this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
964 points (91.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35875 readers
3508 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This is why
The long and short of it - Google search was designed at a time when the web was in its infancy. Basically just text and a few images.
Fast forward to today, and reddit is the only one that still allows its data to be crawled.
As media has become more social (basically all of it) the walled gardens prevent you from even viewing content without an account.
Every platform wants you to be searching inside their service.
Google is useless.
What's upsetting to me is how many communities that have moved to discord and there's no centralized way to search for content in there. Black hole of ethereal content
And the Discord search is total garbage. There's no way (I know of, and I've tried to search for it) to search for the exact term. No parentheses, no plus signs or whatever. So you try to search one term, but the results come back full of terms that are similar but not the same.
It's not the crawling that is the issue. Facebook for example shows up just fine on search results, you just need an account to view the content on FB if it isn't public. User privacy settings also shield content. Google has actively and willingly destroyed its utility as a search engine by placing revenue sites/preferred results ahead of actual search results. What they want you to $ee comes first, and if social media like facebook isn't profitable to google, you don't get to see it. I did a quick search for "facebook car groups" and got a page full of them, so you absolutely can get those walled gardens in results.
Facebook shows up, but do any of the conversations with meaningful information show up in a search?
Unfortunately I think this will get worse over time as databases of text and video are extremely useful for LLM training, and locking them down makes sense if you look at them as an asset that can be licensed.
On a related note, internal search sites implemented is usually a horrible abomination unable to find anything remotely relevant to the search. Bonus points if it doesn't allow exact search in some cases or at all; even if you know the specific text you search for, you'll go through hell to find it
Edit: better wording for exact search