billy joe bowers 🗽Modern search engines: "Let me just assume a bunch of words you didn't put in there and ignore a bunch of the ones you did"
2xfo@billyjoebowers
There was a time when you could keep adding quotes until you found the exact thing you wanted, SMH
Nazo@billyjoebowers I understand why they do what they do, but I don't understand why they insist on taking it to such extremes and refusing to let us have the tools to bypass that when needed (eg stuff like the quotes, judicial usage of keywords, etc.)
It's one thing to try to "help" users along when they suck at searching, but the end result of what they've done is create a thing that experts can't use to find anything and which is so bad at actually doing searches that even the people who weren't good at it can't really find what they want either.
Basically they took what seemed like a good idea at the time and just went nuts with it, then refused to back down (sunk cost fallacy?)
This is it. I mean, when I put all those extra words in there, believe me.
jonoleth@nazokiyoubinbou @billyjoebowers I've always assumed (without proof) that the companies benefit by conditioning people to just accept whatever they get cause there's nothing they can do to improve the result anyway. That in turn makes it easier to steer people to the results they want, like ads or content they want to promote or something else.
The less control people have of their experience, the less specific are their expectations
@jonoleth @billyjoebowers Honestly, a lot of people basically believe that's the case, but I personally think it's giving these companies way too much credit. They're not that smart and they can't plan ahead past trying to maximize profits for this quarter. (Yeah, I used to think companies would plan ahead because if you're a company that's kind of the thing you have to do to be in business, but their focus seems to be just quarterly profits and I honestly don't think they can see beyond that.)
Honestly, I think they're that bad just because they kept focusing more and more on targeting trying to let people who couldn't "search-fu" be able to search because they wanted everyone to use their services, but they went too far because they didn't think ahead.
@nazokiyoubinbou @billyjoebowers sorry, I should have been clearer. I agree with you that it's too elaborate to be a deliberate plan; rather I think those are the reasons it's become so widespread and pervasive, and why there's no reason for companies to act differently. Giving more control to users would invalidate or lessen existing short-term business strategies that arise in low-control contexts, so the trend only ever goes one way.
@jonoleth Fair enough. There is absolutely no incentive for them to change it because it also drives more people to resort to the fake "AI" scams they're also running.
@nazokiyoubinbou I pray to whatever will listen that the AI-fication won't stick around after the bubble bursts 
@jonoleth When the bubble bursts it can't stick around. All the services are going to shut down because they won't have the incredibly massive VC funding it takes to keep those things running. They won't even be able to afford the power bills... They will pivot hard. (Honestly not sure what they'll do, but they'll find a way to try to make all the rest of us pay for those bills rather than themselves of course.)
For that matter, just making the models requires insane costs. They wouldn't be able to update them even if they kept something running somewhere.
Shannon Clark@billyjoebowers gmail does this with email search to an extreme where I search for the name of someone or a business and I get random similes of words in their name. It’s utterly useless.
skategoat 🐐 🇵🇸@billyjoebowers or even "yeah I get the gist of what you are saying"
Markus Gerstel@billyjoebowers "anyway, first let's look at some text we just made up"