cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922
Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results
cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922
Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results
“Many of us may wonder,” yep. Some of us are pretty sure it’s because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They’re very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
I recently googled “grass” to find out more about different species and the results were all trying to sell me grass.
Grass.
Where I live it’s as common as dirt. I wonder how many people Google the word “grass” with zero qualifiers when trying to BUY grass.
Ffs
This made me curious. A while back, I decided that I’d had enough with lousy results. I started trying different search engines, and I landed on DuckDuckGo.
After reading your comment, I went and searched the same term, grass. At the top, it showed a short section of ‘products’ and one ad. The next result was a store, then Britannica’s article on grass. Fourth result was Wikipedia.
I figure that a ‘products’ link and one ad, clearly labeled, is reasonable. After all, the search engine is free.
You know, that makes me wonder if someone could figure out the old google search algorithm, and use it to make a new, more useful search engine.
IIRC PageRank was patented, so it’s public, and at this point the patent is surely expired.
A lot of the cost is data storage. Unfortunately, I doubt any party will replace old Google.