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I Just Want to Search

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Re: I Just Want to Search

#31

Post by ileonichwiesz »

graypegg wrote: post #18
superxpro12 wrote: post #10

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…

Maybe I'm just dense and there's some weird psychology thing FB is doing here. but I can't think of any reason why ignoring search parameters would be intentional, especially for a classifieds search! Even if it's for sponsored listings, they're just bogging down the conversion rate. If FB marketplace is showing me a thing I can't buy because it's too far away to pick up, doesn't fit in the space I'm specifying, and…

They don’t actually give a shit whether you find what you were looking for, they heavily optimize for their time-on-site metric. If the search results were terrible, and you had to refine your terms and try again, that’s more time on site! More time is more better!

Re: I Just Want to Search

#32

Post by kzalesak »

pooploop64 wrote: post #27

Google search still has that feature where the little preview blurb will bolden where it matches parts of your query so you can see what context the pattern appeared in. Always very useful but now it gives you a pretty good look at what google replaced your actual query with. Since I started paying attention to this, I've realized that most of the cases where I need to add a bunch of excluded keywords, I'm actually j…

So interesting. The dark theme on chrome mobile can obscure this easily, so I was unaware of the replacements.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#33

Post by pluralmonad »

imzadi wrote: post #12

I use protonmail and the search is genuinely atrocious. Like the word can be in the title and it still won't find it.

I've used Protnmail before and had the same issue. I think enabling something like "full local indexing" or something made it better.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#35

Post by teach »

superxpro12 wrote: post #10

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…

I have the same complaint but with Facebook Dating (yes, of course that's a thing). The app itself is less enshittified (so far) than many other dating apps (thanks, Match Group) but the filtering is just dumb.

"Hey FB I live in a major city and don't want to match with anyone further than 25 miles away" okay here are a bunch of matches from cities 200 miles away

"Hey FB I don't want to match 'as friends' because what even is that" okay cool we'll make sure to ignore that

Pretty sure this was written by an intern for their summer project. At least it's free.

And I guess I'm still on there, so maybe FB knows what they're doing

Re: I Just Want to Search

#36

Post by shevy-java »

> Searching on YouTube means scrolling over two entire rows of Shorts,"People also watched", "Explore more", with your actual results somewhere in between

Google ruins all its search interface. I never understood why I would need "people also watched". That made never any sense - neither on youtube, but even less so on google search. Of what interest to me is it when Charly Joker searches for hentai cyborgs? Even IF I were interested in that, I could search for this ON MY OWN. I don't need mental handholding, so this ALWAYS wasted space I could use otherwise. Thanks to ublock origin I block such UI downgrades anyway, but this is not the only example. Google abuses people here. Google wants you to use a privated web that Google controls. This madness has to stop. Google will not budge, so Google has to be ended by mankind.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#38

Post by ileonichwiesz »

gtowey wrote: post #2

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The on…

The scale of this would need to be unfathomable. Doesn’t YouTube get something like 100 years of video uploads every day? You’d need hundreds of thousands of people working full time to review that much footage manually.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#39

Post by jasonvorhe »

M95D wrote: post #37

I wonder if maybe EU could do something about this. A law mandating that all results must contain quoted search text?

Or people could just use a different search engine that actually delivers results and slowly eat away at Google's dominance, either forcing them to adapt and serve useful results again or become the next Yahoo or whatever, instead of begging an already way too powerful entity for more regulation.

Re: I Just Want to Search

#40

Post by M95D »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #39
M95D wrote: post #37

I wonder if maybe EU could do something about this. A law mandating that all results must contain quoted search text?

Or people could just use a different search engine that actually delivers results and slowly eat away at Google's dominance, either forcing them to adapt and serve useful results again or become the next Yahoo or whatever, instead of begging an already way too powerful entity for more regulation.

If it was possible it would have happend by now.
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