Reply To: 📢 NEW SITE FUNCTIONALTY: Mixing & Mastering Problem Solver PowerSearch

[LinkedMusicians]

On swijaya said

On LinkedMusicians said

The first few pages of results that you see on a search are not necessarily the best, most reliable expert advice. The top results reflect what is popular. The LinkedMusicians PowerSEARCH engines are created by a human curating the included pages being searched to reflect only expert advice from respected expert source regardless of their popularity/ranking with Google or other search engines.

Yes, popularity based ranking is the downside of search engines and current AIs. For search engines, I guess that can’t be avoided, otherwise the alternatives are even worse (nobody wants random hit lists). But future AIs, maybe. Of course it would need people/organization with the correct motive, ideology, and resources (i.e.: money).

It’s a tangent for sure, but what is really disappointing about what Google has been doing with their algorithm lately is assigning more weight to influencers. It’s the antithesis of Google’s historical logic, to value true subject matter expertise and experience, heavily weighing the topical authority of a source. The recent changes are a mix of giving the people what they want and choosing commerce over fact and quality. In any event, the major difference here is that you can — and I did — make a very specialized search engine higher quality by pruning what is being searched, limiting it to only very high-quality, expert sources, as that is something Google isn’t doing, even though they’ve long been using a mix of a computer algorithms, human editors, and AI. Now, I realize that to those who work in technology, what I’m stating is a very basic concept, but to most people who aren’t professionally involved in this area, it’s a quick, accurate way to explain the benefit of this very focused tool to a general search engine.

I suppose another way of putting it metaphorically, we’re amplifying the signal and removing the noise or, to use another analogy, we’re separating the wheat from the chaff. Google or any general search engine is going to give you everything. While Google is a superb search engine, it’s a general search engine with an incredibly deep index of pages with good advice, bad advice, and advice that is somewhere in between, whereas we’re only taking the best parts of their index that we deem very high quality and eliminating everything else. For example, if you search Google for reviews of sample libraries, you’re very likely going to see a good deal of influencers in the top results — literally paid promotion, often from people who are not subject matter experts, just individuals who know how to do entertaining presentations. If you search on mixing and mastering advice, you’re going to see a great deal of terrible advice from YouTubers with no education or subject matter expertise; they just know how to make entertaining videos that a lot of people enjoy. Google’s algorithm will rank these results very high if their videos are very popular, talked about, and linked to by sites and individuals it deems highly relevant even though their advice may be awful.

Even more, AI is deeply influenced by Google search results and can also rely on factors beyond the source’s authoritativeness and subject-matter expertise. If you turn to AI for mixing and mastering advice, you’re just about guaranteed to get a mix of good and questionable to terrible advice.

• This reply was modified 4 weeks ago by LinkedMusicians.

CURATED BEST FREE LISTS: Kontakt Libraries, Sample Libraries, Virtual Synths, Effects
POWERSEARCH TOOLS: Synth Presets, Loops & Sound FX, Gear Reviews 
FREE TOOLS: Mixing Problem Solver, Songwriter's Toolbox, QuickGuides, Scale, Mode & Chord Finder
READING/VIEWING: Best Mags / Podcasts, Audio Production & Songwriter's Dictionaries

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