> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary.
In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.
Yeah this seemed completely bizzare to me, too. Not only are operators like site: and inurl: more necessary than ever, they're not even sufficient a lot of times, because if you don't know what website you're looking for you have to wade through oceans of blogspam that can't easily be filtered through operators since they're designed to match anything you search for. That's mainly a problem with the indexing; Google should be ignoring these sites. But it's probably padding their bottom line, so I guess they're not incentivised to.
I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.
This is exactly the problem. Most companies put 90 plus percent of their effort towards maximizing profit once they go public. Your reason for existence as a company is to serve customers and provide for employees, not only to make money.
Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
But this is the same argument that the companies make, and they start foundations and think-tanks to write papers and do press releases against the stuff that they themselves do.
Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger.
Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation.
It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.]
Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.
Maximizing profit is great if the side effects are beneficial. Currently maximizing profit means shoving as many ads down people's eyeballs as possible and that's the root cause of blogspam. Google is obviously not going to fight it when they often take a cut of the ad money shown on blogspam sites.
We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.
>> We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.
That's easy to say but IMHO requires the consumer to pay directly rather than the whole advertising nonsense that has nothing to do with the consumer searching for stuff.
Starting to think the only way to stop this kind of thing is to remove the profit motive as much as possible. The whole 401k plan idea for retirement savings is causing huge inflows of cash into the market which is probably where a lot of the money looking for returns is coming from. When a whole society is seeking profits it seems like that's going to make things worse. I'm not even sure how much return rich folks were looking for in the old days - if you owned a big company and it was making money, was there such thing as "enough"? There definitely isn't today.
Sure it's easy to say and difficult to achieve. Would it be easier to eliminate profit motive rather than limiting the ways in which it can be done? Eliminating profit motive would be an attempt to change human nature, we are greedy after all. Regulating the ways in which the profit motive can be expressed is an administrative exercise.
If we could ensure that people are more like to get rich doing valuable things (value != money, value == things that match our values), then we wouldn't see the brightest minds of each generation slave away in ad-tech and finance. Spending their work lives manipulating people into buying things they rarely need or fighting it out in a zero-sum financial game for negative societal gain.
Of course, regulations are not a real substitute for having values beyond pure profit motive because regulations can actually reinforce profits by creating a regulatory moat. Regulatory capture is also a real threat.
That's your plan? THAT'S YOUR PLAN? For the people in charge to magically start valuing your quality of life without beating them over the head with regulation?
Look, I hope as much as the next guy that a competitor emerges with a better offering, against all odds beats the incumbent, and unlike the last 5 times this happened does not follow the market incentive to become evil, but hope is not a strategy.
The paradox is that as long as it's difficult to become in charge, only the really ambitious people will get there, and these generally aren't the people who'll serve others. Back to the lottery system?
If we move ownership from boards of investors to the people who work at a company, and make leadership democratically elected, such as in a co-op, things work out a little better. Yeah, ambitious people will still raise to the top, but their incentives will be to make the company better, not necessarily more profitable.
Ok, let's assume for the sake of discussion that co-ops are better in every way, what then? Should we just require all shareholders to be employed full-time at the company (effectively eliminating the stock market), or just the leadership?
For a co-op to work, every employee (And often, every customer, though that's not necessary) gets one vote. They become the shareholders. Yes, this means that company in particular wouldn't have stock with voting shares, but that doesn't mean it can't have a stock market. For instance: There are other companies.
Generally I take an evolutionary view. If we accept that companies evolve through competition in markets, regulations should be designed to put selective pressures on having those values.
A regulatory moat, is in my view homologous to niches in biology. Things settle into a sort of equilibrium where evolutionary change drastically slows. The main solution to this: aggressively break up monopolies(I would argue duopolies too). Other ways this equilibrium breaks is just that the environment changes. E.g some new technological breakthrough makes older technologies obsolete. Or a natural disaster in biology, throwing the ecosystem into disarray.
My average search starts with „site:reddit.com” because otherwise first three pages of results will be SEO blogs where 90% of article follows „First, what is XYZ?” followed by „so we see why it serms hard, but if you pay us/our affiliate money we will do it for you nice and easy!”
Try out alternative engines like You.com or Brave Search. They let you set reddit and other apps as a preferred source/show it on all relevant queries.
duckduckgo also has "bang operators" that allow you to specify site. An example is !r for reddit or !w for wikipedia
It's even nicer for some sites like Wikipedia because it goes directly to the page if theres an exact match instead of the intermediate search results page
Google was never good enough to remove the operators, and as you said it’s gotten worse not better.
Seemingly people using operators would produce additional training for the algorithm which is currently not possible. This could also be a factor leading to the results decay everyone has experienced when trying to find something that isn’t leading popular culture. It’s that peculiar behaviour where tweaking the search terms didn’t affect the results.
Ugh, yes. Google is still pretty good for navigation-by-title on popular content, but it is increasingly terrible at search. Breaking operators is part of that story, but I've seen more and more instances where Google will prove that it can return a page but won't return results for some of the phrases on the page. I half suspect that behind the scenes there is a one-hot encoding or embedding that just ignores tokens with low frequency, which completely wrecks Google's ability to navigate technical writing with abbreviations, part numbers, small brands, etc. Sometimes it does work, so I think of it like a popularity algorithm plus a decrepit fallback for the content it deems "no longer necessary" to do a half decent job on.
Which is the core issue, Google has likely gotten better for the average user, but worse for above average users; say this as an above average searcher that has helped average users search for years.
To my knowledge Google neither publishes search quality reports, nor acknowledges that there’s a gap between their search quality for average users and above average users. In my experience even their “Search Quality Raters” (contractors paid to evaluate search quality) are rarely above average searchers, they are just good at evaluating what they evaluate.
Average user either likely: does not care, values ADs, understands ADs pay the bills, does not care enough to understand ad blockers, cannot tell search quality has changed, is unable to tell real reviews from fake, etc.
If you care, in my opinion, you’re not an average user, since if the average user cared, so would Google.
Why Google became popular is way to complex a topic for a thread like this, but no, average user at this point does not with any meaningful cadence look for other search engines to use and likely started using Google not because they compared it to others, but because someone told them to use it. If you’re doing more than five searches a day, you’re not average.
To add to this, most non-tech people I know just type their search in the URL bar and it goes wherever it goes, usually to google. They even do this with actual urls, without the .com or whatever at the end and just click on the google search result for the link they wanted to go to. As someone who has meticulously hand-crafted search queries since the altavista days of the web, it still stuns me when I see it.
We haven't done a very good job of explaining how the web or browsers work to the general public, let alone the landscape of search engine companies.
If you want the old, good, Google back: Turn on Verbatim Mode.
Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim.
Instead of Google throwing away 90% of your search query and looking for the "top hits" (and returning almost entirely auto-generated pages), it keeps every word you entered and returns actually relevant stuff.
I hate modern "search". I understand nontechnical people probably like algorithm-based "enhanced" search fine, but if I search for something specific I want THAT THING ONLY.
"Modern" search made it really hard to ask very specific, strict questions.
Yeah, I suspect when they added all the "filter out all the piracy sites" features, and anything else that's bad on the internet, it really ruined what was once the most powerful search engine I had seen to date. I don't think we'll ever see that again. Probably also when they "personalized" the search results more and more.
What Google needs is a built-in way to block domains, like idk... Pinterest.
That's one more example of why operators are more necessary than ever - you can add a -pinterest to your searches and (at least for now) it respects it.
But I'm glad to see something finally done about my biggest gripe with Google (and even DDG sometimes does this): search results that don't contain the phrase, or not even part of it, that I'm specifically searching for, quotes be damned. If Google is finally getting the hint, good. This has been driving me nuts for years.
A plain, no algorithmic "enhancements," regexp search would rock. I've wanted that since the Alta Vista days, but I doubt I'll ever see it. It might be a bit expensive to do something like that over a Google-sized search database.
In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.