Perverse incentives at work!
They rolled out a completely new design semi-recently for... half of the pages... and left the other half on the 10+ year old styles.
It just feels like Amazon is happy to take advantage of its dominant position with Goodreads having a more complete catalog than any of the other more open offerings. And yet, they seem to invest no effort in modernizing or improving the site, making it more performant, etc. The moderation tools kinda suck too — doing super common things like merging (incorrect) duplicate listings is a PITA.
Also the app exhibits blatant conflicts of interest like prioritizing buying new books from Amazon over, e.g., digital library loans, with no option for users to configure that.
Nothing I'm saying here is new though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism.
I'm finding Open Library (part of the Internet Archive) is increasingly useful for book search.
You might also have success with a major library (e.g., British Library, Library of Congress, major US city libraries (NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.), and some academic libraries. Watch that these aren't in fact backed by Worldcat though. (Many local library systems are.)
What’s infuriating is how this lying has become normalized in “good” brands. For instance, try to buy a 60” TV. I do not think you can find one. They are all 59.5” and sold as ‘60” class’.
"keyboard non mechanical like cherry switch membrane touch rgb light clicky gaming blogging ergonomic xiaomi redmi arduino android ios windows laptop desktop computer tablet phone", and if you sort by price, the first one is $0.99.
Then you have 5 different colors of plasticky $15 keyboards and a usb card reader for $0.99 to choose.
Don’t reward bad behavior or they’ll keep doing it.
- All your regular non-food needs in one cart.
- No-hassle refunds if there is a problem with the order.
The first one is just convenience and I could do without. The second one is where most other stores fail. Or at least enough of them that I don't want to risk having to phone their hotline or pay for shipping back because they or their delivery contractor fucked up - or is fraudulently claiming they tried to deliver when they made no such attempt at the specified address and instead want you to waste your time picking up the package at a random location accross town.
I strongly agree with this bill hicks bit on advertising:
Kagi (don’t use it personally)
Nothing to see here.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-a...
I don't know if 4chan is included in the google index, but I've never gotten a 4chan result in any search I can recall.
I still don't get how you expect it to work when the content rotates quickly and disappears
If you search 4 Chan on Google it does come up in the results and a safe search warning
This is super annoying because it doesn't appear to inform you of this anywhere in the UI, until you click through to page 2 and see what it modified your query to be.
From what Google's hinted at and probably your own experiences (which I reckon are like mine), it's pretty clear that most folks aren't great at Google searches. This might be why Google has leaned on AI to "guess" the best results. They figure their AI can predict what you want better than you are able to specify via your search query.
A few years back I used to scoff at people who wrote searches in the form of literal questions instead of boiling things down to key terms, e.g. the "how do i..., what is the largest..." type searches.
Nowadays I not only need to write stupid searches like this to get better results but quite literally find that my brain has adapted the pattern and my past skill at crafting salient key term, operator driven queries is eroding.
No results found for "spill clean big search stain".
Results for spill clean big search stain (without quotes):
This isn't new, I've always seen Google doing something like this. It hasn't always been large on the page but it's always been there.
They don't need to waste the eng resources or infrastructure on rock solid search anymore, they own the market and got all the users into their funnel of products, most locked in for life.
Search results still show sponsored listings, they still have all the users, and all the profit, and a lot less of the profit sucking operational costs it took to be good at what made them a household name, search
The issue isn’t that they are watering down the cream in the milk, it’s that the cream isn’t part of the milk at all now.
I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
I miss 90s Internet in general. It wasn't the ugly battleground and desolation planet that the current net has become.
Think about it - some human element of trust and vouching for someone being added to the ring.
(Ultimately, this is a bad facsimile of human group behavior - all the way up to shunning people who deeply violate group norms. And I don't think it'll scale super-well. )
And I'd still say pagerank did work really well in an Internet where there was overwhelmingly trust. But in a world where default-trust is a bad stance, I believe there needs to be an equivalent of what "You can trust X" does in small in-person groups. (Or, alternatively "Sheesh, X went off and just destroyed all trust")
I do think it'll need to be more than a single metric, too. Trust is multidimensional by topic(E.g. "I trust the NYTs data science folks, I have zero trust for the OpEds"), and it is somewhat personal. (E.g. I might have experienced X lying to me, while they've been 100% honest to you - maybe in/outgroup, maybe political alignment, maybe differing beliefs, etc. Ultimately, what we call trust in an indirect situation is "most of my directly trusted folk vouch for that person)
> I wish there was a search engine that ran like mid 2000s google but with a social media component so you can down vote SEO spammer blogs into oblivion.
There's no way this won't get abused, but the SEO stuff is out of control. Not even spammer blogs, but if you have a quick question like "how do I check tire pressure" you will only get articles that start with a treatise on the entire history of car tires and the answer is deeply buried somewhere in the article. My guess is that Google sees that we're on the page for a longer time than we would spend on pages that just return the answer, and they assume that "more time on page" == "better content" or something.
Most egregiously I will search for something very rare (e.g. about programming) and DDG will return me results regarding my city's tourist/visitor info. It's as if it just keeps ignoring words from the search prompt that return no results until it runs out of keywords then it's just the geoIP results.
I want this too, but I think an often understated aspect of this issue is that by this point Google has absolutely trashed the web of that era. In these threads people will say "the content you want isn't out there, it's all on social media now" -- and they're largely right, but I think Google is the party most responsible for mutilating the web to the state it is in now, and users fled to social media partly because it seemed like a safe haven.
What we need is a concentrated effort to rebuild the web. Take the best parts of what we've learned and combine with the best parts of what we've left behind and try to build something better, for humans, not for advertisers and hyper-capitalists.
That will take time, energy, and people who remember what we lost and believe we can build something better. A better search engine alone is not enough.
When rates of change were slower, you might only have to “move” once in your life, but with increasing rates of change in our human experience, staying nimble is arguably of ever increasing importance.
Google just doesn't know that they exist anymore, or rather doesn't want us to know, because those sites are not commercial enough or big enough.
Almost without fail, no matter what you search for, it tries its best to turn it into a search for a product or service. And those content oriented websites don't fit that, so it just pretends they don't exist.
This is sort of what I've been trying to do with Marginalia Search, except I don't really believe a voting system would work. It's far too easy to manipulate. Been playing with the thought of having something like an adblock-list style system where domain shitlists can be collaborated on and shared without being authoritative for the entire search engine.
My search engine is still pretty rough around the edges and limited but I think it works well enough to demonstrate the idea has some merit.
Even just personal shitlists would be golden and make just about everyone happy.
Mojeek seems to be the independent, non-paywalled search engine with the biggest index, for an overview see https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
We know it's not, but expect them to try to tell you you're imagining things.