The last paragraph was the best lulz I've had all week -
>Real search engines don't primarily compete on finding relevant documents. They compete on resisting manipulation. The moment Google's algorithm became valuable, an entire industry emerged dedicated to gaming it. Every ranking factor becomes a target for optimization, spam, and abuse. Search engines spend enormous resources not just on relevance, but on detecting artificial link schemes, content farms, cloaked pages, and sophisticated manipulation tactics that evolve daily.
This certainly differed considerably with my reality as it ebbed towards the mid 10's. Google back then were happy enough to provide 100 results per page, and I typically would hunt though around 10 pages of results when expanding each keyword query set to hunt down what a user wanted. Each angle of looking for the needle, the initial keyword query generally needed to be modified a number of times to trim away the should-be-easy-to-identify-as-BS-sites which Google seemed totally unable to filter out and actually crowded out real results. No I'd say google was when I last used it earnestly, it was all about generating revenue from clicks, but not in an entirely obvious manner.
A site getting google's attention is probably even more critical now - it's been a long when I've seen more than 10 pages results from Google via a particular keyword query, and it's only willing to serve me 10 results per page, so less than 100 results in total is normal now - scary that back 10 years ago in a much smaller web a great multitude of results from google were available.
Once the lower service (enshitification) was accepted as the norm, one could guess the higher costs to extract data from various sites these last few years, it's not that worthwhile for newcomers to spend up big without being able to offer up anything much better than what the main search engine google can offer, given a good percentage of searches are easy searches where the first page of results is probably going to satisfy the user query.
Link is for those who cloudflare has decided is a bot for some reason or other ... amongst many things, what browser one is using. If an older browser is a threat to some site ...
As much as I dislike A.I. generated answers, using it as a tool to fix sentence structure or styling a passage to meet a certain level of writing required for a format will at some future date be accepted as much as we accept automatic spell checkers. It'll probably be more accepted across the web once generated BS is sorted out.
Personally, I'm against all the new BS of no double space after a sentence and no gaps around em dashes. Not doing so removes a lot of options for those who use string searches to hunt out certain things.
I use the spellchecker and I'd like a better gramar and spell checker like in gmail. Is gmail using an expert system or AI? I think there is no problem with that.
I chanced upon most of Yanis Varoufakis's televised speech [1] [1a] he made at Australia's National Press Club and the way the term was introduced and defined seemed perfectly reasonable. Snatching at semantics to discredit some otherwise defined idea doesn't make for good argument.
>The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:
It grabs our attention.
It manufactures our desires.
It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.
It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.
It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.
It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.
Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!
I'm surprised they were able to save even some of that tree. Velpar [1] is a mean herbicide that can move in the soil. I haven't had a job where I was required to use it, but am quite aware how nasty it is due to what occurred in a picturesque valley that had a line of nice looking hills for background. The boundary lines for some of the rural blocks in our part of the world follow along the top of hill ridges and typically fenced, and often with the main access track which can become overgrown if not regularly maintained. One year (about 15 years ago) someone had a really good idea that velpar would be ideal to clean up around the fence track and sprayed their top hill boundary a little bit too enthusiastically to put it mildly - no doubt for some period the result was a nice clean track and new saplings growing too close to the fence would have died promptly ... but then like a cancer as the herbicide moved downwards, people started to notice a line of dead trees getting ever wider as the months went on. There's dry seasons so for a time it didn't stick out like a sore thumb, but certainly a time arrived where the line of green hills was interrupted by a block sporting nothing but dead trees on it - it was quite easy to see this 15 miles away (approx 25 km)
I'm in a very rural area so the first on any cheapie android phones is a good GPS program - doesn't need mobile network coverage to get position, time and speed of travel.
>Real search engines don't primarily compete on finding relevant documents. They compete on resisting manipulation. The moment Google's algorithm became valuable, an entire industry emerged dedicated to gaming it. Every ranking factor becomes a target for optimization, spam, and abuse. Search engines spend enormous resources not just on relevance, but on detecting artificial link schemes, content farms, cloaked pages, and sophisticated manipulation tactics that evolve daily.
This certainly differed considerably with my reality as it ebbed towards the mid 10's. Google back then were happy enough to provide 100 results per page, and I typically would hunt though around 10 pages of results when expanding each keyword query set to hunt down what a user wanted. Each angle of looking for the needle, the initial keyword query generally needed to be modified a number of times to trim away the should-be-easy-to-identify-as-BS-sites which Google seemed totally unable to filter out and actually crowded out real results. No I'd say google was when I last used it earnestly, it was all about generating revenue from clicks, but not in an entirely obvious manner.
A site getting google's attention is probably even more critical now - it's been a long when I've seen more than 10 pages results from Google via a particular keyword query, and it's only willing to serve me 10 results per page, so less than 100 results in total is normal now - scary that back 10 years ago in a much smaller web a great multitude of results from google were available.
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