How is search so bad? A case study • Hacker News Board

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#341

Post by mattmcknight » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #218

mattmcknight wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. The site query worked. The issue is that there is no clear way to determine information date, as pages themselves change. Since more recent results are favored, SEO strategy of freshness throws off date queries. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history...

Wrong. In the article he elaborates. > As you can see, I didn’t even bother clicking on all of them now, but I can tell you the first result is deeply irrelevant and the second one leads to a 4 year old thread. He also wrote > At this point I visibly checked on reddit if there’ve been posts about buying a phone from the last month and there are. Duckduckgo even recognized the date to be 4 years old and reddit doesn't…

You said this wrong thing: He specified a search for "site:reddit.com" and claimed it was irrelevant. THAT IS NOT A RELEVANCY TERM. It correctly scopes searches to the specified site.

The entirety of the problem is the date query is not working, because of SEO for freshness. You also said this other wrong thing: "That's not actually the problem described here" . That is the problem here. The page shows up as being updated because of SEO.

The date in a search engine is the date the page was last judged to be updated, not one of the many dates that may be present on the page. When was the last reddit design update? Do you think that didn't cause the pages to change? Wake up.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#342

Post by Retric » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

creato wrote: post #222

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…

> I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. > It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better. It's hard for me to take this seriously when wikipedia exists, and almost always ranks very highly in search results for searches for "knowledge topics". Between wikipedia and sources cited on wikipedia, I find the depth of a…

Wikipedia is surface level knowledge. Using wikipedia what is AM4 socket’s pinout? Do a google search and you find several people asking the question but no answers. On the other hand you can easily find that for an old 8086 cpu.

What’s sad is Google has generally indexed the pages I want, it’s just getting harder to actually find them.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#343

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #331

dredmorbius wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The results could be audited.

Fail an audit, lose your reputation (ranking).

The basic principle of auditing is to randomly sample results. BlackHat SEO tends to rely on volume in ways that would be very difficult to hide from even modest sampling sizes.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#344

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:10 AM UTC

thrwaway69 wrote: post #319

dredmorbius wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the early days of banner ads, a CSS-based approach to blocking was to target images by size. Since advertising revolved around specific standards of advertising "units" (effectively: sizes of images), those could be identified and blocked. That worked well, for a time. This is ultimately whack-a-mole. For the past decade or so, point-of-origin based blockers have worked effectively, because that's how adverti…

Some of those techniques will make the whole experience slow compared to the current network request filters and dns blockers. And that will probably be blocked or severely locked down by your most popular browser, chrome. I don't need to give advertisers data myself when someone else I know can. I really doubt it is easy to throw off chrome monopoly at this stage. I presume we will see a chilling effect before anyth…

At this point, I'll take slow over shitshow.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#345

Post by cf512 » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

As a point of clarification, "Past Month" is not the same thing as "Last Month" or "Previous Month". "Past Month" in this context actually means the past 30 days from today. It's a really subtle and confusing nuance in English. In any case, Google Search having results from 5 days ago is accurate when filtering for Past Month. Google (being a global resource) really should reword "Past Month" to "Past 30 Days" to eliminate any confusion.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#346

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #88

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…

> However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. If only there were some kind of analog for effective ways to locate information. Like if everything were written on paper, bound into collections, and then tossed into a large holding room. I guess it's past the Internet's event horizon now, but crawler-primary searching wasn't the only evolutionary path to sear…

https://curlie.org/ exists.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#347

Post by JDiculous » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:21 AM UTC

Google search is absymal at generic questions like the one the author mentioned about the best phones, or others like "Redux vs. Mobx" or "styled-components vs emotion". I end up just searching Reddit (or sometimes stackoverflow) not because Reddit is particularly good for technical discussions, but because Google's default search literally just returns blogspam from dev agencies.

Why hasn't a superior competitor emerged yet?

I get that the web is super broad and indexing the entire thing is an enormous task. But perhaps there's room for more niche search engines (eg. focused on tech) to stab away at this Google search monopoly.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#348

Post by radicalriddler » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

cf512 wrote: post #345

As a point of clarification, "Past Month" is not the same thing as "Last Month" or "Previous Month". "Past Month" in this context actually means the past 30 days from today. It's a really subtle and confusing nuance in English. In any case, Google Search having results from 5 days ago is accurate when filtering for Past Month. Google (being a global resource) really should reword "Past Month" to "Past 30 Days" to eli…

But still, none of the reddit posts he referenced are from the past month. They say things like Jan 11, 2020; which would be correct, but the actual post on Reddit is 6 years ago.

Whether this is Google or Reddit causing this is another issue.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#349

Post by asdff » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

creato wrote: post #222

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…

> I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. > It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better. It's hard for me to take this seriously when wikipedia exists, and almost always ranks very highly in search results for searches for "knowledge topics". Between wikipedia and sources cited on wikipedia, I find the depth of a…

There is a lot of stuff you won't find on wikipedia that is now buried, one example being old forum threads containing sage wisdom from fellow enthusiasts on any given topic. You search for an interest and a half dozen relevant forums used to come up on page 1.

These days I rarely see a forum result appear unless I know the specific name of the forum to begin with and utilize the search by site domain operator.

Another problem these days, unrelated to search but dooming it in the process, is all these companies naming themselves or their products after irrelevant existing english words, rather than making up something unique. It's usually fine with major companies, but I think a lot of smaller companies/products shoot themselves in the foot with this and don't realize it. I was once looking for some good discussion and comparison on a bibliography tool called Papers, and that was just a pit of suffering getting anything relevant at all with a name like that.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#350

Post by TecoAndJix » Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #342

creato wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. > It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better. It's hard for me to take this seriously when wikipedia exists, and almost always ranks very highly in search results for searches for "knowledge topics". Between wikipedia and sources cited on wikipedia, I find the depth of a…

Wikipedia is surface level knowledge. Using wikipedia what is AM4 socket’s pinout? Do a google search and you find several people asking the question but no answers. On the other hand you can easily find that for an old 8086 cpu. What’s sad is Google has generally indexed the pages I want, it’s just getting harder to actually find them.

Did you ever find the pin out manual for AM4? Your comment sent me down a google hole...

Clearly, they don’t want it available because their tech docs they host stop at AM3b. I was hoping an X470 (or other flavor) motherboard manufacturer would have something floating around...