Tonight on GeekNights, we consider the current state of search engines and why Google increasingly doesn't work anymore. In the news, iOS has multiple zero-day zero-interaction vulnerabilities (update your devices immediately) and Reddit is trying to embrace the worst parts of phpBB. 12 years ago we gave two short talks about how game mechanics (and UX design) literally make the communities that use them.
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Whenever some choad on the airplane tells me that he’d prefer to sit in my seat, instead of the one assigned to him, I say “You know, I’d also like to sit in my seat. But, I’d happily sit in your seat for $500 (or some amount depending on price of flight)”. That usually settles the question. Capitalism kind of sucks, but once in a while, it is fun to use it for righteousness.
Now, if it’s a parent travelling with a young child, the situation is a bit different. Here’s a pro-tip, though: If you really want to trade seats in order to sit next to your child/SO/whatever, always volunteer to trade down in order to sit next to who you want.
Bet on Rym’s marathon time, you say?
Side action on bargle/non-bargle is another good one.
@SkeleRym you never get gmail spam? I find out I’ve been selected at least once a week.
The sole spam I have gotten in gmail for many years now is influence brokers trying to publish their astroturf “articles” to the GeekNights web site. A few a month on average.
These spams get through largely because they aren’t automated. They are real people sending these emails from their actual accounts. Just like job recruiters.
Weird. In recent months, I’ve been regularly getting so-obviously-spam I can’t believe Gmail lets it through.
Random gibberish in the From: field, “click here to get your free blah”, etc. Several a week.
I mark every one as spam. They still get through. What is Gmail doing? Good ol Bayes should work. A regex should work!
Are you using free gmail? Maybe there’s a difference between free @gmail.com and the not free google workspaces.
Hmm, hadn’t thought of that. These are all in free gmail I think, now that you mention it.
Anecdotally I can tell you that the number of coolers I have won from Dick’s Sporting Goods (for instance) via my free Gmail account in recent months is too damn high. Whereas I also get basically nothing to my (still free legacy Google Apps for Domains/Workspaces) Gmail account.
Cory Doctorow just wrote an article on the downfall of Google.
Google Image search is totally unusable now.
Not any different than Google text search.
YouTube search is now as broken as Google search.
So, um… Wow. I didn’t expect an update to the above video after so long (or ever, really).
The simplest babies first full text search engine can only return exact matches of text. They often can’t even match a search query for a word like “buckets” to a search result that only contains the word “bucket.”
The most advanced search engines are successful, and hard to compete with, because of just how much of the nuance of language they are able to deal with. Instead of matching the literal text of the user’s query to the text of the result they match the meaning of the user’s query to the meaning of the result.
In this particular case there was some incorrect flagging that down-ranked the search result. However, the video was still present in the search results. It wasn’t completely eliminated. Yet, the search query was an exact text match for the video’s title. That’s baby’s first search result.
This is a thing that I think is frustrating users of all the advanced search engines. Yes, when a user is trying to discover information, it’s important to interpret their meaning to find something that may provide answers. But often times users aren’t trying to discover something. They already know precisely where they want to go. The only reason they are using a search engine is because they only remember the name or title of the thing they want, and not the URL.
But these advance search engines try to be too clever, and complete text matches are not prioritized. You would think that typing in the precise title of a video would make that video the number one search result, but no.
And the reason for this is somewhat obvious. Spammers would just make videos with the exact same titles as popular videos in hopes of showing up in the second spot when user’s search for the very popular video.
Users can solve this somewhat by bookmarking things they find valuable, so they never have to use a search engine for something they already know.
Search engines can solve this by prioritizing exact matches in their search results, but also aggressively eliminating spam and other garbage from the results entirely. In ProZD’s original video on the subject, so many of the results were re-uploads of his video. If YouTube was decent, any channel that engaged in that kind of re-uploading would be completely shut down.