EatonJul 16, 2023

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

Show threadTim CarmodyJul 16, 2023
@eaton it does this with scholarly papers too
Show threadWilliam GunnJul 16, 2023
@tim @eaton I'm having trouble seeing the parallel with scholarly papers. There are canonical sources (ScienceDirect, Crossref, publisher websites) and long-term preservation systems (LOCKSS, etc) that mostly do the job of preventing this. Are you talking about Academia.edu and Researchgate?
Show threadTim CarmodyJul 16, 2023
@williamgunn @eaton if you search for a given paper, you’re just as likely to find a low quality database that’s indexed the title or maybe the abstract as you are an actual source for the paper
Show threadTim CarmodyJul 16, 2023
@williamgunn @eaton so it’s not that they’re unavailable, although sometimes they are; but more that (like with Jeff’s example of user guides) you have to sort through a lot of churny false positives to even see if it can be found.
Show threadStryder NotaviJul 17, 2023

@tim @williamgunn @eaton Although it sounds like you can just skip the search engine and go straight to the publications DB.

There are other ways to navigate the web that don't involve making a Google search.

Show threadTim CarmodyJul 17, 2023
@StryderNotavi @williamgunn @eaton see I thought we were commiserating about the way false indexing has made it harder to find reliable databases and especially made broad-based searches worse, while you seem to think I’m complaining that I don’t know how to find a journal article even if I know its exact title and where it was published
Show threadWilliam Gunn
@tim @StryderNotavi @eaton I'm not sure where the confusion is arising, but the databases of scholarly work have been the same ones for a long time. Finding a reliable database or index of articles isn't something people do on a regular basis. You do it once.
Jul 17, 2023 at 3:20pmMastodon for Android