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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

#21

Post by wickedOne »

Tenoke wrote: post #4
anuraj wrote: post #2

Try 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.

searching for

  best cell phone to buy site:reddit.com
and setting it to results from last month works fine...

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#22

Post by bobosha »

I think web information access needs a new paradigm, that needs to make "search" itself irrelevant. Much like search replaced the taxonomy-based browsing (Yahoo/"Portals" of the 90s).

I don't know what that is, but there needs to be paradigmatic change.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#23

Post by echelon »

MrEldritch wrote: post #5
arielweisberg wrote: post #3

Google 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.

Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ``, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely computer friendly for ingestion and remixing. It not only turned search into a problem we could all solve, but gave us rails to start linking disparate content into a graph of meaningful relationships.

But instead Google wanted to make things less strict, less semantic, harder to search, and easier to author whatever the hell you wanted. I'm sure it has nothing to do with making it difficult for other entrants to find their way into search space or take away ad-viewing eyeballs. It was all about making HTML easy and forgiving.

It's a good thing they like other machine-friendly semantic formats like RSS and Atom...

"Human friendly authorship" was on the other end of the axis from "easy for machines to consume". I can't believe we trusted the search monopoly to choose the winner of that race.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#24

Post by Tenoke »

ma2rten wrote: post #11

This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

Yes, admittedly I do expect a search engine to be able to parse one of the biggest websites in the world, just how it used to for roughly a decade.

Obviously, it doesn't need to consider the upvotes directly but maybe the text inside the page. Or the date.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#25

Post by tyingq »

masonhensley wrote: post #16
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs? Not joking I have a feeling subject specific topics will be further distributed based on expertise & trust.

Return of the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ? Heh.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#26

Post by kqr »

nothis wrote: post #13

I'm a bit cynical with this but I believe a lot of the "super smart" AI tech they no doubt run over all their search these days isn't actually that super smart. If we actually handled metadata properly "last month" would be a trivial, "dumb" thing to search for but apparently that's broken. Why?

You might be surprised at how many ways "last month" is encoded just in a single data set. One of the biggest problems with search -- just about any kind of search-- is the low quality of markup/metadata. If only data was structured properly, we would barely need search in the first place!

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#27

Post by ses1984 »

The worst thing for me is that I have become accustomed to search working a certain way. If I put a word in the query, it had better fracking be in the results. That's why I put it in the fracking query.

I guess whatever sauce Google applies to the query maybe works better according to some metrics for some users, but it is a source of endless frustration for me.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#28

Post by thrwaway69 »

ma2rten wrote: post #11

This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

Given how relevant forums and discussion spaces are. One would think there would be some standardized structure for it so you can search for comments or posts with criteria all over the internet.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#30

Post by Tenoke »

wickedOne wrote: post #21
Tenoke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

searching for best cell phone to buy site:reddit.com and setting it to results from last month works fine...

Did you click on the results? I just checked that exact query and it's mostly the same links - the first one is the one from 6 years ago, as with my original search.
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