21–30 of 58 posts
It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.
I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well... Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?
Agitation multiplied when I finally found the answer, which was reaching blindly under a plastic trim panel for a hidden downward-facing button to open the panel, lift the top up, and then balance the top midway between open and closed while I finesse the plastic tonneau cover panel back down under the rear part of the top. Garbage UX on both the part of Chevrolet and Google. I wish to become a hermit in the woods.
I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct. They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results. Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you…
Amazon has gotten that bad. Yesterday I searched for "3/8 inch handles", and got several ball-shaped ones, plus some things that included (but were not) handles. I added the term - "3/8 inch ball handles" - and only the not-actually-handles remained.
Give me search like McMaster-Carr. Everything is an instance of a category class with madatory properties. If your product doesn't fit in any existing category, tough shit. Go convince someone at McBezos-Carr that whatever premade-landfill product you're selling is a category, along with providing dimensions/materials/properties that category varies by, and maybe they'll consider adding it.
I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well... Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
The current state of things makes the problem seem worse than it is, but it is not a simple problem. Should a post about "L'acteur Gérard Philipe" be found by a search for "gerard", without the accent, through collation? Probably, but should quoted/verbatim searches also do collation? How about the non-verbatim but misspelled "gérard philippe"? What if the search has a correct spelling, but not the page? What if the…
I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct. They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results. Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you…
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That being said... the first wave of web search engines weren't built by the companies hosting the content. Search engines as tools became popular because, even in 1998, browsing and navigating sites (esp. corporate sites) to surface content, was already becoming an increasingly adversarial experience.
Search engines were built by companies spidering other sites' content. This was content that was often — if you were navigating along these sites' happy paths — found five to ten links deep through a confusing warren of subtle and unintuitive click targets. This content was the original "deep web." And search engines made it shallow... often against the spidered sites' consent.
Companies at the time much preferred "directory" sites that would only ever link to their landing pages. To companies of that era, sites linking directly to specific URLs of your site would be like if the Yellow Pages listed specific directory-extensions of your company's phone number! But this first battle in the "war against deep-linking" was a losing one from the moment it began, since early websites were almost inherently bot-accessible.
The second battle, in the early 2000s, where sites were built as [non-deep-linkable] Flash apps, took longer to determine, only finally resolving (again in favor of an open web, and thus third-party search) when laws and regulatory compliances both started to force companies back toward UA accessibility.
But for going on a decade now, we've been embroiled in a seemingly-indefinite third battle in the "war against deep-linking" — this time with companies tucking every possible type of user-generated content behind a login wall of some walled-garden everything [web]apps. Permalink URLs for individual content-items still exist in these webapps; but you get redirected to a login interstitial if you visit them.
Where's the adversarial spirit of the first search-engine companies today? Where are the companies trying to index the modern "deep web" of login-walled content? Why can't any company give me a search box that searches "into" YouTube video transcripts, "into" Facebook Marketplace, "into" public Slack and Discord and Telegram communities (probably requiring archiving, ala how Deja News/Google Groups surfaced Usenet), etc?
Sure, this sort of thing is intensely adversarial (but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn — while it might be against a site's ToS, but it's not against the law.) And sure, this sort of thing requires per-service connectors (but any thought of this business model therefore being "unscalable" comes from a pre-coding-agent era.)
But isn't it also, very clearly, "what people want"?