Great post! Reminds me of a Freakonomics podcast episode a while back. One of the guests said "Is Google search getting worse, or is it the internet that is getting worse?"
Google's success means people tend to create content for Google rather than for an audience. That content is often garbage. I'm writing a post about how this affects the training data available for AI.
Interesting opinion Logan. Curious when you say search has to change factors continuously to counter scams, does that mean it has to utilize new features to know about the new kinds of scams ? Or do you mean change the ranking function entirely ?
Those are both good questions and since I don't work directly on search I can't answer with specificity, but afaik both are true to some degree. I think large scale changes in rankings are probably uncommon but rankings definitely change over time.
Ads typically offer no content and even when they do it's biased, and the very existence of ads is World Litter and always favours some over others for no Reason at all. In short, they're bad by default. No defense of them comes close to countering these objections.
Bias exists in everything. As someone who works on ads, it's a tough problem to get them working for everyone (including removing bias) and that's why it's a constantly changing landscape. Ads are great because they've make products free and accessible to many more people, but they can definitely be better and that's our goal.
Great post! Reminds me of a Freakonomics podcast episode a while back. One of the guests said "Is Google search getting worse, or is it the internet that is getting worse?"
Google's success means people tend to create content for Google rather than for an audience. That content is often garbage. I'm writing a post about how this affects the training data available for AI.
Really interesting and a great way to put the webpages being indexed. Looking forward to the post.
Interesting opinion Logan. Curious when you say search has to change factors continuously to counter scams, does that mean it has to utilize new features to know about the new kinds of scams ? Or do you mean change the ranking function entirely ?
Those are both good questions and since I don't work directly on search I can't answer with specificity, but afaik both are true to some degree. I think large scale changes in rankings are probably uncommon but rankings definitely change over time.
Ads typically offer no content and even when they do it's biased, and the very existence of ads is World Litter and always favours some over others for no Reason at all. In short, they're bad by default. No defense of them comes close to countering these objections.
Bias exists in everything. As someone who works on ads, it's a tough problem to get them working for everyone (including removing bias) and that's why it's a constantly changing landscape. Ads are great because they've make products free and accessible to many more people, but they can definitely be better and that's our goal.