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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

#411

Post by Mauricio_ »

blattimwind wrote: post #71
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?

> 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…

Could it be that there just isn't a single page in the web with the exact error?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#412

Post by Mauricio_ »

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?

Are you sure there's a page on the web that has the stack trace you search for? Maybe there just isn't anything.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#413

Post by zackees »

JamesBarney wrote: post #279
leereeves wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a political context, "credible" is often a synonym for "agrees with me". Anyone ranking "page quality" should be conscious of and try to avoid that, and yet the word "bias" doesn't even appear in the linked guidelines for Search Quality Raters. Of course Google's own bias (and involvement in particular political campaigns) is well known, and opposed to Project Veritas, so it's quite possible that you are right and…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas I doubt this affected search rankings but Project Veritas does have a ton of credibility issues.

Project Veritas does not have credibility issues. They have never issued a single retraction.

If this surprises you, then welcome to the systematic bias of wikipedia.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#414

Post by Eridrus »

eyegor wrote: post #246
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…

Here's an xkcd [0] inspired idea. We have several search engines, each with some level of bias. We're not looking to crawl the whole internet because we can't compete with their crawlers. However, we could make a crawler to crawl their results, and re-rank the top N from each engine according to our own metric. Maybe even expose the parameters in an "advanced" search. I'm assuming this would violate some sort of eula…

Isn't this basically what DuckDuckGo does?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#415

Post by graycat »

pjc50 wrote: post #387
graycat wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but capturing meaning mathematically is somewhat an unsolved problem in both mathematics, linguistics and semiotics. I've been successful via my search math. For your claim, as far as I know, you are correct, but actually that does not make my search engine and its math impossible. > That will produce a set of techniques that are observed to increase the ranking. Ranking? I can't resist, to borrow from one of…

So, do you only ever display one single result? Or do you display multiple results? Because if you display multiple results, they will be in a textual order, whether that's top to bottom or left to right, and that is a ranking. People pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to move their result from #2 to #1 in the list of Google results.

> #2 to #1 in the list of Google results.

My user interface is very different from Google's, so different there's no real issue of #1 or #2.

Actually that #1 or #2, etc. is apparently such a big issue for Google, SEO, etc. that it suggests a weakness in Google, one that my work avoids.

You will see when you play a few minutes with my site after I announce the alpha test.

Google often works well; when Google works well, my site is not better. But the post I responded to mentions some ways Google doesn't work well, and for those and some others my site stands to work much better. I'm not really in direct competition with Google.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#416

Post by viklove »

krageon wrote: post #407
viklove wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do your colleagues get to decide what is fact and what is fiction? It's our right, as humans, to be able to make that decision on our own after we encounter information. If Wikipedia gains a reputation for libel, then the onus should be on the public to stop trusting them. Google does not have the moral authority to censor the internet, and it's absolutely wrong for them to attempt this. Information should be fre…

> decide what is fact The fun thing about facts is that nobody needs to decide whether or not they are true. Perhaps the fact that you can honestly claim to think otherwise means you need to take a step back and examine your reasoning.

> Perhaps the fact that you can honestly claim to think otherwise

This is an example of a "fact" that I'm talking about. It's not a fact, it's an opinion being presented as fact. I guess if you present yourself this way online you have no problem with Google controlling what "facts" are found when you use their search engine.

I guess I'll just have to wait until they start peddling a perspective you disagree with.

> If wikipedia contains cherry picked slander against a person, topic or website

Just remember that this is the comment we're discussing... how does one determine if a statement is slander? Are you telling me Google has teams of investigative journalists following up on each of their search results? Or did someone at Google form an opinion, then decide their opinion is the one that should be presented as "fact" on the most popular search engine in the world?

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