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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

#41

Post by yusef555 »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #12
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.

everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.

But does anyone know why search on Reddit is broken? Perhaps intentionally? I don't want to get tin foil hatty but perhaps more not readily apparent false positives = more user clicks = more revenue via ad serving?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#42

Post by wongarsu »

pbourke wrote: post #34
echelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.

If WordPress outputs semantic output that instantly gives you a lot more than 0.0001%. The rest would follow as soon as it improves discoverability of their content

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#43

Post by wongarsu »

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.

That's exactly what github's Awesome lists are: Decentralized, democratized handcrafted subject-specific catalogs

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#44

Post by basscomm »

tyingq wrote: post #7
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?

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.

My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary, including: searching for synonyms for words I searched for instead of the specific words I chose, excluding words to increase the number of results (even though the words they exclude are usually the most important to the query), trying to figure out what it thinks I asked for instead of what I actually asked for.

I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#46

Post by vanderZwan »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #35
rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

Goodhart‘s Law in action. I wonder how we make a new measure that buys us more time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

The backtick in your link broke it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

(Were you on mobile and using a smart keyboard?)

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#47

Post by echelon »

yoz-y wrote: post #36
echelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work for Google but not on search. I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. There are currently multiple competing microdata formats out there than enable you to specify any kind of metadata but they still won't help if spammers fill those too. Maybe some sort of webring of trust where trusted people can endorse other sites and the chain breaks if somebody is fou…

> I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam.

That's not so hard. It's one of the first problems Google solved.

PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... I'd much rather tackle this problem in isolation than the search problem we have now.

The trust graph is different from the core problem of extracting meaning from documents. Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure, which is a hard problem we're currently trying to use ML and NLP to solve.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#48

Post by wongarsu »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #12
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.

everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.

I prefer https://redditsearch.io/ but Google works too

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#50

Post by antonvs »

yusef555 wrote: post #41
aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.

But does anyone know why search on Reddit is broken? Perhaps intentionally? I don't want to get tin foil hatty but perhaps more not readily apparent false positives = more user clicks = more revenue via ad serving?

Because search is difficult to get right. So most sites just implement a basic feature and then assume users will use Google.
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