From my perspective, if we want a smarter society, we need a society willing to do the work of actually being smart and informed.
That may help, but also you need a society that values education, gives people the time to do that work, and has schools that preserve people's curiosity rather than gradually extinguish it.
This was a wild ride of a post. Once I hit the historical research part I thought I knew where you were headed, only for it to get worse in that way that anything to do with history seems to do.
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.
Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn't matter as much with how the space is now and how Google's being better in the past wasn't necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.
Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn't be having this discussion, but "free" markets go brrr.
Fwiw I was aware of a number of those, hence why in the OP I mention: "and few really good competitors." That wasn't to suggest there were few total competitors, only that there were few really good competitors, which I think is generally the case any time you have a large number of, well, anything tbh.
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 found one thing that is important for you and don’t accept that other people don’t give a shit
Some of them became the very things they dislike: the sports fan that never shuts up about their sport, the religious person proselytizing, the obnoxious ads...Just for that one thing, like you say.
This gave me a sort of questionable idea, but it'd be sweet if at the start to some bike trails they had a little parks & rec office or something where folks that don't have bikes (whether for financial or basic space reasons) could rent them/lend them out to ride along the trails. Maybe some more well-funded areas already have something like this?
I know some places will rent out bikes to folks, but I dunno how affordable that tends to be.
Some older folks that aren't as tech savvy have made some impressive pieces with it if memory serves. There's also those that use it unironically for its constraints to produce pieces with a classic MS Paint style produced from those limitations. In a way this update kind of flies in the face of that a little, maybe, but eh.
I was told there would be baguettes, however I'm not sure what a baguette is so I don't know what I'm looking for and I think there may be a notable nudist commune or three around here.
Fair, albeit I think many outside of the field are inclined to bundle the two together given how closely they coordinate. Plus it's a shower thought post, so not meant to appear too well thought out.
You may like it, and you are priming yourself to like it by wanting it to be good, but this doesn't necessarily mean it will be good in a broader sense than for you, and tbh even if it's only good to you, that's good enough if it makes you happy.
That may help, but also you need a society that values education, gives people the time to do that work, and has schools that preserve people's curiosity rather than gradually extinguish it.