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BITWASTES_METASTASIZED

                                             October 30, 2021
                                             October 04, 2022


                                                   BITWASTES

David Auerbach,
"Bitwise: A Life in Code", p.184:

    "People like to speak of Google's ranking algorithm
    as its 'secret sauce', but this ever-shifting recipe
    is one that not even Google's own engineers could
    write down.  'Usefulness' had metastasized from a
    humanly comprehensible algorithm into an arcane
    calculation involving hundreds of individual factors
    per page.  The relationship of Google's measure of
    'usefulness' to *our* measure of 'usefulness'
    remained more or less steady, but this continuity
    masked how much Google's algorithm diverged from
    intuitive thought processes."


                             Another thing that's pretty well masked
                             is the actual usefulness of search
                             results.  We're long past the era when
                             a Google search did an amazing job of
                             finding just what I was looking
                             for... now it's more likely to give me
                             a pointer to a place I would've looked
                             next in any case.

                                          ENGINE_TROUBLE

                             That is, when it doesn't give me a half
                             dozen links to authors of completely
                             unknown province, writing for obscure,
                             veiled purposes.
                                                     
                       If I do try to use a web search,     
                       I end up prioritizing the links      
                       to sites I'm already familiar        
                       with.  The others aren't likely      
                       to be worth that much.               
                                                            
                                                           
                    To get *real* information you almost
                    always want something curated by            BROKEN_WEB
                    professionals at government/university
                    sites.




    In the early days of the web, people would ask me to find stuff
    for them, and I would often succeed just by thinking about
    different sites and what I'd seen there-- altavista was a bit
    better at this than I was, and google originally did a much better
    job than I could on my own.  With the present-day, dumbed-down
    web, we're back to the best way to find stuff is to first think
    about the places you're going to check.

      Wikipedia, stackoverflow...
      Reuters, Guardian UK...



                              We're back to the point where people ask
                              each other how to find things rather than
                              resort to web searches because it
                              increasingly seems like a waste of time.





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