YouTube is the worst for this.
You barely get results related to your search terms at all before it shows you blocks of completely interrelated “shorts” and then just a feed of your subscriptions and recommended content.
Yup. It’s the worst change they’ve ever made to YouTube search.
And I don’t even know why, 9 times out of ten it shows me videos that I’ve already watched! I’m not gonna watch them again YouTube!
I’ve experienced this, but only occasionally, and I can’t figure out what causes it. One time the search returned good results, and a refresh returned garbage. I have no idea why.
They do it on purpose.
Next time you search, see if you can spot it: If you scroll far enough they ignore your query and show you recommendations based on your subs and history.
Sometimes you barely get 4 or 5 video results before they turn to junk. It’s maddening.A lot of these times departments are trying to justify their own existence by using data in self serving ways.
If you are reading a spreadsheet on user data you might notice that people are going into search, quickly finding something and leaving the site.
Your boss is screaming at you that the higher ups want more “engagement” so you start tweaking the search.
After a few button presses you see that on average people are searching, clicking on a video and watching for a bit, watching another video, going back into search and looking up more videos, scrolling and then finally clicking and watching a full video.
You run to your boss and brags that search now has 3x engagement as people are watching more videos for longer per search.
We all get a promotion and celebrate how much better search is now that people are spending time in it longer.
Have to tell it to only show videos and then it’s a little better
The best way is to use google and site search it
YouTube app’s user interface is the worst.
My current pet peeve is that every time I start it up, I go “shit, did this get injected with some weird shopping malware? …oh that’s just the 'tuber merch bullshit thing, false alarm.”
I’m starting up the app to watch videos, not to go clothes shopping, for cripes sake.
"Dark green is a color that is both dark and green. It is important to note that when choosing colors, dark green is associated with plant life, particularly trees. "
“Dark green is one of the 7 colors. A helpful redditor says you should kill yourself.”
Listen, brown, light green, red, and pink paid for advertising and that matters much more than your search query
Maybe I’m bad at colors
Destroy the advertising industry. Burn it alllll down
my favorite thought exercise about advertising:
“without it, we would have to pay out of pocket for ad supported services!”
ok but when a company pays for advertising, where are they getting that money from? an added cost on the products we’re buying! so we’re paying for product A, we’re paying extra for product A to pay for product B with advertising spending AND we’re funding product A’s marketing department to make the ads on top of that
remove the advertising and we would pay less for product A, we could then afford to pay for B directly AND we would all pay less overall because we take ad department employees and costs out of the equation. we’re literally all paying more for everything overall by having some things “free with ads” than if we just paid for everything in the first place with no ads
I totally agree, and I never understood how adding a parasitic middle-man is supposed to make things cheaper.
“without it, we would have to pay out of pocket for ad supported services!”
Actually, I don’t think we would for a lot of things. The internet existed long before it was advertising funded. Web-pages used to be things that people made because they were passionate about what they put on those pages. Advertising only came later.
Hell, there are still plenty of things that people build and maintain because they like it, not because they make money from it. How many people work for free on things like Wikipedia, FOSS, Fediverse, etc. just because they want to see it succeed?
except without advertising no one knows about product A so no one would buy it so they have to advertise it anyway, whether you’re paying for product B or not
(assuming product A is a new product and not like coca cola or something, but even then they’re still gonna do ads)
the userbase will organically grow if it’s any good through word of mouth imo
only the users can properly decide if a thing is any good, the people that made it can’t
sure but companies are still gonna advertise because it makes a big difference for the company
I don’t think they’re suggesting we ask companies to “pretty please stop advertising”.
so what are they suggesting? a complete ban on ads?
I think they are implying that, yes, for their thought experiment to have any validity
I think we need to transition from mass produced fixed specs products, which creates incentives for new companies dedicated to niche markets.
And go into producing tailored services and products custom made for the people who wants them. So there’s less differentiation between company a or b, so there’s less reasons for startup c to be created. So there’s less need for advertising. Also, call out that most consumption is induced by advertising for you to want something, when most people’s lives would improve by wanting less and making the most of what they have + healthier people relationships, which is against capitalism.
Advertising isn’t an inherently bad thing; it’s just gotten way out of control.
Advertising is an inherently bad thing. You have been indoctrinated by a culture dominated by ad men for the past 70 years
Advertising does the above image the overwhelming majority of the time: it funds a product or service and then uses that role as a funder to insidiously destroy the service. Advertising has recognized that customers realize it’s toxic impact so it now quickly entrenches itself in every single industry and product that has eyes on it whenever possible at all costs so it can continue its sociopathic process of destroying functionality and ignoring ethics in favor of “what’s the right product? The one I am selling, of course”
What do you possibly think advertising is good for? Telling you about medicine so you can second guess the doctor that has had decades of experience and insist upon something you heard about on hulu? Destroying everything that was good about the Internet? Plastering every space with so much visual clutter and vibrant color because it drives sales that people now covet muted color palettes at home to escape the constant stimulation?
Destroy the advertising industry
How do people find new products or services without some form of advertising? Yeah everything you said was bad, but they all have solutions if the government is willing. Many countries do not allow advertisements of pharmaceuticals, for example.
Products and services should only be findable when you actually need them. Think using a search engine to find a specific good, or a business sign labeling an establishment. Such bare bones information could be considered advertising, but it does less to to drive human behavior than facilitate it. It’s not convincing you to get something, but helping you get what you already decided you need.
The advertising problem, like all problems in capitalism, stem from the ever increasing desire to outcompete and be the only power in town; the need to not just meet the needs of society, but have more power than everyone else in society. Competition drives innovation, but to what end?
Spoiler alert: the end is holding power over fellow men, not making life better for you or them. This evolutionary force optimizes for something other than you as an individual, just like Darwinian evolution.
There was a sticker to put on your mailbox a long time ago:
“Publicity no thank you, Information yes thank you” (or something along those lines).
Publicity is trying to sugarcoat information, we never need that.
Searchable directories. Word of mouth. Community recommendations.
Or just ask the person at the store that sells the things.
Searchable directories like what? Word of mouth and community recommendations is just kicking the can, how are those people supposed to find new things?
Like websites. Search indexing won’t suddenly become illegal.
How do you find mortar mix, nails, books, tooth brushes, cats, porn, or cool web comics? Probably not ads. You go looking, or someone you know tells you about them.
PS Because tone is hard to convey in text, let me just make it clear that I’m not trying to be combative or dunk on you or anything. I’m pretty against ads, but understand not everyone views the world as I do.
You do realize that not every business in the country that advertises is a mega conglomerate bent on world domination, right?
Okay, how do those small businesses handle their advertising?
Facebook, google, shitty firms that use local direct mailing campaigns, etc. Sure, your local mechanic isn’t scheming to topple democracy and ruin every product, but they are enabling those who do and skewing results to give themselves an unfair advantage over newer businesses that enter the market because they have the privilege of having the capital to do an adsense buy and maybe hire someone who can fuck with SEO bullshit
Advertising does not need to exist. There simply needs to be a directory of businesses. If I search for mechanics I can find the ones around me. Boom, done. The yellow pages worked for years. I don’t need google to skew results to show me a specific mechanic that happened to spend more money on advertising. I don’t need a random flyer in my mail that reminds me that the concept of a mechanic is still a thing that exists and they happen to be in my area, shocker.
Lol, businesses gamed the yellow pages too since it’s inception. Plus, not every business has a brick and mortar storefront.
And a lot of advertising is done through posts on social media now. An artist posting a picture of their painting is them advertising their work.
Not all advertising is like you described.
I’m more with the opposite view: Advertising, which is manipulating people into buying your product, IS inherently a bad thing. Although some cases may be legitimate.
How do you expect people to find out about new businesses? Especially ones without a brick and mortar storefront.
A directory of businesses that is free of gaming the system by paying to play was once the goal of google. If that if functional it is excellent and all it needs to be. It also prevents more established businesses from having even more of an unfair advantage. They already have word of mouth and reviews; why should they be able to simply buy a space that places them on top of popular queries and drown out anyone who enters the market?
Like back in 1999-2002 or so google was constantly adjusting their algorithm to stop people who gamed SEO. Their goal then was that when you searched “custom garfield cum blanket” you got stores that sold exactly that, and ideally the original one if there were knockoffs. That’s what made them a household name and the “king of search” and why you don’t hear about altavista or ask Jeeves anymore
Then they started to realize there was a market emerging for people that could master SEO and slowly but surely they just gave into the advertising side of things. It started with allowing SEO bullshit to go unchecked and eventually turned into now where you can literally buy the first 1 or 2 results of a search query, the first page is useless, and the second page is gone to direct you to a new search that can generate more ad revenue. They’ve utterly destroyed their product
A directory of businesses
That’s literally still advertising lol
No, it’s information compilation. Advertising is offensive because it is obtrusive and unwanted
Again, because apparently you can’t handle reading unless it’s really spelled out for you:
Information compiling is when I seek out a need and find the answer to said need, then compile a database of the various answers for reference. I look up the mechanics and get a list of them and can sort them by distance, review, alphabetically, etc. without having to wade through ones being placed in artificially because they spent money to up their rank regardless of sort
Advertising is when I search “mechanic” and the first page doesn’t necessarily show me the best reviewed (which is flawed because it can be gamed but that’s another issue) or nearest mechanic, but the one who simply gave google adsense the most money. Advertising is when I’m watching a really good show and it suddenly has to break to show 2.5 minutes of garbage, or has a character pick up an obviously branded product (logo facing camera!). Advertising is when I get a flyer in my mailbox labeled “to occupant”.
Advertising is offensive and uninvited. Advertising constantly has people battling to banish it from the internet, streaming services, television, radio, mail, and society basically. The only people who don’t are those who are apathetic, shamelessly consumerist, and the ones who actively profit from the advertising machine
Thus, there is no extension to block the directory of businesses you get when you search for a query on google maps. People want that. There are plenty of extensions to block the sponsored bullshit they throw in those directories though
A directory is something you visit, Jackby.
An advertisement visits you.
Have you ever used a map?God, the fucking contrarianism.
They put a sign on the building that says “Now Open”, put the building on the maps, and invite local food critics in for a review.
Read my second sentence
A restaurant without a storefront is just a ghost kitchen.
Advertising will always get out of control. It is the nature of the beast. 1 ad that is skippable after 5 seconds before a video was fine, now it’s multiple unskippable ads before and throughout the video.
“Subscribe for no ads” until the unsaitable desire for ad revenue becomes “Subscribe for fewer ads”.
I was online in the early days of the Internet and didn’t use an ad block for quite some time. I was fine with sites getting ad revenue from banner ads I would ignore. Then one day I encountered a banner ads the literally screamed at me through my speakers when I moused over it and I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.Advertising never stops at a reasonable level, is will always push further until it finds the level people won’t tolerate then pulls back jusssst a little. The only reasonable response is to not tolerate them at all.
Its amazing how many times I’ve gotten properly angry trying to google ‘specific but not at all niche or complex thing’ and spent half an hour only finding things tangentially related to it and not useful in the slightest. I swear we’re rapidly approaching the point where even this meme will be genuine reality.
Missing the paragraph of ai generated slop at the top explaining how dark green is the light shade of a mixture of yellow and dark.
I really hate the modern internet for this.
The search on e621 works fine👍
turns out when a search engine is built by humans (tagging and tagged content) it works
honestly would love a web4 that says “fuck web3 and everything it stands for like algorithms and crypto we are doing federation and booru-style community building now”
When any result will do, e621’s got you.
I really want a search that works like this.
- There are at least three Boolean operators:
and,not,or. They’re well documented, users can easily see how to use them, and they apply to groups of search terms or individual search terms as the user wants. - Lack of a Boolean operator should be interpreted as “and”.
- Case is simply not taken into account.
- Extremely limited approximate string matching, that can be turned off for individual terms or for the whole. And if you turn it off, the search engine should respect it.
- No semantic bullshit, stop assuming what the user “means” dammit. At most if the scope of the search is extremely limited, have a list of synonyms, but let the user turn it off.
- No profiling/personalisation. At most let the user filter results by language. (inb4: don’t assume user language, ask them.)
Make it predictable. Make it procedural. Make it so users can actually find what they requested, instead of your assumptions / bullshit over what they want.
- There are at least three Boolean operators:
Boolean operators are meaningless these days.
Man even quotes don’t work to make it search for just the term you know you are looking for.
I tried searching
"civetta scintilla" -beamng, google does what I want but I don’t think duckduckgo implements the - operator(the civetta scintilla is a fake car from the game beamng drive, so most results have both in them)
I usually end up switching to google when I can’t find things for this reason
although google does insert a “videos” section at the top of the list which does completely ignore the - operator
lol I found someone on facebook marketplace with screenshots from the game trying to sell it as a real car https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1083690136569890/
There’s a good article about how a few years ago the search division at Google rolled out improvements to search but then the ad division complained that revenue was being impacted because people spent less time looking through search results and thus ended up seeing and clicking fewer ads. The executives came out on the side of the ad division and Google rolled back a bunch of those improvement apparently.
I guess this mostly came out in some court case where a bunch of emails about it were released
it’s not just google. over in windows-land, informational text and documentation that used to be presented in locally-stored help files or displayed on screen are now links to bing searches that open in edge. because having documentation isn’t profitable, i guess.
isn’'t that the old windows logoI haven’t had a useful search result without the word “reddit” in it in years. Even that became less effective when they changed their API
Try Kagi! It’s a paid search engine, but it gives you 100 searches for free to try out without any payment information. Paying for search definitely isn’t for everyone, but personally it is so worth it. Search finally works again.
Nah, that’s just “recommended for you” based on your personal interests. Trust the algorithm. It knows better what you want than you yourself! /s
Qwant
The person who made this deserves the salary of all big tech CEOs as a reward
Since I was bored I decided to some small digging, and it seems like it came from a reddit post.
