Whoops -- accidentally moderated it. Undoing...

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

lol, like phys.org (somewhere between journalism and breathless huckterism) has never got crucial facts or inferred conclusions wrong.

College press releases, science journalism, and medical journalism THRIVE on hyperbole and overexaggerated / misunderstood conclusions like this.

Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.

Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.

They have no artists. They buy existing copyrights and sue people, that's their business.

So our military just publicized such that any US opponents know a substantial # of US soliders will either officially or unofficially be out, and we'll be shorthanded, for a 4 day window. Yeah, that won't cause any problems for US.

It's taxpayer money. Means they'll burn through it all the faster.

> No. /end topic.

Yup. Davis' or Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Agreed; I was going to say the same about _worth_. Markets may price their stock there. But I am not seeing a path or rev / profit model thatâ(TM)s making that make sense.

Maybe /. could point ai at their comment input / display code⦠getting escape-code alts to â is a 90s thing.

Agreed; I was going to say the same about âworthâ(TM). Markets may price their stock there. But Iâ(TM)m not seeing a path or rev / profit model thatâ(TM)s making that make sense.

I do not believe the differences are so stark as to account for a jump from 6% to 22% and back to 6%.

That may explain the mechanism, but it still means they've got too small a sample size. There's no reason for Windows and Linux users to differ so extremely over four day weekends.

If it can jump from 6% to 22% for one day, and then presumably back down to 6% the next day, either they've got an almighty small sample size, or they're lying.

This is a false argument, because the mainstream oses (Windows, MacOS, IOS) break their interface every major release. Go from Win10 to Win11 and you have to learn a new interface and retrain yourself. The latest iPhone switches where search is, requiring you to rewire muscle memory. Let's not even go into how new versions of Outlook, Word, and so on break their prior interface.

We need to stop accepting the myth that Windows or Mac are stable and consistent. The shift from Win10 -> Linux Mint is about the same as going Win10 -> Win11, except one of them doesn't say 'Microsoft'.

There's 8 billion people on the planet. Are you saying 7 billion a year do get drunk?

Out of those 8 billion, 7,999,999,999 did not make as stupid a comment as you did. Let's celebrate!