We don’t work on Fridays. My wife went to have lunch with a friend and I have the balcony doors open. The kids from the school yard across the street are running and screaming like they always do. I’m sure there are some that are quiet and just stand or sit. They disappear. Maybe that’s what they’d like to do. I don’t remember school fondly. But I’m also a misanthrope like that.
People feel like search is going down the drain. No wonder! People have been complaining for a while, now. People said it was better to search Google for stuff on Reddit rather than to search Reddit itself. Stack Exchange also had terrible search, but using Google and looking for Stack Exchange results was great. People started noticing. Sadly, all the relevant links I can find are on Reddit.
People have also been working on writing their own search engines.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is killing the web. Bots are writing text for other bots to read, wasting electricity and contributing to our downfall. The faster this bubble bursts, the better. I’m intent on helping it into the abyss. This is my Butlerian Jihad.
So what’s the alternative?
Link aggregators that allow people voting, with federation to allow for different communities to form, and moderation to prevent vandalism, hate-speech, spam and trolls. And then search there.
A return to adding more links to blogs and searching there. Public bookmarks, in a way. It’s what I’m trying to do on this site, too. I’m trying to save links I stumble upon with a few sentences of context to remind me of why I liked them. If they’re not part of blog posts, they’re part of a Bookmarks page. I go back to blog posts and add quotes and links – sometimes years later. It doesn’t really matter all that much whether the date of the blog post is correct as long as the hashtags I use are good.
Listing alternatives to subreddits. – Reddit Migration
Fallout from the unpopular API pricing change and disastrous AMA with CEO Steve Huffman is turning out the lights on some of Reddit’s most prominent communities. – Wes Davis, The Verge, Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
The SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other. – Mia Sato, The Verge, A storefront for robots
Relatedly, have you noticed how every website begins with a stupid paragraph overviewing the thing you’re searching for? It’s always followed by a stupid paragraph describing why you should care about the thing. – Sandy Maguire, for Reasonably Polymorphic, Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.
I don’t think that Google meant to dumb down searching for students and academics. They are trying to make a search engine which works for ten-year-olds and octagenarians, people with multiple PhDs and people with an eighth-grade education. But they chose to design an interface which deskills users instead of encouraging them to educate themselves. I don’t think that Google is especially evil. But I will be very glad when they break up and several smaller companies take their place. – Sean, for Book & Sword, Google and the Culture of Searching
This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. – Marginalia
Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks
Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.
Google and the Culture of Searching
#Search #Butlerian Jihad