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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

#191

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rmetzler wrote: post #183

I think a main issue is the vagueness of the query. I was searching for "what phone should i buy in 2020 site:reddit.com" and while a few results where from a year ago, most where from January 2020.

Google have moved on from allowing exact searches to me made, sometimes you have to think "if I didn't know what I actually wanted to see, and was trying to make a question-form query about it, what would I write" and that gets better results, IME, than something where you know the exact words you want (which even with "" might not be in the link).

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#192

Post by trangon »

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…

I somehow doubt that all of Google’s internal decisions are as simple as “well we’re an ads company, let’s just not worry about search quality.”

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#193

Post by rjpr »

endothrowho333 wrote: post #142
detaro wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's algorithm works for its intended purposes, which is to serve pages that will benefit the highest amount of people searching for a specific term. Does it? So for any product search, thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links are really among the best results? Or maybe they are the most profitable result, and thus the one most able to invest in optimizing for rankin…

Over the long-term, Google's algorithm will connect the average person to the page most likely to benefit them, more than it won't. There is no "best result." Any page falling under "thrown-together comparison sites without actual substance but lots of affiliate links" are temporal inefficiencies that get removed after each major update. Will more pop up? Yes, and they will take advantage of any ineffeciency or edge-…

>Will they stay there for more than a few months? No. They will be squashed out, and legitimate players will over time win out.

This isn't true at all in my experience. As a quick test I tried searching for "best cordless iron", on the first page there is an article from 2018 that leads to a very broken page with filler content and affiliate links. [1] There are a couple of other articles with basically the exact same content rewritten in various ways also on the first page.

A quick SERP history check confirms that this page has returned in the top 10 results for various keywords since late 2018.

>It's easy to speculate and make logical statements, but they don't hold much weight without first-hand experience and observation.

This statement is a bit ironic given that it took me 1 keyword and 5 seconds of digging to find this one example.

[1] https://www.theironingroom.com/best-cordless-iron-reviews-of...

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#194

Post by lowkeyokay »

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…

The ‘Google is an advertising company’ is said often on HN. I agree to some extent but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company? Google solves a real problem and this works well, for them, with an advertising based revenue model. Do they compromise their search to that end? Probably. Do newspapers? Hopefully not, but maybe. To me, that doesn’t make them advertising companies. Apologies if this is pedantic.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#195

Post by eitland »

ma2rten wrote: post #9
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?

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.

Quotes doesn't work reliably anymore, this is a big part of the problem. Googlers have been really busy the last 10 years doing everything except:

- fixing search (it has become more and more broken since 2009, possibly before. Today it wotks more or less like their competitors worked before, random mix of results containing some of my keywords.)

- fixing ads (Instagram should have way less data on me and yet manages to present me with ads that I sometimes click instead of ads that are so insulting I go right ahead and enable the ad blocker I had forgotten.)

- saving Reader

- etc

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#196

Post by undefined_user6 »

rwmj wrote: post #178
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).

That can't be right if, according to OP, the first result was a reddit post from six years ago, yet the date according to Google was Jan 11, 2020. So the first time Google saw that page would likely have been the day it was published.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#197

Post by ori_b »

lowkeyokay wrote: post #194
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…

The ‘Google is an advertising company’ is said often on HN. I agree to some extent but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company? Google solves a real problem and this works well, for them, with an advertising based revenue model. Do they compromise their search to that end? Probably. Do newspapers? Hopefully not, but maybe. To me, that doesn’t make them advertising companie…

> * but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company?*

Historically, at least, they sold subscriptions.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#198

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Tenoke wrote: post #24
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.

Does Reddit use semantics like [or a microformat like ...] to allow proper parsing? If not then they should share at least half, probably most, of the blame IMO.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#199

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sfblah wrote: post #123
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.

Google is a TRILLION dollar company. Indexing Reddit properly would take what? 2-3 engineers? Cmon.

Would take 2-3 engineers how long -- I can't really see it being more than a couple of week project. But, why would they? Seems they'd only do it if there's a ROI, is there?

If Google gives you what you want straight away then you leave; sure, you come back, but they want to be bad enough to keep you on there and good enough to be better than other searches. Their reach and resources cures the latter.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#200

Post by ori_b »

echelon wrote: post #47
yoz-y wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

> PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles...

What prevents spammers from signing articles? How do you implement this without driving authors to throw their hands in the air and give up?

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