Google is a Potemkin Village


λ the β-Redex Reducer

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- Go to google.com
- Enter any query which you expect will have many results ("mario", "car", etc)
- Google reports billions of results.
- Go to last page
- Results will have decreased, likely to somewhere <1000
- Add removed results
- Go to last page
- Results are still low, likely still <1000

Google often tells people that it has billions of results when it actually only has a few hundred. And figuring this out takes little more than to keep asking Google for more until it runs out.

Truman-Show.gif
 
I think they always limit any search result to 10 pages.
So the content can change, but you won't actually get the 4 trillion results you searched for without adding more filters to get them fit in the 10 pages.
 
I think they always limit any search result to 10 pages.
So the content can change, but you won't actually get the 4 trillion results you searched for without adding more filters to get them fit in the 10 pages.
You think wrong. Google will only list 10 page numbers, but if you go to page 10 then for many queries more page numbers will appear. You have to keep going to the last page number until Google stops listing, which will often be between page 20 and 50.

You are a good demonstration of why the Potemkin Google works. You just see 10 page numbers, and you assume 10 pages. You never go to the 10th page, you never ask Google to show you that 10th page. You never walked behind the Potemkin village to see it for what it is. I went to the 10th page, and then to the last listed page number, and so on and so on until I reached behind the cardboard buildings and saw the facade. You just stand in front of the cardboard building front and think "Okay, so that is what a true building looks like" while I stand behind it seeing it for the cardboard facade that it truly is.

If you want to see your prison then you must always keep asking, keep looking, keep walking until you knock against the dome. Only then will you see that Google is just a small search engine indexing a small internet.

Anyway, here is an example of what I mean. Both screenshots are with all removed results included.
Page 1:
google1.jpg

More than 4 BILLION results! WWWWWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Google is huuuuuuuuuuge, man! Many people stop looking at this point.

Last page (which was page 46):
google2.jpg

Hey, where did those billions of results go? Why does it suddenly only show 467 results? Why do the buildings look like cardboard once you walk past them and look at them from behind?

The answer to all those questions all have to do with that fact that Google is a Potemkin village. It is just a search engine to find reddit, FaceBook, Quora, Wikipedia, Ebay, etc pages. A small selection of the few major sites is the entire internet as for as the Google used is concerned. The Google internet really is that small. Just a few cardboard props with a nice background showing a realistic painting of a seemingly endless amount of buildings behind the horizon.
 
I think they always limit any search result to 10 pages.
So the content can change, but you won't actually get the 4 trillion results you searched for
They don't even do that any more though. Whatever you ask for, many / most of your results are likely to be akin to "did you mean", "we think you might also like", "you didn't ask for this, but in as you are classified as user type xyz you will get more xyz"... or "we were paid for you to click abc..." results.
 
he answer to all those questions all have to do with that fact that Google is a Potemkin village. It is just a search engine to find reddit, FaceBook, Quora, Wikipedia, Ebay, etc pages
We need to resurrect good old web rings. The internet should be about discovery and learning more than "curated" bullshit. Even google alternatives are either based on google-style results, or seem to show similar populist sites.

I'd like a search engine where you can handpick blacklist sites and keywords from showing results (e.g. even using "-microsoft" doesn't seem to work any more)
 
I mainly use the internet because I am addicted. I am a compulsive consumer above all. I Google things I want to buy.

In terms of Potemkin or whatever, maybe I'd be happier if the facade obscured reality even more. These days current events are primarily a drain on my emotional energy. Why am I getting upset about all these things that (a) I have no control over and (b) probably won't ruine my lIfe?
 
The internet should be about discovery and learning more than "curated" bullshit.
Personally I like wiby.me a lot. It only finds small sites. It is nice for when you are just looking for fun things to read on websites that are not infested with bots (I do not know whether that sub is real and I have no idea how much of reddit actually consists of bots, but I found it interesting nonetheless).

Look for example what I found through wiby.me: http://stephenbalaban.com/a-binary-lambda-calculus-parser-interpreter/
What a cool guy. He was listed on the first page when I queried "lambda calculus".

In terms of Potemkin or whatever, maybe I'd be happier if the facade obscured reality even more. These days current events are primarily a drain on my emotional energy. Why am I getting upset about all these things that (a) I have no control over and (b) probably won't ruine my lIfe?
Have you prepped yet? https://wiby.me/?q=prepping
I think that the first result (https://www.realjewnews.com/) is a legitimate news website. They are very credible and fact checked by the government. I always get my news from the Jews.
Post automatically merged:

BTW, I was just kidding with that last site. This is the first time I see it and I do not endorse anything that it says.
 
You are a good demonstration of why the Potemkin Google works. You just see 10 page numbers, and you assume 10 pages. You never go to the 10th page, you never ask Google to show you that 10th page.
I did check my 10th page, and it didn't give me additional pages then. When I clicked the filtered results I only got the other results, and on the 10th page I couldn't continue. I did use a different search term.
Just checked again and indeed, with a different term (5billion hits) it only goes up to 406 results.

It appears someone noticed this before also:
 
Well, a bit of a storm in a cup.

If you had the enormous resources to code and run a search engine for the whole world wide web, you'd probably come up with something similar.
When you get a search query you look up the terms in your inverse file and come up with statistics on how many pages may contain them. That may give billions. It's basically any page that contains any of the search terms.
Then you use the stats in the inverse file to calculate cosine similarity or any metric and sort some of those results, like say 100. Then you recover the full text (or whatever summary you stored for those pages, run some filters
to check relevance (some pages may contain the search terms all contiguously in the same order, or in other order or far away, or just some, or synonyms, or with typos or case swtiched, or...), maybe even refresh the content if your copy is old (probably not, too expensive),
With that you can parse a little better to calculate relevance and give some number of pages. You decide some are not really relevant (why should you show a page that just contains one search term which may even be a common word?), some are abusive (you can have filters on adult content, language, or country or anything so you also have to and some bitmaps or whatever, depending on user settings). And you render and paginate what's left.

In the case of google, that's a business. Why should it show you a page you didn't pay (money) to find, the page owner didn't pay to find, and noone decided they want you to see to influence your cognition into being an addict and make you buy, vote or believe what someone actively pays or passively promotes ? The page might be what you were looking for, but that's nobody's business. Why were you expecting google to help you ? You pay with your data, but if they really tried to help you they couldn't control you, and then what would they want your data for ?

I mainly use the internet because I am addicted.[...]
These days current events are primarily a drain on my emotional energy. Why am I getting upset about all these things that (a) I have no control over and (b) probably won't ruine my lIfe?
Because you are an addict and your dealers are controlling your hormones, of course. Some dealers have a lab and sell people drugs they manufacture (or buy from those). Some use the lab in your body to have you produce substances that change your mood, and they need to control the information you process to achieve that. They know what content to promote, what color schemes, what rhythms, everything, to give you dopamine, adrenaline or whatever.
Or not all of them know the precise biochemichal chain, they just play with the knobs they have and see what their popullations do and machine learn from that.
If you were happy you wouldn't stay there looking at a screen. You would sing or kiss or dance or jump or run or sleep. So making you afraid, sad and taciturn is a precondition to keep you hooked. Then they can start to
sell you things, or recruit you to spread (online or offline) feelings to the people that would never trust them but would trust you. For those feelings to work for them they also need to keep people overflown with information, so
they don't have time to sit and think, and have to take decisions from feelings alone.

Look at me. I'm just playing along by complaining of the internet in the internet. Why am I getting upset about all these thing that (a) I have no control over and (b) shouldn't be able to ruin my life ?
Because they build a virtual world and give you the illusion you have more control on that virtual world than in real life. If I spoke to a neighbour about what I'm saying here I would most likely be ignored.
So I select what online circles I visit and preach to the choir. I'm solving nothing, it's just onanism. The trick is making you unsure of whether (a) you can influence the situation (by getiing or raising awareness, at least) and (b) you need to
do something about it because it will ultimately affect you, if only by making you a misfit. Once you are there, if someone can control the flow of messages to profile, filter or throttle them, then they have control.

This is basically why internet is gratis, and it will never be otherwise because nobody would pay for such a crap.
 
I did check my 10th page, and it didn't give me additional pages then. When I clicked the filtered results I only got the other results, and on the 10th page I couldn't continue. I did use a different search term.
Just checked again and indeed, with a different term (5billion hits) it only goes up to 406 results.
Maybe you just got unlucky with a query that returned exactly 10 pages.

It appears someone noticed this before also:
I did not discover this on my own. I never even use Google. Here is where I learned about this. I actually recommend watching the entire series in order. They are 3 videos and all three of them are really fun.

This is basically why internet is gratis, and it will never be otherwise because nobody would pay for such a crap.
The internet has many good things. freetechbooks.com, khanacademy.org, soilandhealth.org, academia.edu, rawfigs.com, sci-hub.st ("st" is likely to change in the future), etc. Tons of useful sites that are definitely worth paying for.
 
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