@seawall It’s good to teach young people to pay attention to sources and to question information presented as factual: but it’s also a hurdle. “what was the first shark?”
“do birds eat meat?”
“what is the smartest insect?”
Used to be the kind of questions anyone could innocently explore and stand a chance of finding their way to better sources and better questions… now I have to give all of these extra warnings “some pages that look like they are about science are just traps”
Here's something I have noticed, front page search results all look like they were created specifically for your search question. Like they were written by middle schoolers who took a test question and turned it into the first sentence/topic of their low lexile answer.
You no longer land on a resource written last year or 10 years ago.
And the ads! Oh, the ads! Every four sentence paragraph begins and ends with an ad and most likely a floating video box.
@MyWoolyMastadon @futurebird @seawall
I feel like at some point I need to do a longer post about pitfalls like this, but IMO searching for "questions" has always been bad for reasons besides SEO spam.
To put it bluntly, people who know their stuff almost never present information in that manner, so whenever you "ask" a search engine a question you're almost always leaning on whatever semantic behaviors that search engines is doing to dissect that question.
@jeruyyap @MyWoolyMastadon @seawall
If you write nice keyword searches most engines aggressively try to convert your words into a “natural language question” anyways.
And don’t get me started on the way words like “AND” “NOT” “OR” are ignored.
But really there should be nothing wrong with searching for a question: that is the kind of parsing that’s reasonable to expect to work, but right now it probably makes results worse.
