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How is search so bad? A case study

svilentodorov.xyz

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Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#11
This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?")

Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#12
post #11

This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#13
I'm a bit cynical with this but I believe a lot of the "super smart" AI tech they no doubt run over all their search these days isn't actually that super smart. If we actually handled metadata properly "last month" would be a trivial, "dumb" thing to search for but apparently that's broken. Why?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#15

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?

I've been using DDG as a good enough search engine for most things, but when I sometimes fall back to Google, it blows me away how many ads are on the page pretending to be results!

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#16

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?

If they were ripe for disruption and it was easy to do this disrupting just be returning better search results, and returning better search results was an easily doable thing then I suppose all the other functioning businesses that have a stake in web search would already be doing that disrupting. Search disrupted catalogs. What will disrupt search?

Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs?

Not joking I have a feeling subject specific topics will be further distributed based on expertise & trust.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#17
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.

To be fair, Google has always been trash at searching for recentness. I don't remember a time when searching "recommended X (current year)" didn't return old out-of-date info. I think Google has had a habit of returning 3-year-old pages since its inception.

Did you try clicking Search Tools and limiting the date range there instead of in the query string? Always works for me.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#18
post #2

Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.

This is good advice. I used to be very good at formatting queries in search-engine-ese, but that stopped working well. I finally tried switching to asking questions in normal language, and my results started getting good again. It seems that AI has reached a point where natural language is better than trying to talk like a computer.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#19
post #11

This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

It doesn't have to be special parsing. Upvotes are just a heuristic for contents. Good contents generate upvotes, not the other way around. And site layout shouldn't fool the algorithms, or is that something that only Reddit does?
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