[HN Gopher] Discussions: Real human answers in search results
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Discussions: Real human answers in search results
Author : vmullin
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-04-20 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brave.com)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| What I want is a search engine which searches the complete
| content of every paper, including both original research reports
| and reviews, published in a peer-reviewed journal since 1900. No,
| not just abstracts.
|
| Of course we can't have that since it's all hidden behind
| proprietary paywalls, and so much for the promise that the
| Internet would be the greatest source of information for all and
| would open up the knowledge base for every human being on the
| planet.
|
| That's the scientific knowledge base, and it's absolutely
| ridiculous that people anywhere can't search through it easily in
| today's world.
| yablak wrote:
| Like google scholar?
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...
| mmastrac wrote:
| The content of Reddit discussions on relative merit are terrible.
| Usually a bunch of groups are repeating long-held misconceptions
| that may have been true at some point but are no longer true, and
| get upvoted by people that recognize the same out-of-date facts.
|
| I'm not saying the web-at-large is _much_ better, but curated
| content from true experts _tends_ to be a lot better (finding
| those experts is obviously hard). Throwing more algorithmic crap
| on the results page doesn't make results better. It just adds
| more noise.
|
| The given example on the blog post points to this page [1] where
| the top comments/top replies are:
|
| - "I know OLEDs are better, but you should at least show 2
| pictures from the same angle." "The room lighting is completely
| different as well. I don't understand the motivation here. Bit of
| a weird post"
|
| - "You ah ..... You see that location more times than you care to
| admit ?" "Yeah but now when he sees it, it has the deepest
| blacks"
|
| - "I absolutely think OLED is way better than LCD, too. Just your
| comparison is not good. [...]" "I totally agree, it was a spur-
| of-the-moment comparison as I saw the awful backlight bleed and
| the shimmering on the image I put on top there [...]"
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/safq43/the_dif...
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I have the same experience.
|
| Usually, I find Reddit discussions at least 5 orders of
| magnitude less valuable than HN ones, for example.
|
| They're not useless, but HN most often contain good advice. It
| has bad advice too, but it's easier to sort out.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Yep, you should also be careful of people shilling (not even
| corporate brands doing marketing but regular people who are
| shareholders in a stock shilling!). For example /r/buildapc
| famously has a bias towards AMD CPU/GPU because many posters
| there are $AMD holders. Same goes for Tesla across pretty much
| all subreddits.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I hope Reddit has a good anti-bot system in place.
|
| Brace for SEO spammers, they're coming to your subreddit.
| mianos wrote:
| > Brace for SEO spammers, they're coming to your subreddit.
|
| Or those million complete waste of time MVP vote whores who
| just paste the "Reset PRAM" or other irrelevant standard block
| pasts to every question on the google support groups.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| As skeptical as I have been about their crypto stuff, Brave has
| been making genuinely new features for several iterations now.
| MisterBiggs wrote:
| I find myself attaching "reddit" to the end of search queries
| more and more so this is a great feature. Even though the
| discussions aren't always perfect its nice to see opinions that
| aren't manufactured to maximize clout, SEO, or ad revenue like
| most of the internet is.
| Imnimo wrote:
| How concerned should we be that this only works because currently
| SEO has no incentive to target Reddit or StackOverflow, and if
| this takes off, those communities will be overrun by SEO spam?
| [deleted]
| Nowado wrote:
| It is exactly that. I'm not sure what the norms are on linking
| vs copying own posts here, so for now I'm going with both.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746
|
| 21 points by Nowado 62 days ago | parent | context | prev |
| next [-] | on: Reddit can't build a better search engine
|
| Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool
| you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It
| will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical
| angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think
| it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics
| (where once any division in population is found, it becomes
| valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once
| anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it
| becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be
| used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it
| becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you
| figure out someone's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there
| just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something.
|
| Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because
| what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you
| do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato
| chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check
| 'potato chips dip', you google all you can find there and some
| of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every
| now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you).
| Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that
| input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO
| (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online).
|
| That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM
| company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to
| audience for a price that's lower than cost of what I just
| described. There will be edge cases, especially on
| international markets where value of time for various business
| owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting
| more clogged up with ads, but that's the general gist. If you
| can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes
| when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite
| weird if nobody ever did it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Kind of sideways related to "Goodhart's law" -- "When a measure
| becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
|
| Which kind of dooms all web search now that one thinks about
| it.
| rel2thr wrote:
| how would that work? the point of the SEO spam is to fill up a
| site with 'content' and then sell ads or affiliate links to
| make money on that site
|
| You can't really make money by commenting on Reddit, they are
| very agressive about affiliate links and banning
| Imnimo wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure it would work the same as current SEO
| spam, but I just feel like some portion of this idea is
| predicated on mis-aligning incentives. Right now, SEO has no
| incentive to go after Reddit comments, so Reddit comments are
| (apparently) higher quality than raw search results. But once
| search engines start directing people to Reddit comments, the
| SEO's incentives shift, and it feels like their behavior
| would change accordingly (although I admit I can't articulate
| a clear vision of what that new behavior would be), causing
| the reliability of Reddit comments to plummet.
|
| Maybe it's true that Reddit's moderation is sufficient to
| prevent this from happening, but I feel like I see a decent
| amount of SEO-adjacent subreddits already, for things like
| new crypto pump-and-dumps. Before Reddit removed nsfw subs
| from r/all, you'd sometimes see a bunch of spam links for
| OnlyFans sites.
|
| I could imagine a situation where Brave has to try to
| distinguish good subreddits from bad subreddits and it
| becomes just as challenging as distinguishing good websites
| from bad websites.
| kovek wrote:
| It looks like these days, NLP models are able to "seem"
| human. Start generating many reddit accounts, act like
| humans, gain karma. When an important discussion appears,
| use the army of bots to debate that product A is better
| than product B
|
| EDIT: If previously the race was to make a business look
| legitimate (page rank), then now it is about making users
| look legitimate (human rank)
| altdataseller wrote:
| Forums hve been dying for a decade so I'm not sure what other
| discussion sources they can add, aside from maybe Quora and maybe
| Twitter.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| HN?
|
| I'm sure there are many 'HN-like' forums for many other topics.
| rel2thr wrote:
| ooh this is really good, granted I'm biased because I am already
| a Brave user
|
| Also its not just reddit they are integrated with, if I search
| 'best catfishing austin' I see they've pulled our local fishing
| discussion board thats like an old school php forum and a great
| resource.
|
| That forum is nowhere on the front page of google for this search
| , instead there are lots of made for SEO 'magazines' there
| makeworld wrote:
| Wow I'm impressed to see smaller forums like that show up,
| nice.
| vimy wrote:
| Google used to have this. It showed search results from all kinds
| of different forums. Remember vbulletin and phpbb? It was a
| really useful feature and I don't know why Google removed it.
|
| I guess the equivalent search function in 2022 would search
| reddit, fb groups and discord.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I don't remember using that feature but just like I add reddit
| today, I used to add vbulletin.
| est wrote:
| I think search should be split into two categories, one is
| seeking advice from other humans, another is pinpoint exact doc
| retrieval without the fuzzing or auto-correction bullshit
| nostromo wrote:
| Brave should work with Facebook to unlock a massive amount of
| this content.
|
| Facebook will not work with Google for competitive reasons, and
| for similar reasons, it would make sense for them to build up a
| search competitor like Brave.
|
| My own personal experience is that Facebook Groups have some of
| the best content on the internet for a number of hobbies. For
| example, if you want to know how to grow tea, or create a new
| workout targeting triceps, or build a shed in your backyard --
| great answers for these types of questions are hidden away from
| search in Facebook Groups.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| I agree. This is an unpopular opinion but Facebook is gating a
| significant part of the internet from search engines. Hopefully
| now that their growth is slowing they might have to unblock it.
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(page generated 2022-04-20 23:01 UTC)