Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How is search so bad? A case study

svilentodorov.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 416 posts

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#171

Post by lqet »

Well, how do you actually determine the age of a web page? Is it the post date? How do you even find that out? Is it the last comment post date? Is it the last edit of the main post, or the last edit of a comment? How do you find this out automatically? Is it the last change the HTTP server responds with? Is it the last time the entire page has been modified? If the page is built up of multiple components like iframes, do their post dates matter? Do ads matter? If the page is dynamic, everything gets a few orders of magnitude more complicated.

Point is, it is not a trivial task at all to automatically find out the time that corresponds to the intuitive understanding of the "age" of a web page.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#172

Post by l0b0 »

lettergram wrote: post #158

I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads. Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. T…

Is it time for paid search engines? Make users vote with their wallets and pay for the eternal arms race. Problem is, whoever is behind something like that would have to start with an already sufficiently superior experience (or massive geek cred) to make people pay from the early days. Maybe going back to manually curated results of a subset of topics would work? Or some Stack Overflow-esque model of user powered metadata generation?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#173

Post by Kiro »

reaperducer wrote: post #163
soheil wrote: post #145

> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo. For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.

For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing. Every time the topic of search comes up on HN, someone always jumps in and says this. Then there are a bunch of other people who jump in and say that Duck is much more than that. So, which is correct?

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Interpret it as you wish. To me it sounds like they are using 400 sources and their own crawler for the Instant Answers stuff but get all their "traditional links in the search result" from Verizon(?) and Bing.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#174

Post by zozbot234 »

reaperducer wrote: post #157
aaron-santos wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merging js deps into one big resource isn't difficult. The number of ads point is interesting though. How would one determine what is an ad and what is an image? I have my ideas, but optimizing on this boundary sounds like it would lead to weird outcomes.

In the early days of DMOZ, some editors would rank sites lower based on the number of ads they had.

I don't think DMOZ had ranking per se? They could mark "preferred" sites for any given category, but only a handful of them at most, and with very high standards, i.e. it needed to be the official site or "THE" definitive resource about X.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#175

Post by majewsky »

echelon wrote: post #38
pbourke wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. You don't think we'd have rich tooling to support it and make it easy to author? Once people are using it with success, others will follow.

The breakthrough would be when Google were to rank pages with proper semantic markup higher. Just look at AMP.

(Of course that won't ever happen, but that's what would be needed.)

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#176

Post by drivebycomment »

zozbot234 wrote: post #93
allovernow wrote: post #40

I've been screaming about this for years and only recently have people begun agreeing with me - and I know exactly what the major problems are, and they are synergistic: 1. SEO has totally warped result rankings. Now instead of getting results which naturally match my keywords because of content, I'm presented with almost exclusively commercial websites which are trying to sell me something. Gone are the days where y…

Well, '"roof repair"' was never a good search for obvious reasons. But you'd expect a search like '"how to" repair roof' to mostly filter out sites providing roof-repair services - and if a search engine doesn't do that properly (because it ignores the "how to" part as irrelevant even though it's in quotes!) that's just broken.

I tried "how to repair roof" and the first organic result is the featured snippet of how to fix shingles, with bunch of youtube videos on various roof repair methods next, with DIY repair sites. So I don't see anything broken there ?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#178

Post by rwmj »

lqet wrote: post #171

Well, how do you actually determine the age of a web page? Is it the post date? How do you even find that out? Is it the last comment post date? Is it the last edit of the main post, or the last edit of a comment? How do you find this out automatically? Is it the last change the HTTP server responds with? Is it the last time the entire page has been modified? If the page is built up of multiple components like iframe…

It's the first time Google saw the page. Reddit posts have unique URLs and Google scans popular sites very regularly (in fact is rumoured to have site-specific optimizations).

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#179

Post by [deleted] »

lettergram wrote: post #158

I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads. Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. T…

[deleted]

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#180

Post by majewsky »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #95
OJFord wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 'standards' (and an XKCD comic) for that. See schema.org for example. Google does use it, last time I used it there was even tooling for it in the 'check how my site is to crawl' console, whatever it's called.

https://schema.org/upvoteCount Yet I haven't seen even one instance of this anywhere. :(

BRB, need to put `upvoteCount="10000000"` on all my blog articles. :)
Post reply on HN