Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How is search so bad? A case study

svilentodorov.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 416 posts

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#201

Post by detaro »

sfblah wrote: post #123
ma2rten wrote: 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.

Google is a TRILLION dollar company. Indexing Reddit properly would take what? 2-3 engineers? Cmon.

Google adding dedicated optimizations for popular sites seems like a bad trend.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#202

Post by berkut »

cygned wrote: post #37

In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me: 1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace. 2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in. 3. It tries to be smarter than…

You don't even seem to be able to simply get the URL of a search result any more: some hierarchical token thing is used instead to display each search result's address, and copying any link just gives you:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

with the url buried somewhere in the GET params.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#203

Post by soheil »

reaperducer wrote: post #163
soheil wrote: post #145

> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo. For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.

For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing. Every time the topic of search comes up on HN, someone always jumps in and says this. Then there are a bunch of other people who jump in and say that Duck is much more than that. So, which is correct?

Well, of course, it can be "much more than that" depending on how you interpret that statement. When I hear marketing blurbs like _"over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex"_ I inevitably start yawning and realize "much more than that" for what is is, marketing that worked on people.

You can run an experiment: would you ever have to be persuaded that for instance Google is much more than just X? Well, no because it's usually proven that it is without someone on the internet having to tell you about it.

Crawling most of the web on a regular basis is incredibly difficult and requires resources that only a company like Google can provide.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#204

Post by jacquesm »

rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

It is only solvable for a short period of time. Then, when whatever replaces the current search is successful enough there will be an incentive to game the new system. So the only way to really solve this is by radical fragmentation of the search market or by randomizing algorithms.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#205

Post by freediver »

graycat wrote: post #108
rahulchhabra07 wrote: post #32

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surf…

Good to hear your concerns. > The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. I intend to announce the alpha test of my search engine here on HN. My search engine is immune to all SEO efforts. > I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. In simple terms my search engine gives users content with…

Get feedback before you launch. Id be happy to test it.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#206

Post by mikehollinger »

detaro wrote: post #83
mikehollinger wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two anecdotes: It’s really fascinating. 1. My work got some attention at CES so I tried to find articles about it. Filtering for items that were from the last X days and searching for a product name found pages and pages of plagiarized content from our help center. Loading any one of the pages showed an OS appropriate fake “your system is compromised! Install this update” box. What’s the game here? Is someone trying…

The first seems big right now, on weird subdomains of clearly hacked sites. E.g. some embedded Linux tutorial on a subdomain of a small-town football club.

Yup. Entertainingly I just saw an example of the “lying date” the original article pointed out: according to google the page is from 17 hours ago. However right next to this it says June, xx 2018. Really?

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#207

Post by soheil »

wickedOne wrote: post #21
Tenoke wrote: 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.

searching for best cell phone to buy site:reddit.com and setting it to results from last month works fine...

Still getting results that are outdated if you click on the links, even though the date on the search results page is recent.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#208

Post by dredmorbius »

eitland wrote: post #189
dredmorbius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference?

Will you take my word for it? They not only disregard quotes but also their own verbatim setting.

Asking for a reference helps:

- Establish the behaviour as documented.

- In representing and demonstrating this to others.

It's not that I doubt your word, but that I'd like to see a developed and credible case made. Because frankly that behaviour drives me to utter frustration and distraction. It's also a large part of the reason I no longer use, nor trust, Google Web Search as my principle online search tool.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#209

Post by amiga_500 »

ori_b wrote: post #197
lowkeyokay wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ‘Google is an advertising company’ is said often on HN. I agree to some extent but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company? Google solves a real problem and this works well, for them, with an advertising based revenue model. Do they compromise their search to that end? Probably. Do newspapers? Hopefully not, but maybe. To me, that doesn’t make them advertising companie…

> * but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company?* Historically, at least, they sold subscriptions.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...

Hsbc demanded The Telegraph pull negative stories or they would pull their advertising.

All newspapers are full of stories about property "investment" and have a separate segment one a week for paid advertising of property.

Re: How is search so bad? A case study

#210

Post by acdha »

echelon wrote: post #23
MrEldritch wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.

Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ` `, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely…

> Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with ``, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata.

Can you explain in technical details what you think was lost by Google launching a browser or what properties were unique to XHTML?

Everything you listed above is possible with HTML5 (see e.g. schema.org) and has been for many years so I think it would be better to look at the failure to have market incentives which support that outcome.

Post reply on HN