How is search so bad? A case study
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How is search so bad? A case study
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Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#2Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#3Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need.
Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore.
Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#4Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.
A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#5Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#6Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
If they were ripe for disruption and it was easy to do this disrupting just be returning better search results, and returning better search results was an easily doable thing then I suppose all the other functioning businesses that have a stake in web search would already be doing that disrupting.
Search disrupted catalogs. What will disrupt search?
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#7Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
My guess is that suppressing spammy pages got too hard. So they applied some kind of big hammer that has a high false positive rate. You're getting the best of what's left.
Maybe also some quality decline in their gradual shift to less hand weighted attributes and more ML.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#8Don't get me started on Outlook search. For a company that runs a global search engine, the most prominent mail client in the world is absolutely shit for searching.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#9Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
Did you try putting them in quotes?
EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#10Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.
A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.
To be fair, Google has always been trash at searching for recentness. I don't remember a time when searching "recommended X (current year)" didn't return old out-of-date info. I think Google has had a habit of returning 3-year-old pages since its inception.