On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results • Hacker News Board

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#21

Post by neves » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #18

There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…

Google revolutionary approach to indexing the web was that it started to use the amount of hyperlinks to a page as a measure of its importance. Since then, they have a strong "internet bias". If something is more present in the internet than in the "real" world, it would appear first.

Searching for "Apple" used to display just pages about the company, not the fruit (even when the company was almost out of business). Searching for "samba" would display just pages about mounting windows filesystems in Linux, not the most important musical genre of a whole country.

Nowadays they improved their algorithms and this bias isn't so strong, but it always important to remember that what is important in the cyberspace isn't necessary important for the whole world.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#22

Post by vonklaus » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #17

vonklaus wrote: post #16

I will not beleagure this point again, I make it everyday on deaf ears. * Search can never be decoupled from the browser. * search is worse and discovery is hard. * Brave Software needs to focus on building security by design which means a search engine AND browser. The memex-explorer model is the design of the google killer. Likely why it was abandoned. Browser wars began ~6 months ago. The next larry page & brin, W…

I would like to know your reasoning as to why search cannot be decoupled from the browser; I would like to know why you think that a browser war began about six months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11134798

Trying to find time to continue work on something a bit more polished but it is not ready. This is my response in another thread, either ctrl+f my un or "-2" and you will see response to similar query.

Idea is "so obviously crazy", mentioning it publicly for several months and begging people to consider it and work on it has been met with down votes or completely ignoring it. Which means, if you realize it now and start working on it, you will have ~6 (I think less now though) head start as people catch up with it.

edit: Because I don't think this makes sense as a model for search. http://imgur.com/Gz7hXY7

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#23

Post by dheera » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #18

There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up.

However, there's a particularly interesting case:

https://www.google.com/#q=tsla

I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#24

Post by hotcool » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:09 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

Newcomers might be better off approaching the challenge in a totally different way.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#25

Post by ErikAugust » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

You are perpetuating a myth for the sake of a monopoly.

A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no one dares.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#26

Post by whitegrape » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

hotcool wrote: post #24

romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

Newcomers might be better off approaching the challenge in a totally different way.

I remember DDG did side-by-side comparisons, but did they ever just query Google themselves and then do their own stuff on top? Anyway I'm not sure Google can be beaten at all by any particular newcomer, instead they might suffer death by a thousand cuts as more niche engines like Shodan show up and bring in context-specific searches that are orders of magnitude better than Google's more complicated all-web-they-approve-of-and-find-relevant-to-your-account search.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#27

Post by SixSigma » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

When I search for Amazone the only result for Amazon is one for a product called Amazone. All the rest are Amazone domain names or Amazone the movie

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#28

Post by webmasterraj » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

ErikAugust wrote: post #25

romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

You are perpetuating a myth for the sake of a monopoly. A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no one dares.

Maybe. Search is a resource-intensive algorithmic problem. So you need one of two things to beat Google: more resources or a much better algorithm.

You're not going to get the first unless you're Facebook or Amazon or God, but maybe you can build a smarter algorithm. You are up against an army of some of the smartest computer scientists and mathematicians ever assembled -- but what you have going for you is a complete lack of inertia or legacy. You could try crazy things that Google might not, because they won't think it'll work. If you get lucky, one of those blows up. But you have to get very lucky (this is the Innovator's Dilemma in a nutshell).

Anyone want to give it a shot?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#29

Post by fixermark » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

If you are logged in to Google, and search for Amazone, then click the "search instead for Amazone" option, Google should remember your preference the next time you search.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#30

Post by adevine » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

ErikAugust wrote: post #25

romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

You are perpetuating a myth for the sake of a monopoly. A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no one dares.

If a small company could design a credible alternative to Google, I'm sure it would have been done - the incentives are too great.

Entrenched businesses are RARELY displaced from their top position. Instead, what usually happens is the world changes around them, and the entrenched business is ill suited to compete in the new world. Nobody ever managed to seriously challenge Microsoft for desktop/laptop OS dominance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste.... The issue is that desktop/laptop OS dominance is no longer as important as it once was.