyed by corruption, but I did still get use out of it so I think this is premature.
Or have they only changed the dates not the content itself substantially, etc. So that's a poor excuse if it was one.
This isn't journalism, where articles never change. It's providing current information about a topic and the URL is a shopping window – it changes.
All the more important to be able to find out what it used to say at important points in time, such as the day someone decided to link to it.
Therefore, it’s useful because you can sort by approximate date of the content being crawled. It doesn’t need to be the exact date of the content being published. Just approximate is better than nothing.
Today.
All sites indexed by Google have at least one very important date associated with them: the date they were indexed, and by extension what they looked like then.
And you can bet Google isn't throwing away this information for their own use. Temporal signals give causal signals, and casuality is extremely important for AI.
But it seems equally clear that it might be useful for others.