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Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

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

#61

Post by JohnStrangeII »

hedora wrote: post #59

Internet search has been solved for about 10 years. Evidence: Before it sold off to Bing, Yahoo search was quantifiably better than google for a few years (in blind tests where you rip off the branding). No one cared, because google was good enough. Having said that, I use duck duck go these days, and occasionally spot check using google. I think the google results have become unusable because they too aggressively m…

Couldn't you use quotation marks to search for phrases? I do that all the time. The search is not verbatim, Google certainly stems the content of quotation mark phrases, but I was under the impression that related concepts are not included.

I'm not claiming to be sure about that, it's a subjective impression, so if someone can explain better, I'd be very interested. Since I use Google for work (more often than Google scholar), I'd hate not to find what I'm looking for, but generally Google results seem to be much better than others. It's the main reason why I don't use DuckDuckGo, ixQuick, Yandex, Bing.

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

#62

Post by ma2rten »

nikanj wrote: post #46
sh4z wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you just tell the name of the store? I want to see for example what happens if I select verbatim mode.

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

#63

Post by soared »

Grue3 wrote: post #56

No, it's not solved. Google utterly fails at it. I'm a person with simple needs. I mostly search in English, sometimes in Russian (which is my native language) and sometimes in Japanese (which I'm learning). These languages use completely disjoint sets of characters so it should be obvious to Google what I'm trying to do (since I'm logged in and they know all about me). There's also a setting that allows me to pick l…

> utterly fails

> $74b revenue

> 80% market share

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

#64

Post by axaxs »

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…

Ah! This drives me insane and it's only started recently. I can enter as little as two words in format 'uncommonProperNoun commonNoun', and the entire first page will be results of 'missing uncommonProperNoun'. It's maddening. It's like searching for 'the moon' and getting results back containing 'the'. Does anyone know how/why this started? Is there a way to enforce a query?

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

#65

Post by hedora »

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #61
hedora wrote: post #59

Internet search has been solved for about 10 years. Evidence: Before it sold off to Bing, Yahoo search was quantifiably better than google for a few years (in blind tests where you rip off the branding). No one cared, because google was good enough. Having said that, I use duck duck go these days, and occasionally spot check using google. I think the google results have become unusable because they too aggressively m…

Couldn't you use quotation marks to search for phrases? I do that all the time. The search is not verbatim, Google certainly stems the content of quotation mark phrases, but I was under the impression that related concepts are not included. I'm not claiming to be sure about that, it's a subjective impression, so if someone can explain better, I'd be very interested. Since I use Google for work (more often than Google…

Aggressively “”’ing can help, but I think that also turns off useful stuff, like word stemming, when what I want it to do is not map to some other more popular term.

I’m sure people have been trained to use google effectively, but I switched years ago, and find it harder than the alternatives.

To be clear, this is all nitpicking. The last time this came up on HN the only query anyone found that actually showed practical differences between the two was the acronym FOSS.

Google rewrote to “free open source software”, with no quotes, giving poor quality results (eg bsd software).

Ddg gave the definition of foss, and relatively few results pointing at actual software, because that acronym was (is?) obscure.

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

#66

Post by andy_ppp »

I can give a list of things I'd like in a search engine:

1) Sticky topics - if I'm at work and I type Flow I am way more likely to mean Facebook's js library than I am Flow energy.

2) Different views on the information (Grid view/masonary that makes sense)

3) Ability to search within a set of search results

4) Ability to customise the algorithm with other programs I can write/plugins

5) Many more things for programmers and advanced "omni bar" style features that allow me to type shortcuts and autocomplete things.

6) More automation of programmer stuff - if I type a number and a unix timestamp it should show me a date etc. for possibly millions of things. Same for unicode char of a hammer, url decode, etc. etc.

7) Clean integration with your OS search that makes sense.

I'm aware Duck Duck Go does some of these things (relatively badly). I think I'll give it another go then and see if it's better.

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

#67

Post by arthev »

Given that google is the de facto standard ATM and often returns irrelevant results, I'd wager that search isn't solved.

"That does not by itself mean there's room for a new search engine, but lately when using Google search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen." http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

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

#70

Post by lbriner »

Searching is easy enough but scoring the value of what it finds is not! Is an answer on Stackoverflow valuable because the poster has 100K reputation? (no!) Was the information valid 10 years ago but completely irrelevant now? Is this programming blog post very specific to Drupal and not relevant to other PHP frameworks? Was it information taken from somewhere else? (I would rather send traffic to the original).

Another problem is how to search for something when you don't understand it enough to search for it or you can't think of distinct enough words or phrases to search for it.

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