Just stop using computers for fun. It sucks now and it’s over.
I Just Want to Search
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: I Just Want to Search
#52One pattern I have observed and guilty of myself is that simple hybrid search patterns work poorly on single-word intent queries. It is better to do pure lexical search for certain queries and then fallback to semantic or hybrid.
Re: I Just Want to Search
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched. I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preemp…
I'm leaning against the user flagging model of content moderation because it keeps the incentive for bad actors to try to game the system. Bad content, even briefly included can still do a lot of damage. It's like spam email -- even though something like 99.9% gets filtered out, that 0.1% is still valuable enough for spam senders to keep trying. If the problem of spam is just a numbers game, then bad actors will just…
The problem is that it can also be gamed in the opposite direction. Anything automated gives a way for hostile third parties to disappear links at will, which can be similarly damaging especially if timed right. YouTube and many other sites with automated DMCA handling for example have major issues with this.
Re: I Just Want to Search
#54HN's basic search using quotes can be way more useful than google to me
HN has a ridiculously good search in my opinion. It's also really fast.
Re: I Just Want to Search
#55This problem is at least 26 years old. At the end of the last century there was an application called "Copernic" that executed searches in the search engines of that time, Go, Netscape, Yahoo, etc., downloaded the results and executed the search in them, deleted those that did not match and then showed the valid results in an order pre-selected by the searcher. The required result was almost always in the first item on the list. Unfortunately Google was the end of "Copernic".
Re: I Just Want to Search
#56When was the last time you saw an ads-esque box and be like I am so glad you shoved it into my face! I guess Never at least if you are reading this.
More often than not you know exactly what you are looking for, you're not browsing to see what's out there. The systems should optimize for that instead of whatever this is.
Re: I Just Want to Search
#57HN's basic search using quotes can be way more useful than google to me
HN has a ridiculously good search in my opinion. It's also really fast.
That results update almost live as you type is impressive, but I also wouldn't mind if it was slow. I just need full-text search with quotes.
Re: I Just Want to Search
#58I wonder if maybe EU could do something about this. A law mandating that all results must contain quoted search text?
> if maybe EU could do something about this.
If you pay them well. At least more than your competitors.