Comment by WirelessGigabit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WirelessGigabit | Hacker News Reader

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WirelessGigabit

The problem here is authority. What makes you an authority on a subject? Books written? Credentials (diploma?)? References?

These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that.

In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass').

And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web.

Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve.

Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400

Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...

I work (partly) in SEO. One of the main issues that affects search and will get even worse in the future is the post-scarcity environment of the web when it comes to information. Say you had five websites for that each have identical cookie recipes. If you optimize search rankings by click-through rating, eventually all the sites will have similar copy, titles, and page descriptions. If you optimize for bounce rate, you knock out sites that get to the point but also knock out sites that crappy and have bad ui/ux. What about core web vitals? Well again, everyone will catch up eventually. Anything that can be gamified will eventually be gamed.

Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user?

There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.

This expectation that everything can be automatically done by algoryths is the core if the problem. its like a form of insanity, it doesn't work but we keep trying.

Why are top 10 results for 'apply for visa to Moldova' a scam? Is it really impossible to give government officials an ability to provide input for official business, like applying for a passport?

Could you not hire like 2 people in each makor country to keep track of websites for important government services?

Could you not take community input like reddit does, or wikipedia?

seriously sometimes i think the people making the smartest algorythms are tge ones with biggest tonnel vision, and are incapable of examining alternative solutions.

...It isn't the algorithm that's the problem. It's people invested in becoming a value extracting diversion for an answer that'll be around.

Lets take your problem. Applying for a visa for Moldova. Let's say that there's a site hosted at visa.moldova.gov with a form to apply.

Eventually, someone is going to integrate a bunch of data broker services to auto-fill that form, then data broker to other tourism related businesses trying to compete to plan your stay.

It is very much in their interest to ensure that no one sees visa.moldova.gov, but instead sees one of their onboarding funnels.

Thus the well around a well known onboarding point to a critical government service is poisoned.

You could stop working in SEO and just design shit to be responsive to typical boolean search like Tim intended. But dear God, people might be able to find things then, and where would you fork in the distracting cruft?

The problem never was or will be Search. The problem is advertisers hijacking the verb of "Search" to weight it for those willing to pay.

Librarians and archivists have had search solved for the last century. The only people who have a problem with that implementation are the ones who want to convince you the answer you're looking for is them.

>>What makes you an authority on a subject<<

the ability to make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation.

You seem to have misread the question. How does Google, an automated service, "make accurate predictions of outcome by way of knowledge, observation, and logical deliberation"?

they dont, and thats a major issue.

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