With all the changes in search engines(only Google and bing left, personalization, Google disregarding a lot of your search operators and intent) - do you still find the lore usefull ?
I never see any exercises in deducing limits of APIs to understand means to break their literal limits. I think with cost of bandwidth and instances now, subsets of search might be attempted against a private crawl, to peer into invisible optimisations.
I recently have been thinking, how vertical markets and subject areas may be susceptible to challenge for search traffic supremacy, how if the big search and data slurpers may be toppled sooner rather than later by federations of sophisticated narrow search. What if, hypothetically of course, big companies used their own data to train search models, and the models could be traded, the cost regained by advertising arbitrage in industry portals, related industries aggregated and new search models developed at both higher and lower levels? After all, what does Google do, but an implicit quid pro quo, in particular with gmail accounts? Do we need such intimate personalization to ever be even possibility? It would be strange and maybe profound irony, if big companies' actions relieved us all of intrusions by way of enabling a new search competition.
Yep, Fravia would not have felt constrained - to overmuch anyway - by an API being deprecated. I'm sure he would immediately ponder why, and whether there was a reason important to the searcher.
I always thought it poor thinking, that the SEO game was self limited by the fact it set about to skew results, instead of first learning how accurate the non gamed indexes might be already gamed. I see the way Google seems to prefer decisions following user behaviour even over any lookup at all (follow the most followed links, assume audience is right, as opposed to worry that was best of poor set of results) was the natural outcome of a industry determined to rewrite the source material constantly, even to the point of creating new grammars. Of course, what SEOs affect is not all the web, but they have been too influential, to my taste anyhow. The most written language, I forget who pointed this out here not long ago, is actually transliterated speech, exclamatory or emotive not structured with dependant clauses for elimination of risk for misinterpretation is priority, information subordinate to emotional appreciation of message intent, and semantics choice over expression. Only the other week, a comment which expressed the received impression of a company's marketing stance as speech from their spokesperson, was warned that HN doers not accept such language, and the reprimanding moderator (?) went on in such a way I was uncertain they, as opposed to a supposed audience they meant to protect from such dangerous prose, understood the words they criticized.
My view is that more "formal and correct" search might go a long way to
edit: just continuing last sentence as pushed this too quickly...
might go a long way to averting many kinds of linguistic rot.
When people really seek, not just jamming words into a search box, but really seek they become the mind of the person producing the wisdom. Any one search engine is a window onto a huge sea.
Search results are needles on an iceberg. The rest is up to the seeker.
I'm confused, because I understand your comment to mean, that if I set out to learn something, by commitment alone, I recreate within my mind the tutor's knowledge and vision.
I should dearly love that to be the case, the real possibility.
I don't think that was the subject of my comment, however.
My concern is that search engines are limiting information quality by nature of making most money when they provide the shallowest and most common presumptions for results.
Search engines want to steer you back onto a profitable path. Google shows you only what the crowd has decided to show you. PageRank by definition shows the most popular stuff, not the best or most important. One then has to find different vectors to the destination.
But to find truly unique, esoteric knowledge requires being the mind of the producer, then one can route around the thought terminating search engine algorithms. A search engine is only the first 10% or so of the journey.
I think it's rather sad what Google has become; in an attempt to make search "more human", they have also quite successfully replicated all the disadvantages of asking a not-so-intelligent human to find what you're looking for, complete with second-guessing and subtly modifying your queries as well as not showing everything that does match. I am not completely convinced there is an ulterior motive behind it, but it could certainly be one way of controlling what the population thinks or even the language: if all searches for foo are silently redirected to fob or a similar but actually different thing, then it reduces the ability to discover --- and subsequently propagate --- information about foo.
Near the turn of the century(!), I remember hearing that the Internet was one of the places you could find information on very obscure/fringe subjects, and for a while that was actually true; but now it seems that search engines are gradually cutting off that fringe in optimising for the popular and mainstream.
I also noticed Google's search results took a nosedive in quality (~2010) not long after Fravia passed away --- I doubt there's any correlation there, but that felt a little surprising to me.
Selling advertisement (tied to a "free" service) is mass market. My guess is power users are a) harder to capitalize on b) more demanding. There's plenty of low hanging fruit in general public so why bother?
Indeed, I was going to say the same thing. Fravia+ was where I had read about Orc+ if I remember the name correctly, who had a series of tutorials on how to crack games. I think I downloaded his entire site back in the day, I wonder where in my terabytes of junk data I have it.
One of my favourite quotes: a red flower in our mouth, a cold determination in our fingers, a computer not far away... death to Gates!
At the time I took ORC very seriously and to this day I still have the same contempt for MicroSoft as back then, even though nowadays MS has become mostly a bad joke, a pathetic shadow of its former self.
It's been a long time since I spent my time reading that site. That was one of the best sites around back in the day, not surprising that so many people here remember it fondly as well.
I think much of the industry a joke, and Microsoft a exception.
I have lived through a 30 year saga of battles for really basic baselines to be established, insofar as the wars over office software databases and operating systems are concerned. Yes, I am impressed by what I see now, so much has evolved fantastically, but mostly users perform the same tasks and there is no recorded gain in productivity I am aware of. Gates wanted ubiquity of computers. His actions probably did more to enable that than any other individual. Without Microsoft the sometimes seemingly embittered motivation for Linux would not have been anything like it was. I think Gates always wanted to move on to more interesting goals in computing, and am inclined to think the company open source decisions do more for enabling advancement than anything else, because they make a ubiquitous platform more consistent to write for, the perennial monopoly complaint of a aggressive Microsoft. The cash cow applications are bundled now with facility permitted only by integration at prices only low as they are enabled by dominance, and I see nothing not dominant or lame, about that. I only recently benefitted from VS Community, and am still really happy at that, and I bet BillG would dearly love to give SQLServer away if only he could earn from it like a operating system (it is enough one already) and it's a peculiar delight to think Larry E may actually lay awake at night, one day, fearful that possibility is real. I think the reason has more to do with necessity to pay big sales commission to maintain the ecosystem around Microsoft database business, which provides for the channel welfare in turn supporting the rest. Meanwhile there is no Linux competitor because the GPL is anti competition. Except and unless, like all the big convert lovers of open source, someone uses the ability of cloud VDI to never have to release their code. Then we'll have incentive to make a Linux ecosystem selling desktop seats. I'm sure that's why Microsoft is porting so much, even experimentally.
I notice that certain sections of the site are "closed" and designed for clever searchers. Unfortunately the site's integrity is somewhat poor since 2 of the 3 mirrors are down, and the site's internal search function is broken. Sad. Is there zipped archive of the site anywhere?
18 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] threadI never see any exercises in deducing limits of APIs to understand means to break their literal limits. I think with cost of bandwidth and instances now, subsets of search might be attempted against a private crawl, to peer into invisible optimisations.
I recently have been thinking, how vertical markets and subject areas may be susceptible to challenge for search traffic supremacy, how if the big search and data slurpers may be toppled sooner rather than later by federations of sophisticated narrow search. What if, hypothetically of course, big companies used their own data to train search models, and the models could be traded, the cost regained by advertising arbitrage in industry portals, related industries aggregated and new search models developed at both higher and lower levels? After all, what does Google do, but an implicit quid pro quo, in particular with gmail accounts? Do we need such intimate personalization to ever be even possibility? It would be strange and maybe profound irony, if big companies' actions relieved us all of intrusions by way of enabling a new search competition.
Yep, Fravia would not have felt constrained - to overmuch anyway - by an API being deprecated. I'm sure he would immediately ponder why, and whether there was a reason important to the searcher.
I always thought it poor thinking, that the SEO game was self limited by the fact it set about to skew results, instead of first learning how accurate the non gamed indexes might be already gamed. I see the way Google seems to prefer decisions following user behaviour even over any lookup at all (follow the most followed links, assume audience is right, as opposed to worry that was best of poor set of results) was the natural outcome of a industry determined to rewrite the source material constantly, even to the point of creating new grammars. Of course, what SEOs affect is not all the web, but they have been too influential, to my taste anyhow. The most written language, I forget who pointed this out here not long ago, is actually transliterated speech, exclamatory or emotive not structured with dependant clauses for elimination of risk for misinterpretation is priority, information subordinate to emotional appreciation of message intent, and semantics choice over expression. Only the other week, a comment which expressed the received impression of a company's marketing stance as speech from their spokesperson, was warned that HN doers not accept such language, and the reprimanding moderator (?) went on in such a way I was uncertain they, as opposed to a supposed audience they meant to protect from such dangerous prose, understood the words they criticized.
My view is that more "formal and correct" search might go a long way to
edit: just continuing last sentence as pushed this too quickly...
might go a long way to averting many kinds of linguistic rot.
Search results are needles on an iceberg. The rest is up to the seeker.
I should dearly love that to be the case, the real possibility.
I don't think that was the subject of my comment, however.
My concern is that search engines are limiting information quality by nature of making most money when they provide the shallowest and most common presumptions for results.
But to find truly unique, esoteric knowledge requires being the mind of the producer, then one can route around the thought terminating search engine algorithms. A search engine is only the first 10% or so of the journey.
Near the turn of the century(!), I remember hearing that the Internet was one of the places you could find information on very obscure/fringe subjects, and for a while that was actually true; but now it seems that search engines are gradually cutting off that fringe in optimising for the popular and mainstream.
I also noticed Google's search results took a nosedive in quality (~2010) not long after Fravia passed away --- I doubt there's any correlation there, but that felt a little surprising to me.
Selling advertisement (tied to a "free" service) is mass market. My guess is power users are a) harder to capitalize on b) more demanding. There's plenty of low hanging fruit in general public so why bother?
One of my favourite quotes: a red flower in our mouth, a cold determination in our fingers, a computer not far away... death to Gates!
At the time I took ORC very seriously and to this day I still have the same contempt for MicroSoft as back then, even though nowadays MS has become mostly a bad joke, a pathetic shadow of its former self.
I think much of the industry a joke, and Microsoft a exception.
I have lived through a 30 year saga of battles for really basic baselines to be established, insofar as the wars over office software databases and operating systems are concerned. Yes, I am impressed by what I see now, so much has evolved fantastically, but mostly users perform the same tasks and there is no recorded gain in productivity I am aware of. Gates wanted ubiquity of computers. His actions probably did more to enable that than any other individual. Without Microsoft the sometimes seemingly embittered motivation for Linux would not have been anything like it was. I think Gates always wanted to move on to more interesting goals in computing, and am inclined to think the company open source decisions do more for enabling advancement than anything else, because they make a ubiquitous platform more consistent to write for, the perennial monopoly complaint of a aggressive Microsoft. The cash cow applications are bundled now with facility permitted only by integration at prices only low as they are enabled by dominance, and I see nothing not dominant or lame, about that. I only recently benefitted from VS Community, and am still really happy at that, and I bet BillG would dearly love to give SQLServer away if only he could earn from it like a operating system (it is enough one already) and it's a peculiar delight to think Larry E may actually lay awake at night, one day, fearful that possibility is real. I think the reason has more to do with necessity to pay big sales commission to maintain the ecosystem around Microsoft database business, which provides for the channel welfare in turn supporting the rest. Meanwhile there is no Linux competitor because the GPL is anti competition. Except and unless, like all the big convert lovers of open source, someone uses the ability of cloud VDI to never have to release their code. Then we'll have incentive to make a Linux ecosystem selling desktop seats. I'm sure that's why Microsoft is porting so much, even experimentally.