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

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

#91

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

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…

Search can be decoupled from the browser, it always has been; so starting with an obviously wrong statement puts people off.

You've not explained the relationship between security and search either (unless you mean privacy?)

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

#92

Post by solveforall » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

Lagged2Death wrote: post #61

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow. And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed mac…

In terms of results from crawling, I would consider Bing a "serious" competitor, although still a distant second. They are well-funded, used in ~30% of searches in the US, and don't look like they're going away anytime soon. It would be sad if they did because Google would then be a total monopoly.

Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.

Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and start with a ?, like "?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would love to get any feedback.

Link to the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174127

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

#93

Post by nkurz » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #89

Google couldn't find what he was looking for because it doesn't exist on the web. Take a look at the search with a +retina term: https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina Or in verbatim mode: https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1 His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually…

I don't think that Google accepts +term any longer. They switched several years ago to requiring "term" with quotes. Presumably this was because they wanted to make searches for Google+ names easier. For a while I think they gave a warning, but it seems like they've stopped doing that now.

Edit: Wait, you work for Google, right? Am I the one that's lost? Did they switch back to supporting +term?

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

#94

Post by EdSharkey » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

Here's a thought: maybe the shift in the index to display realtime website updates and factor in social network inputs have ruined their ranking system? Or at the very least, forced it to approximate results rather than be precise about it?

Maybe google has become like robocop receiving 100+ prime directives. All these low quality, noisy inputs are simply driving the engine bonkers?

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

#95

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #93

nostrademons wrote: post #89

Google couldn't find what he was looking for because it doesn't exist on the web. Take a look at the search with a +retina term: https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina Or in verbatim mode: https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1 His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually…

I don't think that Google accepts +term any longer. They switched several years ago to requiring "term" with quotes. Presumably this was because they wanted to make searches for Google+ names easier. For a while I think they gave a warning, but it seems like they've stopped doing that now. Edit: Wait, you work for Google, right? Am I the one that's lost? Did they switch back to supporting +term?

Actually, no, I think you're right. I left about 20 months ago, and they disabled support after I left.

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

#96

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #68

isleyaardvark wrote: post #45

I don't understand this article, particularly this footnote: >OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it! That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to…

I'm the original author of the blog post; if you'll allow me to clarify. I apologize for the misleading footnote - I believe it gives the impression that this isn't the correct search result when it is. "The" post that I wanted to be first place had the perfect summary in Google, discussed deluge on OS X, talked about the lack of retina for a few different apps, and explicitly mentioned a few without retina support b…

"Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates” is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a random time that I saw fit?"

Doesn't that basically describe dating? I found my wife because the pool of "perfect soulmates" for me was basically zero, so I figured I'd take a risk and expand my definition of "perfect", and then discovered that I liked what I found.

Back to the topic at hand - it's a bit strange that a page that gives you the wrong answer is the right page because it answered you. It'd be like if you asked "What city is the capital of Kansas?" and I answered "Kansas City" because it had both the words "Kansas" and "City" and both of them are Capitalized, even though the answer is actually Topeka. I'd think a better answer would be "I don't know, but here's a list of state capitals" even though it's missing the words "Kansas" and "City".

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

#97

Post by hexagonc » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:16 PM UTC

swe wrote: post #71

adevine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Search, or the quest for knowledge, is not going to be displaced or marginalized. If a small company builds true AI, Google is done.

Depends on how they arrive at it. If they create true AI with lots of spare capacity then maybe Google is threatened, but what seems more likely to me is that true AI is achieved in some hodgepodge system that wasn't well architected to scale. An example of this would be a true AI that came about as a result of embodiment in a robot. Yes, it is true AI but that doesn't mean it knows how to read, let alone read and understand billions of webpages. Even if it could read a page of general text at the level of an average adult, that doesn't mean it can read it quickly.

[EDIT] And as an addendum to this fun tangent, even if the AI was capable, in principle, of reading billions of webpages fast and well, we don't know the power requirements would be for this. This hypothetical small company may have stumbled upon the right algorithms and the right training data to produce a true AGI, but they may simply not have the hardware or the engineering know-how to scale it up across multiple processors. Or scaling it up may require too much (i.e., more than the company can afford) data bandwidth if the robot is controlled. Again, it depends on the details of how they arrived at the AGI.

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

#98

Post by solveforall » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:16 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…

To be fair, when I search I get a huge Knowledge Graph result on the right with a picture of the animal.

Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this.

What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings

Unfortunately, it's not there right now.

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

#99

Post by dheera » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #69

dheera wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search being a democracy is really just a crude way of creating a better ranking system than just looking at, say, keyword occurrence count. Humans are great at filtering out spammy and useless websites, and the democracy system picks up on that. As a next step, privacy issues aside, what if they "profiled" you by the types of things you search, and tried to guess what you need based on other people who "think like y…

I made this point below about inability to provide context. In the other thread link, I think I provided why,. although I am no machine learning specialist but I think because: Google can never necessarily know what you want and can never truly know you achieved your goal, so you could not train it properly. Not only would you need to discover what profession I am in, assuming you had fully updated linked profile, et…

> Google can never necessarily know what you want and can never truly know you achieved your goal, so you could not train it properly.

They do have some amount of confirmation. All of their search results are redirect links, so they're tracking which links you click on. Based on the timing of those clicks, they can tell if you clicked on a result, left that site a few seconds later, and then clicked on another result further down the page, which probably means the first result didn't give you what you want. It's not perfect but it's still potential training data.

If that site has Google Ads or a Google '+1' icon, they can get slightly more information about how you spend your time on that site. I don't know about the legality of this but it's technically feasible.

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

#100

Post by 05 » Thu, Feb 25, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #74

zeven7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you mean by that. From the article you linked: When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, li…

"Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped..." That is the definition of not working. The point of the quotes is to allow searching for literal strings. You have elucidated the entire problem . Unless, of course, you're just searching for movie star names, in which case the rubbery nature of the search results really doesn't matter. It appears that -negative searching does work, which is amazing -…

sure you can - just use "rsync ignore-existing" . Might be slightly inconvenient, but people who use command line switches should generally be able to figure this stuff out?