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Ask HN: Is 'search' a solved problem?

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

#91

Post by thanatropism »

PaulHoule wrote: post #76

There are big opportunities precisely because the field seems dead. (1) The first big story is the dominance of Google. With an advertising-centered model, Google has a reason to degrade result quality. If you get trained to scroll down to find the real results and you found them good, you might avoid touching any of the ads (hard to do because they cover so much of the screen.) (2) The web is 95% Javascript and 95%…

Re: desktop search. What. I see "lay users" in meetings with projectors/TVs using the search function in the windows menu to find documents all the time! My org is named something like XQWK, so the files they want to show have the letters XQWK. It's pretty natural to them.

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

#92

Post by telchar »

asperous wrote: post #71
arthev wrote: post #67

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 i…

I would suppose that this change is less google changing and more the web changing as people pump out content marketing and SEO. Also might be "olden days were greener", I sure remember a lot of keyword stuffing back in the day.

You're probably right about that. Although I can point to one very specific way the olden days were better: a Google search used to turn up lots of forum posts, which are often the most useful results on a given topic. These days I almost never see forum posts of any kind turned up a search results (except stack overflow, thankfully). I'm not sure what caused the change but I find useful information is much more likely to be buried by low-information wikihow-type results and corporate landing pages.

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

soared wrote: post #63
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

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by a008t »

telchar wrote: post #92
asperous wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suppose that this change is less google changing and more the web changing as people pump out content marketing and SEO. Also might be "olden days were greener", I sure remember a lot of keyword stuffing back in the day.

You're probably right about that. Although I can point to one very specific way the olden days were better: a Google search used to turn up lots of forum posts, which are often the most useful results on a given topic. These days I almost never see forum posts of any kind turned up a search results (except stack overflow, thankfully). I'm not sure what caused the change but I find useful information is much more like…

Possibly because most forums seem to have died? Or maybe they died because they got excluded from search results?

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

#96

Post by jonbarker »

pm215 wrote: post #48
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.

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.

Google returns results specifically showing which terms were missing if this were the case for me. This is useful for finding articles with intersections of concepts (assuming I got the terminology/jargon right) and knowing when those probably don't exist, so I like the feature.

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

#97

Post by andrewmcwatters »

soared wrote: post #63
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

Social networking's industry is also a great success, look at Facebook.

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

#98

Post by fifnir »

I think search is not only not solved, but a failed concept overall.

It's too hard to find relevant information from the gazillions of pages based only on a few words.

I think search needs to be replaced by some kind of indexing/ontology/knowledge organization system, and then maybe only be applied in the "last mile" of a person's 'search' for relevant information

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

#100

Post by ivm »

slantyyz wrote: post #86
arthev wrote: post #67

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 i…

>> Given that google is the de facto standard ATM and often returns irrelevant results, I'd wager that search isn't solved. Search has become a cat and mouse game where every time search is "solved" with an improved algorithm, it is "unsolved" quickly by people looking to game the algorithms.

Also, large publishers can start a new site in any niche and quickly outrank competitors by linking from their old domains with high authority. Quality of content doesn't matter, it's all about "who you know" on the Internet.
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