From: bencollver@tilde.pink
Search 101: How to Find the Lost Web by Bob Leggitt
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> Privacy activists have a heightened sense of the way censorship
> works hand in hand with surveillance to build the classic picture
> of Nineteen Eighty-Four. And when we know a search engine is
> capable of giving us accurate, relevant results, but doesn't, we
> realise we're seeing a form of censorship.
Google's lost the internet. You might have seen a few complaints.
Whether they've come courtesy of anons in the underbelly of the
Fediverse, or a viral soundbyte from Edward Snowden, a growing
catalogue of gripes is asserting that web search is no longer fit for
purpose. Well, unless web search's purpose is to detect capitalism.
In which case thumbs up. The search engines are better than ever at
that. They now surface ecommerce, ad-tech, and affiliate-pumped
listicle hell so reliably that we barely even need to enter a search
term.
But the internet we used to know and love, brimming with offbeat gems
from passionate authors... That's gone missing. And with it, the
humour. The imagination. The individuality... Maybe we've just
forgotten how to use a search engine?...
Nope, it's definitely not us. Change the nuance of the query. Add a
tail. Use quotes... It doesn't seem to matter anymore. We get the
same list of crap based on one or two commercially-associable
keywords, more or less whatever else we type. What we won't get, is
what we actually searched for. If we're looking for a specific piece
of information, the average web search engine is going to ignore the
specifics and hammer us with a scripted smorgasbord of abject
capitalism, augmented with a token entry from Wikipedia--frequently
the only useful result.
> The value of being able to filter spam chronologically is immense,
> and it can completely demolish virtually any myth built by the
> information machine.
But the thing is, Wikipedia has its own search engine, which is
mercifully devoid of results from Amazon, eBay, and an army of
affiliate-drones' listicle sites. So, if Wikipedia is often the only
genuinely useful and non-commercial resource we're finding in the
visible output of a web search engine, why are we still running to
the likes of Google, Bing and DDG as a first resort? Why do we not
just use Wikipedia Search as a basic source of general knowledge
results, and supplement that with a range of other search facilities
which are at least attempting to give us what we ask for?
That's exactly what this article is going to suggest.
DO WE REALLY NEED TO REPLACE WEB SEARCH?
========================================
It's no coincidence that many of the complaints about search quality
are coming from privacy activists. Privacy activists have a
heightened sense of the way censorship works hand in hand with
surveillance to build the classic picture of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And when we know a search engine is capable of giving us accurate,
relevant results, but doesn't, we realise *we're seeing a form of
censorship*.
Search engines have nannied us for a long time, assuming by default
that we mistyped any query that isn't verified as a popular topic.
But we're beyond that now. We're no longer in the realm of
"Are you sure you want that?". We've descended into...
> No, you don't want that.
"Yes I do."
> No you don't.
"Yes I do."
> No you don't.
Even if we still regard this as heavy nannying rather than
censorship, do we really want to go through that ever-lengthening
argument every time we run a web search? Just for the sake of our
"framework of mind", as Dickie Valentino put it in the cult 1994
movie There's No Business..., we have to start finding better ways to
access information. It's unlikely we'll break free from major web
search engines entirely, but now is definitely the time to start
reducing our dependency on them.
> Once upon a time you could search Google for the world's most
> useless product and dive into a motley collection of chucklesome
> mock ads--topped, if I remember rightly, by an enthusiastic
> promotion for... Well, is it a screw? Is it a nail? No - it's a
> scrail! Still makes me laugh today. But that same search produces
> wall to wall e-corp listicles now. And if you search for scrails
> you get Amazon trying, in all seriousness, to flog you an actual
> packet of scrails. It's like, is there any Google search at all you
> can now run that doesn't eventually lead to Amazon?"
FOR ACCURATE INFO, TWITTER SEARCH IS NOW MORE USEFUL THAN GOOGLE
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It's almost incomprehensible that the worldbeating sophistication of
Google Search could regress so far as to allow a micro-blogging site
to provide more relevant information, but that's where we are. And
one of the main reasons Twitter Search has become more popular than
Google with many people who research for a living, is the platform's
rigid protection of chronological integrity.
There are three components to this...
* All Tweets are dated and uneditable.
* Twitter Search allows us to define a date range.
* One of the best ways to find a relevant search result is to filter
out spam, and spam tends to come in waves, which are based on
trends and current affairs. In other words, a reliable date filter
can serve as a reliable spam filter.
When something becomes a talking point, the search results are
overwhelmed by spammers, news sites, megablogs, etc, jumping on that
talking point in a bid for search traffic. They know everyone is
looking for info on that subject, so they produce content about it
whether or not they have anything to say. This vast glut of very high
ranking domains then squeezes out all of the previous results, and
that usually makes finding previously published information through
typical web search methods incredibly difficult--if not impossible.
Some of these assaults of skimpily-researched verbal diarrhoea
actually end up changing history, as the public accept bone idle
journalism as truth and the reality is buried out of sight.
But Twitter's Advanced Search allows us to cut through the spam by
defining a date range in a search query. Because no one can
manipulate the dates of Tweets, or any of the information contained
within them, filtering out the period of the spam assault can
completely remove the spam.
For example, if you want to know what the consensus on vaccination
was in summer 2019 before the covid pandemic, a web search engine
[continued in next message]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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