<story><title>A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design</title><url>https://search.marginalia.nu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again.&lt;p&gt;It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let&amp;#x27;s say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-time respected books of the past centenary. Amazon&amp;#x27;s algorithms constantly push to recommend the latest hot book of the year. But I don&amp;#x27;t want that. A year is not enough time to have society determine if the material withstands time. I want something that has stood the test of time and is recommended by reputable institutions.</text></item><item><author>rchaud</author><text>The context matters. I&amp;#x27;d happily read &amp;quot;Top 10&amp;quot; lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. &amp;quot;Top 10 Prog Rock albums&amp;quot;, while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website.&lt;p&gt;But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter &amp;quot;new media&amp;quot; blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who&amp;#x27;s repackaged Wikipedia&amp;#x2F;Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy writing designed to get people to &amp;quot;share to Twitter&amp;#x2F;FB&amp;quot;. No passion, no expertise. Just eyeballs at any cost.</text></item><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today&amp;#x27;s web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.</text></item><item><author>snakeboy</author><text>Wow, that&amp;#x27;s awesome.  Great work!&lt;p&gt;For a simple test, I searched &amp;quot;fall of the roman empire&amp;quot;.  In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs.  All extremely useful resources.&lt;p&gt;When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle &amp;quot;8 Reasons Why Rome Fell&amp;quot;, then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totally useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jamra</author><text>This is just a guess, but I believe that they use machine learning and rank it by the clicks. I took some coursera courses and Andrew Ng sort of suggested that as their strategy.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that clickbait and low effort articles could be good enough to get the click, but low effort enough to drag society into the gutter. As time passes, the system is gamified more and more where the least effort for the most clicks is optimized.</text></comment>
<story><title>A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design</title><url>https://search.marginalia.nu/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again.&lt;p&gt;It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let&amp;#x27;s say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-time respected books of the past centenary. Amazon&amp;#x27;s algorithms constantly push to recommend the latest hot book of the year. But I don&amp;#x27;t want that. A year is not enough time to have society determine if the material withstands time. I want something that has stood the test of time and is recommended by reputable institutions.</text></item><item><author>rchaud</author><text>The context matters. I&amp;#x27;d happily read &amp;quot;Top 10&amp;quot; lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. &amp;quot;Top 10 Prog Rock albums&amp;quot;, while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website.&lt;p&gt;But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter &amp;quot;new media&amp;quot; blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who&amp;#x27;s repackaged Wikipedia&amp;#x2F;Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy writing designed to get people to &amp;quot;share to Twitter&amp;#x2F;FB&amp;quot;. No passion, no expertise. Just eyeballs at any cost.</text></item><item><author>foofoo4u</author><text>Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today&amp;#x27;s web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.</text></item><item><author>snakeboy</author><text>Wow, that&amp;#x27;s awesome.  Great work!&lt;p&gt;For a simple test, I searched &amp;quot;fall of the roman empire&amp;quot;.  In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs.  All extremely useful resources.&lt;p&gt;When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle &amp;quot;8 Reasons Why Rome Fell&amp;quot;, then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totally useless.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amenod</author><text>&amp;gt;  is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages.&lt;p&gt;They do? That would explain a lot - but ironically, I can&amp;#x27;t find a good source on this. Do you have one at hand?</text></comment>