See the cynic in me is wondering whether it was actually a mistake like they said, or if it’s a cover up.

“Hey, Wired, weird thing with our search algorithm. It seems to always put you on page 2 since your article dropped. I wonder why that is?” – Larry Page, probably.

Skull giver
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My interpretation was this + in terms of the actual “sponsored” results work by matching “kids clothing” with advertisers who match for that term, and Google “changing” it into “$brand_name kids clothing” which seems entirely obvious when spelling it out.

I haven’t used Google as my primary search engine for many years but occasionally I do run a search on it. While the quality of results is extremely low, I never noticed anything obvious like a generic search term only returning results for a specific brand + that search term like the original article implied.

It seemed like a giant misunderstanding of how it all works from the start but made for a great headline.

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141Y

The claim was that Google was taking a query for “kids clothing” and turning it into " kids clothing" to get more ad revenue from , but the slide shows the exact opposite: " kids clothing" is turned into “kids clothing”.

Am I having a stroke?

Skull giver
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@[email protected]
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21Y

weird

> is for block quotes

I don’t about that other one though

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They fucked it up completely in a way that raises questions of competence.

HTML has ways to display angle brackets specifically intended to never be interpreted as tags. “Entity names” will never be code. There’s not even a sensible way to do it deliberately, like %20 nonsense.

Could have done it with proper encoding, don’t need to remove it lol o.O

Allowing tainted data in to the dataset means every single client has to do every single spot of content rendering correctly or else be vulnerable to easy hacking. Keeping it out of the dataset means not all clients have to be perfect for Lemmy to be a secure place.

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The point of encoding, the process of representing data in a different way, is to have the data set not be tainted. :)

Here, for example: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp

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11Y

hm, thanks for the information

@[email protected]
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61Y

we’re having a stroke together

apis
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Am all in on this stroke as well.

The slide shows neither. It shows that they use synonyms to get more results. They take a search for “kids clothing” and add results for “children’s clothing” and “kidswear”

I hope they also add results for “kids swear”.

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