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

371–380 of 416 posts

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#371

Post by arminiusreturns »

dragonwriter wrote: post #339
arminiusreturns wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You got me in a technically correct way, which is as they say, the best kind of correct. I think the keyword "majority" being defined as more than %50 being the crux, so I should have worded my statement better with a "most", "plurality" or "relative majority" instead.

> most Americans specifically identify as either Democrats or Republicans

Now you just did the same thing I did but in reverse! See my comments about more specific words for plurality such as "most".

> independents are given outsize importance by the major media

I don't think independents are given much importance at all by the major media, but I have increasingly disconnected from that circus too so I might not be a good judge of it.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#372

Post by erikbye »

edoceo wrote: post #236
erikbye wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews. Can you give some examples of queries/topics? Not that I disagree, I often have the same problem, but have found ways to mitigate.

Can you elaborate some of these ways? I just have a big minus list of sites.

I would need to hear examples, queries or topics that results in solely superficial information, like OP stated.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#373

Post by monort »

asdff wrote: post #349
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…

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. Anoth…

Add inurl:forum to the query. Google used to have a filter "discussions", but they removed it for some reason. Nowadays I usually start with https://hn.algolia.com/ and site:reddit.com when I want to find a discussion.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#374

Post by true_religion »

wozniacki wrote: post #310
true_religion wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the assumption of left or right, when at least in the US most people identify as independents? And to be even more fair, you aren’t talking about “people” here but the OP who can clearly state their own personal preferences, without the need for you to construct a theory of hidden bias.

Why the assumption of left or right, when at least in the US most people identify as independents? Do you wish to cite a source for this or do you wish to gaslight here? Voters declaring themselves as independent of a major political party rose nationally by 6 percentage points to 28 percent of the U.S. electorate between 2000 and last year’s congressional midterm contest in states with party registration, analyst Rh…

The pew polling numbers posted higher in the thread are a fine source.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/15/facts-about...

The gist of it is that for any given party, more people are not members of it (e.g. 70%+ of Americans are not Democrats) so you are not safe in guessing someone political affiliations. Stats wise, you will likely be wrong.

Secondarily, saying that someone who leans to a party is basically in that party is wrong.

For example, I am an independent. I lean republican on the local level, but in the Federal elections I lean Democrat. If you polled me, I would say I lean republican since that’s usually what’s on my mind

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#376

Post by rmetzler »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #191
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).

No, I didn't use quotes (exact match) in my query. This was only to express delimiters. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#377

Post by rmetzler »

Tenoke wrote: post #220
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.

Adding 2020 might kind of work in January. It wouldn't help as much for getting this month's results in November.

I tried it and I think you're not right. The reason why this works most of the time (at least on reddit) because there are lot's of threads which put the date in the title.

Query was:

what phone should i buy nov 2019 site:reddit.com

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#378

Post by stevenicr »

kccqzy wrote: post #221
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…

Not to totally detract from your point, but my previous experience with SEO people showed that some SEO strategies actually not only improve page ranking, but also actual usability. The first, and the most important perhaps was page load speed. We adopted a slightly more complicated pipeline on the server side, reduced the amount of JS required by the page, and made page loading faster. That improved both the ranking…

I have noticed most HN comments with SEO in them take it as being bad bad bad and the reason for the death of good search, the need for powerful whatever..

I really wish everyone would qualify, and not just black-hat seo / whitehat - there are many types of SEO, often with different intentions.

I understand there has been a lot of google koolaid (and others) about how seo is evil it's poisoning the web, etc...

But now, or has it been a couple years how? google had a video come out saying an SEO firm is okay if they tell you it takes 6 months... they have upgraded their pagespeed tool which helps with seo, and were quite public about how they wanted ssl/https on everything and that that would help with google seo..

so there are different levels of SEO, someone mentioned an seo plugin I was using on a site as being a negative indicator, and I chuckled - the only thing that plugin does is try to fix some of the inherent obvious screwups of wordpress out of the box... things like no meta description which google flags on webmaster tools as multiple same meta descriptions.. also tries to alleviate duplicate content penalties by no-indexing archives or and categories or whatever.

So there is SEO that is trying to work with google, and then there is SEO where someone goes out and puts comments on 10,000 web sites only for the reason of ranking higher.. to me that is kind of grey hat if it was a few comments, but shady if it's hundreds and especially if it's automated..

but real blackhat stuff - hacking other web sites and adding links.. or having a site that is selling breast enlarging pills and trying to get people who type in a keyword for britney spears.. that is trying to fool people.

I have built sites with good info and had to do things to make them prettier for the ranking bot, but they are giving the surfer what they are looking for when they type 'whatever phrase'... I have also made web sites better when trying to also get them to show up in top results.

So it's not always seo=bad, sometimes seo=good for the algorythm and the users.

and sometimes it's madness - like extra fluff to keep a visitor on page longer to keep google happy like recipes - haha - many different flavors of it - and different intentions.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#379

Post by stevenicr »

erikbye wrote: post #372
edoceo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate some of these ways? I just have a big minus list of sites.

I would need to hear examples, queries or topics that results in solely superficial information, like OP stated.

I too am asking people to start making lists of lame query returns. I have taken screen shots of some, even made a video about one... but a solid list in a spreadsheet perhaps would be helpful.. of course with results varying for different people / locations and month to month / year to year, having some screen shots would be helpful too. Not sure if there is a good program for snapping some screen shots and pulling some key phrases and putting it all together well...

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#380

Post by reportgunner »

mszcz wrote: post #63
cygned wrote: post #37

In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me: 1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace. 2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in. 3. It tries to be smarter than…

Yeah, number 3 really pisses me off recently. If I type in 3 words I would like to search by those 3 words. What ends up happening is Google just decides that it's too much of a hassle or that I've made a mistake and just searches using 2. So now I have to input all the words in quotes so that it works like it supposed to in the first place. This functionallity literaly never helped me during search. Not once.

"try" "putting" "the" "words" "in" "respective" "quotes" "like" "this"
Post reply on HN