Am I the only one who’s annoyed that the message is gated and that FB somehow needs to track everyone who has seen what I imagine amounts to a mea culpa for their clusterfuck of a week.
It’s so weird reading about Web3 and the focus presumably on digital sovereignty and privacy and to see a platform moving backwards and away from any semblance of an open internet.
Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.
The problem is generally typical of online content as a whole given SEO gaming and commercialisation. DDG's bang searches and the ability to fluidly target searches to specific sites with less typing and fewer hops is a key differentiator.
The most relevant quality content tends to come from published rather than online sources, or by going direct to source.
The Web has been a mistake.
That said, Google's SERP page content, layout, tracking, and advertising all effectively drop relevance by a tremendous amount --- I've got to consciously filter out Google's own crap on top of the irrelevant web results returned.
DDG's cleaner presentation increases effective quality by a subjectively-assessed factor of 2--10.
Date-bounded search remains one of the very few reasons to favour GWS for a specific search, though even that is highly unreliable. Often what I want is a searchable archive from a given period, not a guestimate of a date-ranged search over the live Web.
Even in Google Books, date-ranged search results very often fail to return content from the requested period.
That's a good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer.
I'm also not sure that djin can be rebottled. The history of media advances has been that they tend to progress and proceed, and human culture changes around them, they do rather less adapting to human culture.
(I've become aware in the past five years or so of the study of media and its impacts on society as a whole. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change only hints at the full breadth, but is one of the major works on the topic. She draws heavily on Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (literally: we live in the universe Johannes Gutenberg created), and there are numerous others who explore this, notably Adam Curtis and Neil Postman. Again, the Web, algorithmic social media, and mobile computing each bring their own twist. Again, this isn't the first time media's transformed society. I'd argue that every advance, from speech on up, has. The changes can be tremendous and catastrophic --- to the previously existing order --- as with the printing press and the Reformation and Hundred Years War.)
One useful approach is to look at each of what were touted as the Web's strengths, and consider them from the perspective of "what could possibly go wrong". Several principles of the sociologist Robert K. Merton are helpful here: overt vs. covert functions and phenomena, unintended consequences, and possibly self-fullfilling prophecies.
It's not clear to me what boundaries can be established for the Web, or what the consequences of a failure to establish those might be. Either case the future appears bleak.
I almost never get useful results out of a web search, nowadays, unless the query is very specific (like looking up a website I forgot the domain of). This is not particular to google search, which in fact I don't use anymore.
Trying to find information given only fuzzy details almost never produce relevant links; anything remotely commercial, like trying to find a product reviews, film to watch, a store nearby, etc. produces tons of synthetic websites full of ads that magically match my query; specific technical information can result in low-effort blogspam or total rip-offs from other websites (stackexchange answers, other blogs, etc.); and the list goes on.
It seems to me the only actually interesting material is now found in forums, message boards, wikis and other kind of websites where users generate the content. Unfortunately searching these is far from handy because they aren't always indexed or have archaic interfaces or require a login. I think search engines in general, either by prioritising revenue or being tricked by spammers and CEO, are now blind to the real information contained in the web. I wish for a search engine that would only index a curated list of genuine websites based on a topic, but I don't think we'll ever have one because it's not profitable.
1. Only finds it if something in the line of "programming language and interactive shell with built-in file manager" for less, it indeed misses.
2. "(this) gas causes smartphones to temporarily deactivate" second result
3 "blog post ipv6 was supposed to replace MAC adresses" 3rd result
In some cases some slight change in the wording changes the ranking drastically. However, I am not sure "The old good google" would find these at all honestly.
YES! I still remember the earlier days of Google, when it was not only returning results, the results were a delight to click through. I genuinely felt happy using it. Infoseek was good in a way that it let you search within searched results, so you could filter down. Alta Vista was definitely larger, but Google was pure magic. Not only relevant but digs up interesting and rewarding well researched information sitting around in a little corner of a web.
My company actually did a very extensive study on this and found that the majority of websites utilize dark patterns. Only 25% of sites are even legally compliant even after deploying consent management software. Companies are openly flouting privacy laws and we actually found some of the worst offenders in the app space where consent mechanisms don't even exist within the apps themselves.
I'll be the first to admit that the existing advertising ecosystem is broken, primarily due to misaligned incentives across the board. But, given a choice, would you rather have a clearly labeled thing that you know is an ad transparently trying to influence you or a sneaky human billboard, err "influencer" coming up to you with an agenda along with tons of product placement in whatever you watch/read/listen to?
There's no either/or decision to be made here. You get compromised, paid for content with our without ads as well. Critical thinking I'd a requirement always.
There definitely is an either/or because blocking of one channel will naturally necessitate money/barter flowing to the other channel. One is at least transparent and regulated, the murky world of influence peddling isn't since it's hard for anyone to tell in the moment whether something is "organic" or not.
Not when the other channel is already at capacity. And it is. Blocking ads has no effect on that. You never agreed to being tracked either, so blocking that is the right and proper thing to do. Blocking surveillance capitalism might push businesses toward honesty, it's at least with a shot.
If you think influencer marketing and product placement are already at capacity you have no idea how much worse it's about to get if ad blocking gets much worse. And the irony is that, by design, you won't know a good chunk of the time and other times it'll just merely be implied without being explicitly stated. Continued use of social networks, including this one, collects way more identifiable data than what the non-Google/FB/Amazon ad market collects. Ad blockers have had near 0 impact on FB's operations. Google and others have paid to ensure that their search ads still make it through most ad blockers.
Blocking ads does not drive businesses to be more "honest". They'll just spend more on PR and influencers. And given how hostile this community is to ads and perhaps even marketing overall, (how YC ever backed a marketing or ad startup is beyond me), companies already realize that getting a fawning TC article purchased thru connections and favors and PR chicanery is going to be more effective than ad campaign even though the ad campaign is more honest, upfront and transparent with its agenda.
The IANA was responsible for assigning IP addresses back then. It was basically one dude, Jon Postel( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel ), until it was formalized as an organization in 1988.
You just need a whitepaper. And a whole lot of blockchain "experts". Because what makes a biz work is not the soundness of its ideas but the fact that it has its own coin.
I highly doubt that most of the investors in ICOs are all that interested in the core business. They're interested in an arbitrary security loosely linked to the core business appreciating that is referred to as a token because calling it an asset/security would require more regulation.
I mean, you realize that penny stocks are much the same. People don't care much about the validity of the underlying business. They want to make money. Often the penny stock (or alt coin) has solid enough technical fundamentals , to merit an investment. Don't tell us it's risky, we fucking know. Don't tell us we're dumb for investing in something we know nothing about -- we know we are gambling and likely going to lose. There are too many millionaires be minted in this crypto world to be too dismissive of it.
The IAB (digital ad trade group) is proposing a new standard called LEAN in response to ad blockers. These ads are supposed to be non-invasive. The public comment period has been extended to Dec 22. This is the public's chance to shape the standard before you start seeing these EVERYWHERE.
