On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 2:59 AM Bernie Eckhart <[email protected]> wrote: > if search engine providers put more effort into analysis of context and > association of content than their endeavers to maximize advertising > revenue, one might more successfully get substantially decent results.
There are a variety of pressures, including legal issues and privacy policies, which suggest that waiting for that to happen might not be a good idea. Or, ok, it might. And, the people who found that infomercials were a good way to rake in cash might actually solve our documentation issues. The chances are slim, but it's possible. Anyways... I've been watching google search results degrade in quality for something over ten years now. The issues behind this seem to include: (1) Sites going offline which held useful content, (2) Financial pressures and offshoring (3) Spammers (4) Employee changes and resulting shifts in enthusiasms (5) Costs of tracking content updates (6) SEO practices (7) Party time and similar priorities ... There's still plenty of good content, and there's even people putting together new content, but ... once upon a time, I could search on a term and I'd get pages of results and I could find useful results on page 4, page 10 or page 50 or page 70. Nowadays, I'm lucky if there's more than one page of search results and I'm even luckier if the stuff on page 4 is still accessible. And, of course, it's only good reasons why we've seen these changes. (I'd be tempted to suggest you look at the history of what's been happening with Google as it has gone international, to see why it's falling apart, but I'm not sure how much of that content is still accessible, nor am I confident that it hasn't been altered beyond recognition.) Anyways... search still works, but I wouldn't count on it continuing to work for any specific search result. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
