What kind of cluster do I need to just grep the web?
How is search so bad? A case study
361–370 of 416 posts
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#362It's worse than the author described. Google won't even sort by date correctly. I ran into this problem years ago and it still exists. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+buy+a+phone&hl=en&t...
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
Simpler idea: Paid search engine that ranks sites based on how often the users click results from that site (and didn't bounce, of course). The fact that it's paid prevents sybil attacks (or, at least, turns a sybil attack into a roundabout way of buying ads). Of course, at this point, you are now the product even though you paid. But it's a tactic that worked for WoW for ages.
Google already includes clicks and bounces in its ranking factors.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#364This 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…
Or MacOS Spotlight. Good lord. Most common occurrence: searching for Telegram, an app I have open 24/7 and interact with dozens of times a day. CMD+Space "T": LaTeXIT.app (an app I have used fewer than a dozen times in two years) "E": LaTeXIT.app "L": Telegram.app "E": Electrum.app (how on earth??) "G": telemetry.app (an app which cannot even be run) "RAM" : Telegram Similar experience searching for most apps, files,…
Yeah I never understood that, why don't they order it by usage frequency? They have those metrics as they introduced Screen Time
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#365This 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…
With Google you can use their search operators to find some relevant content and I wish more search engine would support the minus (-) to ignore content with certain keywords.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will you take my word for it? They not only disregard quotes but also their own verbatim setting.
Asking for a reference helps: - Establish the behaviour as documented. - In representing and demonstrating this to others. It's not that I doubt your word, but that I'd like to see a developed and credible case made. Because frankly that behaviour drives me to utter frustration and distraction. It's also a large part of the reason I no longer use, nor trust, Google Web Search as my principle online search tool.
I see. I'll try to make a habit out of collecting those again.
That said, I might have something on an old blog somewhere. I'll see if I can find it before work starts...
Edit: found it here http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-... . It is from 2013 and had probably been going on for a while already at that point.
Edit2: For those who are still relying on Google, here's a nice hack I discovered that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else:
Sometimes you might feel that your search experience is even worse than usual. In those cases, try reporting anything in tje search results and then retry tje same search 30 minutes later.
Chances are it will now magically work.
It took quite a while for me to realize this and I think in the beginning I might not have realized how fast it worked.
It seemed totally unrealistic however that a fkx would have been created and a new version deployed in such a short time so my best explanation is they are A/B-testing some really dumb changes and then pulling out whoever complains from the test group.
Thinking about it this might also be a crazy explanation for why search is so bad today compared to ten years ago:
There's no feedback whatsoever so most sane users probably give up talking to the wall after one or two attempts. This leaves them with the impression that everyone is happy, so they just continue on the path back to becoming the search engines they replaced.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> -site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com`
A mock-google that excludes quora and optionally targets stackoverflow/github sounds useful.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#368Earlier 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.
So the old Yahoo web index, basically.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#369I 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…
In the specific case of date based searches they are pretty difficult because of how pages are ranked. For a long time (and still to a large extent) Google ranks 'newer' pages higher than 'relevant' pages. At Blekko[1] there was a lot of code that tried to figure out that actual date of the document (be it a forum post, news article, or blog post). That date would often be months or years earlier than the 'last change' information would have you think.
Sometimes its pretty innocuous, a CMS system updates every page with an updated copyright notice at the start of each year. Other times its less innocuous where the page simply updates the "related links" or side bar material and refreshes the content.
It is still an unsolved ranking relevance problem where a student written, 3 month old description of how AM modulation works ranks higher than a 12 year old, professor written description. There isn't a ranking signal for 'author authority'. I believe it is possible to build such a system but doing so doesn't align well with the advertising goals of a search engine these days.
[1] disclaimer I worked at Blekko.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does for me. USA. [0] https://i.imgur.com/S2rPywz.png Also, is this guy a Q follower or something? The favicon is a Q.
> Also, is this guy a Q follower or something? The favicon is a Q. Actually the favicon is a headshot. https://www.zachvorhies.com/favicon.ico And that's also the icon in the page source: I wonder why Google shows a Q.
> I wonder why Google shows a Q
A placeholder used if the algorithm thinks the favicon is not appropriate for some reason.