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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#191

Post by thenickdude »

mvdtnz wrote: post #161
gniv wrote: post #26

On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.

Netflix search is possibly the most egregiously bad search in the entire industry, and unfortunately it's infecting other players with very stupid ideas. Netflix search is unfaceted, unsortable, unfilterable and worst of all it very often knows what you're searching for and instead of returning "we don't have this title" it will return a bunch of different, loosely related titles.

What's worse is that they explicitly know that they don't have that title, because they do have that title if you visit from a different region. But they waste your time with showing you irrelevant results instead.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#192

Post by janalsncm »

binarymax wrote: post #172
Solvency wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But his examples were about hardcoded filters/facets.

The examples were about a keyword or two (“lentils”, “laundry detergent”, etc) and filters.

The reality is that yes there is a long tail of searches people might search for, but for popular searches like “laundry detergent” you can check them manually. You get a lot of coverage just by fixing bugs from the top N queries.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#193

Post by Spivak »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #122
Spivak wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But chicken and rice canned soup contains rice and the word is part of its logical title. You should be able to unearth the soup with a partial match. What makes the alcohol/alcohol-free problem is that alcohol free is one token that can't be subdivided.

That is not a consistent position. If "alcohol free beer" doesn't contain the word "alcohol", then "chicken and rice soup" doesn't contain the word "rice". Moving the argument into the realm of things that matter, chicken and rice soup is not a product that can be called "rice", and therefore isn't an appropriate response to a search for "rice". The title is irrelevant; if you're stocking rice with a fancy name and i…

I don't get this position, chicken and rice soup is not the most relevant result for the query rice but it is a match. It should show up in the results somewhere. If I page through all the results of rice I expect to get all the results that conceivably match the query.

Yes: chicken and rice, rice cakes, rice paper, cauliflower rice, rice cooker, rice krispies, rice university jersey, mochi, risotto.

No: licorice, ricetta tiramisu.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#194

Post by ruszki »

ry4nolson wrote: post #179
cratermoon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is literally the entire point of search - show what you're searching for if it exists, and show related things after it. That might make sense in an abstract way, but no, that's not what people expect. If I'm searching for something at Netflix, I don't want the answer to "does it exist?", I want the answer to "do you have available for viewing?".

but netflix doesn't tell you that. if they don't have what you searched for, it shows you other things they DO have that are similar.

It tells you that in the first line of the results, like the sibling comment of yours proves it.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#195

Post by latch »

AmazingTurtle wrote: post #152

To be fair, he searched for "laundry detergent" and sorted Name A-Z and was wondering why only 3M stuff appeared. Also I failed to comprehend this one > Of course the list of switch games isn't under Games > Nintendo Switch Games that would be silly. Well.. There is a list of games when you open Games > Nintento Switch Games. What is he complaining about?

If it's supposed to be sorted by name, why does "Ariel Oxy Bleach..." show up before "2-Fold Umbrella..." but "Ariel Antibac Jumbo" shows up after.

This isn't just bad search, it's objectively wrong (and a lot more basic).

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#196

Post by themoonisachees »

cykros wrote: post #143
DonHopkins wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can type age:!well to get movies that didn't age well.

Just watched Trading Places again on Christmas Eve. While I wouldn't say it's aged terribly, I will say this: nobody does blackface like Dan Akroyd.

RDJ has to be up there

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#197

Post by thaumasiotes »

Spivak wrote: post #193
thaumasiotes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a consistent position. If "alcohol free beer" doesn't contain the word "alcohol", then "chicken and rice soup" doesn't contain the word "rice". Moving the argument into the realm of things that matter, chicken and rice soup is not a product that can be called "rice", and therefore isn't an appropriate response to a search for "rice". The title is irrelevant; if you're stocking rice with a fancy name and i…

I don't get this position, chicken and rice soup is not the most relevant result for the query rice but it is a match. It should show up in the results somewhere. If I page through all the results of rice I expect to get all the results that conceivably match the query. Yes: chicken and rice, rice cakes, rice paper, cauliflower rice, rice cooker, rice krispies, rice university jersey, mochi, risotto. No: licorice, ri…

> I don't get this position, chicken and rice soup is not the most relevant result for the query rice but it is a match.

As I said, that is inconsistent with your simultaneous position that alcohol-free wine is not a match for "alcohol". Either they both are matches to their respective queries or they both aren't; there isn't a difference between the two examples. This is true from the perspective of dumb text searches, but it's equally true from the perspective of correct linguistic parsing.

That rice is part of the listed title for chicken and rice soup is a coincidence; the argument for returning it also tells you that you should return the same soup when asked for "tomatoes", if tomatoes are an ingredient in the soup.

Your "yes" and "no" examples don't seem to work. What rule excludes "licorice" that would include anything containing the raw textual string "rice" without regard to whether any rice is involved? Rice paper, rice cooker, cauliflower rice are all purely textual matches. Mochi is a purely semantic match!

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#198

Post by jrm4 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #158
jrm4 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect. While I've never been as deep in the details, my perpetual answer here is: "You're so vain, I bet you think this search is about you?" I understand it because people are human, but I can't help but feel annoyance when people are like "the search engine isn't doing what I want!" It's not designed to DO THAT, it's designed to maximize it's own sales and we're pretty much at the point where we should try to sto…

It's not vanity to complain that a faceted search tool is surfacing completely useless facets populated by obviously-wrong data and actively lying to the user about the number of results in each facet. Or returning completely unrelated products like an umbrella in a search for laundry detergent in the top 3 results. Users should expect better. People with your attitude are not helping.

Yeah, I think my downvotes are not getting my exact intent here; I think what I'm saying or trying to express is the extent to which there's a lack of savviness by everyone about the workings of this particular product?

I guess I'm baffled as to how search has stayed so garbage for so long and why this hasn't been more disrupted yet. We know (or should know) the problem and we have things that look a lot like the solution? Wikipedia has lessons, always adding "reddit" to your searches has lessons, now ChatGPT has lessons.

I guess, to me, this type of complaining is just kind of, yeah duh. Now what?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#199

Post by bee_rider »

billyjmc wrote: post #101
bee_rider wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word. new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.

Not quite the same, but iOS gives me trouble with its word suggestions. Usually, it’s contractions that make me curse. ‘It’ suggests It, It’s, and Its. ‘Its’ suggests Its and Itself. Given that the apostrophe requires accessing a different keyboard overlay, and that only two suggestions are presented (leaving one suggestion slot empty), why not just include the contraction “It’s” in the suggestions?

iOS seems to have some weird temporary grammar check issues, where it’ll show the correction while it works out what you are trying to write. I think it only does it for long sentences, though.

But for example, if you start a sentence with “We’re,” it will often take out the apostrophe… until you reach the end of the sentence, and then when you add the period I guess it’ll analyze the sentence and figure out that you actually meant what you wrote, and put it back. It does highlight the corrections, which is really nice. At this point, I just ignore it until I’m done with the sentence and then go back and check.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#200

Post by realusername »

refulgentis wrote: post #178
realusername wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the same thing for Google indeed, they are getting paid by the search ads so they don't care of the quality of what's below those. As long as the market share is that high, there's no reason to improve anything.

This reply is to a comment gently indicating we've arrived at an obviously wrong conclusion. Gliding past that with "Google [doesn't] care [about] search quality" doesn't add much.

Well, the example given shows that the conclusion wasn't necessarily wrong because Google has the same issue.
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