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Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

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Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#41

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

sgift wrote: post #10

Not really, no. Some parts of search (Internet) have been cornered/solved by big players (e.g. Google), but many other parts (e.g. search in Intranets) are still an open problem. No one has found a solution that's as simple as PageRank for Intranets. No one has found a solution for the "the author of half of these documents is the intern who wrote the template"-problem and many other things. There are good products o…

So true, I can ask Google a range of verbal questions and get great answers, mostly what-is-the-fact questions.

At work we are nowhere near asking an intranet "show me the last pentesting report for Tony's new website" or "show me the change requests for the failed change this quarter". I know exactly what I want, and how to ask, bit I will not get the results I want.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#42

Post by halflings »

Radim wrote: post #23

"Search" is too broad to ever be solved. That's like "solving entropy". Google focused on a specific subset — you enter a few keywords or a phrase, and the machine returns the top ~10 links to pre-existing (indexed) web pages. But that's not all there is to search! Challenges: 1. Intranets: internal documents, typically in different modalities (FAQs, support cases, wikis, public pages) and across diverse storages tha…

Definitely valid point (that there are very different types of "search", not just one universal way to do things), but:

2) Google does not do simple keyword matching, and certainly has a strong sense of "semantics".

3) Try searching "Cheap hotels in San Francisco" or "Plumber jobs in Chicago" in Google. Just because it's a single search box does not mean all results are generated/displayed in the same way.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#43

Post by tephra »

Radim wrote: post #23

"Search" is too broad to ever be solved. That's like "solving entropy". Google focused on a specific subset — you enter a few keywords or a phrase, and the machine returns the top ~10 links to pre-existing (indexed) web pages. But that's not all there is to search! Challenges: 1. Intranets: internal documents, typically in different modalities (FAQs, support cases, wikis, public pages) and across diverse storages tha…

Another fun one that I encountered in an NLP class to many years ago now is multilingual search.

Search in one language, get results in multiple languages. The context in which this came up was in organisations such as the EU or the Nordic Council.

Another one that I would like to see improved is better search for scientific articles.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#44

Post by bitL »

majewsky wrote: post #38
nikanj wrote: post #29

If anything, it's an abandoned problem. A lot of companies bought really expensive enterprise search systems, which are sitting dormant because the results are so bad. With advances in spamming, internet/email search is getting to be a harder problem every year. I remember when Google was quite effective in finding what I need, but nowadays it's dismal. As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got…

> As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got page after page of results. All of them were tagged "missing storename", so just randomly picked return policies from other stores. I think it helps to put the critical search term in quotes. At least in DuckDuckGo, `"storename" return policy` would exclude results that are missing "storename".

DDG seems to have recently switched to the same atrocious imprecise search as Google is running for a few years already...

I don't want to fight with the search engine: "you meant this!" -- "nno, find me that" -- "you surely meant this so here it is!" ...

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#46

Post by nikanj »

sh4z wrote: post #40
nikanj wrote: post #29

If anything, it's an abandoned problem. A lot of companies bought really expensive enterprise search systems, which are sitting dormant because the results are so bad. With advances in spamming, internet/email search is getting to be a harder problem every year. I remember when Google was quite effective in finding what I need, but nowadays it's dismal. As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got…

So would you have rather got results with only 'storename' and not 'return policy', or no results at all, or what's the problem here? If there was a result containing the whole search string it would (I believe) have been the first one.

This being relatively large chain store, I'm quite certain there should be forum posts or reddit discussions about their return policy. I have no way of proving they exist, seeing as how Google is shit at finding stuff.

"So what's the problem here"? The problem is, the search engine threw away one third of my query terms, and then gave me all chaff. Apparently I should've thrown in some random punctuation to convince it to actually use all of them.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#48

Post by pm215 »

sh4z wrote: post #40
nikanj wrote: post #29

If anything, it's an abandoned problem. A lot of companies bought really expensive enterprise search systems, which are sitting dormant because the results are so bad. With advances in spamming, internet/email search is getting to be a harder problem every year. I remember when Google was quite effective in finding what I need, but nowadays it's dismal. As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got…

So would you have rather got results with only 'storename' and not 'return policy', or no results at all, or what's the problem here? If there was a result containing the whole search string it would (I believe) have been the first one.

If you don't have any results for the query, then return a page saying so. Otherwise you're annoying the user by making them scan through a page of irrelevant text to confirm that it really is all irrelevant. When this happens to me my reaction is "don't just ignore what I said to you", which is as infuriating when a computer does it as when a human does.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#49

Post by valesco »

slyfocks wrote: post #36
nikanj wrote: post #29

If anything, it's an abandoned problem. A lot of companies bought really expensive enterprise search systems, which are sitting dormant because the results are so bad. With advances in spamming, internet/email search is getting to be a harder problem every year. I remember when Google was quite effective in finding what I need, but nowadays it's dismal. As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got…

Lately, it has felt like Google has become more optimized for less intelligent/tech-savvy users (i.e. people who search using natural language e.g. “tell me the store policy for target please”). In these cases many of the words used are either irrelevant or counterproductive. I’ve noticed Facebook’s search has started catering to the lowest common denominator as well. Searching for (made-up example) “Louis Potter” us…

There are many cases where you don't know you misspelled the name.

Re: Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

#50

Post by gumby »

Search is very much not "solved" as other have pointed out. I'll add that when google started search was considered pretty much "solved", and Yahoo turned down the option of buying google as they considered their search good enough.
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