• @xenomor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    611 year ago

    The time has long passed whereby we need to remove Google as the effective governing authority of the internet. As with most things online, a good idea ballooned into a net negative for nearly everyone else. This fact was obvious decades ago. There needs to be actual competition and government need to reassert itself as more than a rubber stamp for business growth.

  • @MajorHavoc@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    541 year ago

    Annoying stuff, but I’ve suspected for awhile.

    My personal blog is life changing, but y’all will never find it, at this rate. /Sarcasm

    More seriously, a decade ago my personal blog was the number one article on the Internet for like 3 deeply esoteric technical topics. Neat.

    At some point, that stopped happening. I didn’t give it serious thought, because those articles were never meant for anything but my personal reference, anyway.

    But it made me wonder what was going on with the algorithms.

    On one hand, I figure people can just go to stack overflow. Except, I don’t participate in SO, because they’re a bunch of tossers. But then, I figure someone else can just copy my write-up into Stack Overflow. Except, no one does, anymore, probably because they can’t find my blog either.

    Again, my blog is mostly useless shit. So maybe the algorithm was just doing it’s job. But I’ve wondered for awhile if the Internet wasn’t just plain better a decade ago when search actually worked.

    Whose blogs was I missing out on? Now I find stuff like that through Mastodon, but it still isn’t targeted topical search, yet.

    I need to get in on that web ring action going on.

      • @MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        101 year ago

        None of the most obvious searches I tried came up with my blog, but I did find some better resources (to me, than my blog, which admittedly I don’t care to find since there’s nothing new there for me…) on blogs that it did find. It looks like it’s doing the kind of search I used to rely on. Pretty cool!

    • @Kimano@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      71 year ago

      Yeah, honestly it would be fascinating if you wanted to go search for the specific terms that you think should bring that up, and then compare how deep your blog is in the results on a bunch of different web search pages.

    • /home/pineapplelover
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      When I look up the name of my blog, it shows up. Unlikely for it to come up if people look up just the title I think. Maybe I’ll give it a try

  • @barsoap@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    211 year ago

    I don’t think those rankings themselves are the problem, at least not the ones mentioned in the article, the issue is a lack of transparency and configurability.

    “isLocalCovidAuthority” makes a hell a lot of sense but if it gets boosted to the front then google should say “We are prioritising this result because we deem it trustworthy source of relevant information”: If you make an editorial decision, actually stand by it.

    “isSmallPersonalSite” also makes sense, but what about giving users the choice of prioritising or deprioritising it instead of making it for them?