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> There's now more good new research being published than I could ever read. Researchers need to adapt to that by reducing friction.

That's encouraging to hear from at least someone since it doesn't meet my experience. What I rather see in the few fields I still care about is that we're flooded with a mass of unoriginal and uninspired papers, many using a ML approach, where the purpose is clearly to get graduation or tenure rather than advancing the state of the art. It's happening to a degree that even assessing the major contributions in a field and separating me-too publication from the few original and foundational works has become impossible, similar to how general web search has become pointless. I'm all for free access, but 1. major works have always been published as author's copies with free public access 2. I really don't see any advancement in scientific quality at all as academic achievements are becoming just stepping stones and academic institutions career networks more than anything else.

Edit: also want to mention citeseer as my search engine of choice which seems to have improved a lot after their rewrite ten years ago (which made it useless for me)




I'm interested to hear why you think general web search is pointless. I know that SEO and Google dropping various search functions has made things a little more annoying, but it's still easier to find information than it's ever been.


No it's not, like at all. For nearly every topic I can think of in SW dev, where I usually have a pretty good idea what I'm after, I'm hitting hundreds of naive content-farm clickbait articles when I used to find posts by experts in their blogs, in forums or mailing lists not even ten years ago. At first I blamed Google for sending me to the sites with the most AdWords and Doubleclick ads on them, but with DuckDuckGo consistently giving me just the same results, I believe the problem is rather with the incentives for producing content (or lack thereof), with Google and Facebook having extracted all value out of what used to be "the web". It's not going to improve with ad prices going down the toilet, and Google increasing their efforts of monopolizing every single point of contact as they're struggling to grow. Today if I'm "researching" (not in an academic sense) a topic, I go straight to StackExchange sites, and sites like HN. Life's too short to care about the world of copycat shite that Google indexes; people may find that "searching 456678743 sites in 0.03s" is not, in fact, very useful on the extant web.


As odd as that sounds, I believe there's a market opportunity for a company to start out again like what Google used to be: a search engine used mostly by technical people and searching within a well-defined small circle of websites.




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