Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

    • drphungky@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

      The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

      • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

        Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos

          • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

            • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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              2 years ago

              Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

              You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.

              I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.

              • goetzit@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?

                • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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                  1 year ago

                  You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.