this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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I'm guessing your understanding skipped the part about the PageRank system
Yeah it's a monopoly now, but back then it was a couple of Stanford kids with a good idea on how to make search engines suck less by ranking web pages. And it worked.
But as always, with great power...
As an added bonus: if I recall correctly (which I may not, it was a while ago now), the hilarious thing is that despite its success, the original PageRank system was based on flawed maths :D
Sort of, I don't know enough (or think I know enough) to speak to the specifics of the PageRank system stuff, which is why I glossed over it. From personal experience with however it works, earlier or now, I've not really felt like it suited the way I wanted to search for things, nor allowed for it.
On a really basic level I gather it was (and may still be) related to how often some sites were linked to from other sites, with some extra background weighting this way or that to help surface presumably relevant results. To put it crudely, sort of a popularity contest, give or take the weighting details. That tends to suck though for new or less popular/obscure stuff, the latter of which I tend to prefer (unintentionally, but somewhat intentionally).
You can't say I don't know enough and then critique a system.
You absolutely can. I did, and plenty of other people do all the time about a variety of systems, search engines included. That's not to say they'll be good critiques, but that's irrelevant to whether or not they can.
And in that vein, I'm not suggesting mine is a good critique. However it is reflective of my opinions from my experience with their system and my admittedly rough knowledge of it at the time of writing. Instead of adding to dismissive replies, how about we all get together and read the PageRank wikipedia page and learn together.
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
"But this is just, like, my opinion bro"
We're not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it's a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), maybe learn to read a room?
Edit:
Also, it's not as if I was speaking authoritatively, I was speaking to my experiences and I was upfront about the limits of my knowledge. Instead of bothering to constructively correct me, you flatly went, "Yeah, no." and your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason.
To quote a certain highly educated someone, we’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), so why would we go into technical details? maybe learn to read a room?
Except the stated one....
People are not gonna bother educating someone who won't educate themselves, especially when what is said is so completely incorrect they have no idea where to even begin.
Yeah, no.