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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

#331

Post by TylerE »

dredmorbius wrote: post #320
reaperducer wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Create a core protocol at the same level as DNS etc., that web servers can use to offer an index of everything they serve/relay Isn't that pretty much a site map? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps

A sitemap simply tells you what pages exist, not what's on those pages. Systems such as lunr.js are closer in spirit to a site-oriented search index, though that's not how they're presently positioned, but instead offer JS-based, client-implemented site search for otherwise static websites. https://lunrjs.com

How would this help anything? It would make the blackhat SEO even easier, if anything.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#332

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

reaperducer wrote: post #154
zozbot234 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Common Crawl is a thing already. Unfortunately, a "full" text crawl of the internets is a YUUUGE amount of data to manage, and I can't think of anything that could change that in the foreseeable future. That's why I think providing a federated Web directory standard, ala ODP/DMOZ except not limited to a single source, would be a far more impactful development.

Unfortunately, a "full" text crawl of the internets is a YUUUGE amount of data to manage Maybe instead of a problem, there is an opportunity here. Back before Google ate the intarwebs, there used to be niche search engines. Perhaps that is an idea whose time has come again. For example, if I want information from a government source, I use a search engine that specializes in crawling only government web sites. If I w…

I´d be happy with something like Searx [1,2,3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx [2] https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ [3] https://stats.searx.xyz/

featuring the semantic map of [4] https://swisscows.ch/

incorporating [5] https://curlie.org/ and Wikipedia and something like Yelp/YellowPages embedded in Open Streetmaps for businesses and points of interest, with a no frills interface showing the history (via timeslide?) of edits.

Bang! Done!

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#333

Post by Thorrez »

ori_b wrote: post #197
lowkeyokay wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to this, the newspaper subscription only covered about 18%. The rest was from advertising.

https://idiallo.com/blog/we-never-paid-for-journalism

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#334

Post by anonu »

We need a taxonomy. In the old days finding links was done by going to a directory: dmoz or Yahoo.

I'm not saying we regress back to the past... I'm sure there is some hidden underlying directory structure in web search today. What I'm suggesting is making it more accessible to users as a way of navigating the web for good content.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#335

Post by [deleted] »

avionicsguy wrote: post #102

This should probably be a separate submission but why is search so bad everywhere? - Confluence: Native search is horrible IME - Microsoft Help (Applications): .chm files Need I say more. - Microsoft Task Bar: Native search okay and then horrible beyond a few key words and then ... BING :-( - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SS…

[deleted]

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#336

Post by keanzu »

dylan604 wrote: post #283
trangon wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

Why do you doubt this? As a company in total, I believe that all decisions are made on "will this sell more ads". At the same time, I believe that some of the ideas from the software devs are born from doing something cool. It then gets rolled into "how can we use this new thing to sell more ads"?

Because search quality drives ads.

There were search engines around but when Google came out with superior search results everyone switched and those search engines quickly vanished. There are search engines in direct competition with Google today. If Google does not provide the best service there's an extremely low switching cost. Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo et al would be happy to take your traffic.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#337

Post by inetknght »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #303
blattimwind wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pasting stack traces and error messages. I cannot fathom the number of times I've pasted an error message enclosed by quotes and got garbage results, and then an hour of troubleshooting and searching later I come across a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim . The garbage results are generally completely unrelated stuff (a lot of Windows for…

> a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim. Did you put the error message in quotes? I've never had this problem.

I, too, have pasted error messages verbatim into Google queries only to have garbage returned. I did include the error message in quotes. I started filtering sites from the results eg `-site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com` etc to start to get a hint of other developers with similar issues and/or some bug reports and/or documentation and/or source code.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#338

Post by naravara »

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…

Someone in a previous thread that I, unfortunately can’t remember, suggested that it might not just be the SEO but the internet that changed. Google used to be really good at ascertaining meaning from a panoply of random sources, but those sites are all gone now. The Wild West of random blogs and independent websites are basically dead in favor of content farms and larger scale media companies.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#339

Post by dragonwriter »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #323
dragonwriter wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why the assumption of left or right, when at least in the US most people identify as independents? Most people don’t identify as independents, and, anyhow, studies of voting behavior show that most independents have a clear party leaning between the two major parties and are just as consistently attached to the party they lean toward as people who identify with the party. So not only is it the case that most people…

On the contrary, according to relatively recent Pew numbers from 2018 [1], around ~38% of American's identify as independents, with ~%31 democrat and ~%26 republican. To be fair many of them lean towards one party or another (your last point acknowledged), but independents are much more important in politics than they are usually given credit for. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/15/facts-about...

> On the contrary, according to relatively recent Pew numbers from 2018 [1], around ~38% of American's identify as independents, with ~%31 democrat and ~%26 republican.

That's not “on the contrary”; 38% Heck, even 43% (the number that don't identify as either Republicans or Democrats) is less than 50%; most Americans specifically identify as either Democrats or Republicans.

> but independents are much more important in politics than they are usually given credit for.

On the contrary, independents are given outsize importance by the major media, because they are treated as just as large of a group as they actually are, but are treated as if their voting behavior was much more different from that of self-identified partisans than it actually is.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#340

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #313
zozbot234 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblockers have to solve that problem already. And it's actually really easy because "ads" aren't just ads unfortunately, they're also third-party code that's trying to track you as you browse the site. So it's reasonably easy to spot them and filter them out.

Though, advertisers are already using first party redirection. Future of adblockers is bleak. https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780/

That is fixed since 1.24.3b7 / https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases ?
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