Don't get me started on Outlook search. For a company that runs a global search engine, the most prominent mail client in the world is absolutely shit for searching.
Outlook is poor in every aspect.
How is search so bad? A case study
211–220 of 416 posts
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the early days of DMOZ, some editors would rank sites lower based on the number of ads they had.
I don't think DMOZ had ranking per se? They could mark "preferred" sites for any given category, but only a handful of them at most, and with very high standards, i.e. it needed to be the official site or "THE" definitive resource about X.
You are correct, the sites weren't "ranked" the same way that Google ranks sites now. But there were preferred sites, and each site had a description written by an editor who could be fairly unpleasant if they wanted to.
I had a site that appeared in DMOZ, and the description was written in such a way that nobody would want to visit it. But it was one of only a few sites on the internet at the time with its information, so it was included.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#213I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads. Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. T…
Is it time for paid search engines? Make users vote with their wallets and pay for the eternal arms race. Problem is, whoever is behind something like that would have to start with an already sufficiently superior experience (or massive geek cred) to make people pay from the early days. Maybe going back to manually curated results of a subset of topics would work? Or some Stack Overflow-esque model of user powered me…
Probably not. The problem with current search engines is that they need some way to rank the pages and hence inherently susceptible to clever SEO (that curates pages to get ranked high for certain type of queries).
So having a paid search engine does not fully solve the SEO problem. Having no Ads does not takeout the SEO problem of boosting pages to top.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#214I 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…
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Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#215I'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?
You might be surprised at how many ways "last month" is encoded just in a single data set. One of the biggest problems with search -- just about any kind of search-- is the low quality of markup/metadata. If only data was structured properly, we would barely need search in the first place!
Right! It's just... the internet isn't exactly in beta anymore. You'd think there's a timestamp type value that just tells you the date of an article or forum post that's linked. But no, we have to run a sophisticated algorithm to search for it on the page – and fail.
Honestly, my second theory is that google knows exactly when a given reddit article was posted but doesn't trust the user to judge the relevancy of that information. Which might even be reasonable in many, many cases. But it's also annoying. I'm definitely seeing a trend towards "editorializing" search results on Google, where often the first half of the page isn't even websites anymore but some random info box and whatnot, and your search terms are interpreted very liberally, even when in quotes. It's one of those things that is probably better for 99% of users/uses but super annoying when you actually want precise results.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#216As for the Case Study part, and me saying this isn’t simply a rant - I lied, hence the quotation marks in the title So it's NOT a case study...
For what is worth, I'm not sure why they changed the title here. The flippancy in my original title makes the level of diligence a bit clearer from the get go.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#217I 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…
This sounds extremely implausible; especially claiming "immune to SEO" is like declaring encryption "unbreakable". A lot of human effort would be devoted to it if your engine became popular.
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. That's not actually the problem described here. His problem is actually a bit deeper rootet since he specified the exact parameters of what he wants to see, but got terrible results. He specified a search for "site:reddit.com" but th…
Wrong. The site query worked. The issue is that there is no clear way to determine information date, as pages themselves change. Since more recent results are favored, SEO strategy of freshness throws off date queries. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history...
Wrong. In the article he elaborates.
> As you can see, I didn’t even bother clicking on all of them now, but I can tell you the first result is deeply irrelevant and the second one leads to a 4 year old thread.
He also wrote
> At this point I visibly checked on reddit if there’ve been posts about buying a phone from the last month and there are.
Duckduckgo even recognized the date to be 4 years old and reddit doesn't hide the age of posts. There are newer more fitting posts, but they aren't shown. And again a quote
> Why are the results reported as recent when they are from years ago, I don’t know - those are archived post so no changes have been made.
So your argument (also it really is a problem) in this case is a red herring. The problem lies deeper since google seems to be unable to do something as simple as extracting the right date and ddg ignores it. Also since all the results are years old it adds to the confusion why the results don't match the query. (He also wrote that the better matches were indeed indexed, but not found)
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#219I 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…
The real reason why search is so bad is that Google is downranking the internet.
I should know - I blew the whistle on the whole censorship regime and walked 950 pages to the DOJ and media outlets.
--> zachvorhies.com What did I disclose? That Google was using a project called "Machine Learning Faireness" to rerank the entire internet.
Part of this beast has to do with a secret Page Rank score that Google's army of workers assign to many of the web pages on the internet.
If wikipedia contains cherry picked slander against a person, topic or website then the raters are instructed to provide a low page rank score. This isn't some conspiracy but something openly admitted by Google itself:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...
See section 3.2 for the "Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness" score.
Despite the fact that I've had around 50 interviews and countless articles written about my disclosure, my website zachvorhies.com doesn't show up on Google's search index, even when using the exact url as a query! Yet bing and duckduckgo return my URL just fine.
Don't listen to the people who say that's its some emergent behavior from bad SEO. This deliberate sabotage of Google's own search engine in order to achieve the political agenda of the controllers. The stock holders of Google should band together in a class action lawsuit and sue the C-Level executives of negligence.
If you want your internet search to be better then stop using Google search. Other search engines don't have this problem: I'm looking at qwant, swisscows, duckduckgo, bing and others.
~Z~
Re: How is search so bad? A case study
#220I think a main issue is the vagueness of the query. I was searching for "what phone should i buy in 2020 site:reddit.com" and while a few results where from a year ago, most where from January 2020.
Adding 2020 might kind of work in January. It wouldn't help as much for getting this month's results in November.