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Comment by rock_artist | Hacker News Reader

> Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content

That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.

Fair well.

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Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never stopped to think what it means. :)

Also consider Goodbye, God be with ye. [0]

Adiós - A diós - go to god. [1]

[0] https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org/articles/goodbye-is-short...

[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/145252/origins-of-adis

> Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means.

Fare is unrelated to fair:

> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) +‎ well.*

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare

So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".

In German there's a similar word, "fahren", which means driving or traveling. In Dutch the word "varen" mean to sail or in an older sense of the word "to move".

I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well" - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life: may fate treat you well.

The Dutch word "welvarend" (literally "well-sailing") translates to "prosperous" in English. So "vaarwel" or "farewell" is kind of a medieval way of saying "live long and prosper". :-)

There's also welfare and Wohlfahrt in German.

> Fare is unrelated to fair

True, but ‘fair well’ was likely just a misspelling.

> So to say “farewell” to someones is “have a good journey (in life?)”

On the wiki page for ‘fare’, you have to scroll a little to see the most relevant usage - see Etymology 2 definitions 2, 4, and 5. To get along, to pass through an experience, to happen, to progress.

As a verb, farewell is roughly synonymous with ‘be well’. (This agrees with have a good journey in life, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as travel or an analogy to travel, the meaning and common usage of farewell is already abstract and more general than travel, e.g., “how has your business fared?”)

As a noun, farewell has come to mean a valediction (the opposite of a greeting): wishing someone well when parting. Funny enough, valediction in multiple dictionaries I just checked is defined as a farewell or as the act of bidding farewell.

Que te vaya bien!

You just gave me jamais vu.

Tom's Hardware has been biased towards intel(reg the recent 13th,14th gen over-voltage issues), Anand Tech seemed quite reliable in comparision.

I remember waaaaay back in the day when Tom’s Hardware was mocked as Tom’s Hotware because they did some testing of what would happen to AMD and Intel CPUs if the heat sink spontaneously fell off while they were running. I think at the time, the AMD CPU melted itself, which Tom’s Hardware criticized. It did seem back then that there was a subtle anti-AMD bias on the site, but I haven’t paid close attention to it over time. It’s interesting to hear that the accusations of Intel bias still exist!

Gamers Nexus also showed in their video that TH's writer was the moderator of intel subreddit and they had been deleting posts on the recent issues with intel CPUs.

That is interesting. Between Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware, I am sad to see that Tom’s has ultimately survived longer. Anandtech was one of, if not the, best.

To be fair I've accidentally run a CPU without a heatsink and it did a thermal shut down while testing a BIOS issue. It's a useful feature.

That was fairly standard startup behaviour across all makers. The comment you're replying to talks about the heatsink suddenly falling off - a very specific testcase seemingly chosen to make a company look bad.

“We dont play silly cheap web traffic games” [proceeds to pointlessly split every article across 10 pages]

I don't know your age but rest assured that when Anandtech started, and for the following 7-8 years, doing that was absolutely needed for a good user experience. Try loading a giant single page with dozens of images on a 28.8kbaud connection... It will not end well

Lol I read plenty of long articles on a 14.4kbps connection and have been around long enough to know you’re using baud incorrectly :-)

Without trackers and superfluous images, excessive CSS etc you could load a nice long article reasonably quickly. Text does not need to be split like that. It was done for $$$. Ars even offered a pagination escape hatch as a premium benefit at one point.

The print version concatenated all the pages. They did it to allow users to not load all the charts all at once.

farewell*

fare thee well*

Google captured the web with their search product. Then they monopolised it with Adsense.

And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality information.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

The world is all that much worse for their poor character.

I disagree, their character does not matter, business incentives matter. Nothing would change, if other personalities were in charge, since profit maximization is still there.

Nothing personal, just business. Yes it sucks, but advertising is the business, not search. If it’s free, you’re the product.

The "it's just business" people will double dip and still inject advertising and sell your data while also directly taking your money for a product. Cable TV is a paid product that does both. Cellular carriers sell your data about your location and the usage behaviors of the services you pay for. Car manufacturers sell your movement data for a car you paid for. Sellers of any financial services are all in cahoots about your debt, incomes, holdings, credit worthiness, etc. Even brick and morter stores pull shit with rewards programs to track your buying behaviors to optimize advertising to you.

And when those same companies make public some front end framework, or sponsor a major open source product, or create some novel distributed acid compliant database we (the HN community) rally behind them and say huzzah.

Yes. When.

> Nothing personal, just business

To be candid, this might be the problem.

If we treated people with humanity and respect, we might not be so keen to throw them under the bus for a buck.

over the really long term, it's poor business practices.

> If it’s free, you’re the product.

For Google (and others) you are the product even if you paid for it (Android).

Seems like less something that Google did and more just a natural consequence of the massive economic value of being at the top of the ranking and therefore tremendous incentive to hack the algorithm with advanced SEO.

I don’t agree. As soon as commercialisation of the web began, this massive incentive existed. The early search engines all fell victim to “algorithm hacking” (granted, these algorithms were far more primitive). Google won search in these years by having much more sophisticated algorithms that were resilient to such attempts.

Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?

I wonder what makes you say that Google was more resilient to what you call “algorithm hacking” considering Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades. Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines? I’d argue that Google was simply good at turning search itself into a product. A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.

Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.

Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.

> Google has quite literally auctioned off result placement for two decades

Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.

> Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines?

Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.

> A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.

I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.

> Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.

Ad words spending had clear manipulations on the organic search algorithm. More spending meant better organic search placement. This is officially denied, but I saw this take place.

It is entirely possible that this would happen without manipulating the ranking algorithm. buy adds -> higher traffic -> higher ranking

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/142918?hl=en

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.

Having said that, I think it's clear the quality of non-ad search results isn't great, but I don't know if that's due to perverse incentives on Google's side or just the increasing sophistication of SEO defeating Google's relevance ranking.

> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. These pages talk about how the ordering of marked adverts appear in results, not non-advert search results.

It also describes the situation as it is now, not how it was when Google still cared about search results. The paid ads didn't use to be part of the search resuls list at all but instead were clearly delineated.

When google won, they were still having 2 text ads per page with a noticeable different font and style as the search results. It was trivial to point out the ad. All the ad growth, from the sensible to the massive, and the change to their relationship with SEO, all occurred after the competition had been sent down to, at best, the single digits

Yes, which is the point I was trying to make. I don’t think what we see is the cruel SEO victory over a valiant, but ultimately doomed defence by google. What we see is revenue optimization, that also happens to benefit SEO’s.

To be clear, Google very much had and has a culture of optimizing for (a certain) quality. They definitely fought spam.

It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.

Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.

They absolutely do not. Google has destroyed the promise of thr internet. In my experience the best resources on the internet no longer exist. They were hosted on some academics home page who retired or died 10 years ago. They could have spent their billions of dollars building a searchable internet archive that connects people to an organized library of the world's information. Instead they destroyed the internet and replaced it with affiliate marketing blog spam.

A lot of my favorite sites exist only as bookmarks and on the internet archive. If only there was software to explore the library. We could call it a 'search engine'. It would never catch on...

No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.

In what sense did they monopolise the web with adsense?

I never thought I would pay for searching information; yet now that I do, it's decidedly not google exactly because of this. Adsense hot garbage.

I was really surprised they survived this long. Long, overly elaborate, badly structured, too technical, and hence boring for the average joe, kinda articles all around.

Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.

The whole point of some of their articles was to go into the more esoteric technical details rather than gloss over them like some other sites. So in that aspect you are correct: it wasn’t for “the average joe”. However, for some people it was what they wanted.

That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.

Der8auer doesn't cover CPU architecture hardly at all. He mostly just does overlooking, which is orthogonal.

Have you ever wondered whether these long form articles give you ANY substantial knowledge or only the illusion that you gained something...

Yes, because they provide information I specifically want to know.

Well, I also read books sometimes.

For those of us with an attention span, long investigative reading is enjoyable and the knowledge gained is beneficial

I'm surprised people today even learn to read. Just watch youtube.

i was shocked when i realized some people cant write but use emoji as mean of communication

:clown + :pointright + ?!

(Surely, you jest?!)

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