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Search Still Sucks

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Re: Search Still Sucks

#31

Post by benologist »

zengeek wrote: post #10

Apparently, this blog author has been ousted as "bribed by Microsoft for secret advertising disguised in posts" There has been a lot "google search sucks" submission from Techcrunch lately. This was starting to feel a little weird. So I googled "Michael Arrington Microsoft" and got this : http://techrights.org/2010/02/07/michael-arrington-microsoft... Are people aware of this ? is it old news ? Is HN being spammed ?

Heh that's Roy Schestowitz, I can remember him flooding Digg years ago. Nobody's certain if he's really a particularly hardcore anti-Microsoft troll or if he's actually paid by Microsoft because he's so ridiculously zealous it reflects poorly on everyone else.

Re: Search Still Sucks

#32

Post by webwright »

photon_off wrote: post #6

Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content. I think Google results could…

The problem is that normal humans don't USE social bookmarking sites. Nor do they tweet/share much of value on facebook. Google is VERY good at serving up great results for things that you could imagine the "linkerati" might link to. Start drifting into travel, home remodeling, etc., and it gets pretty grim.

Re: Search Still Sucks

#33

Post by rhizome »

tomkarlo wrote: post #4

At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results. If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace G…

This happened ~10 years ago when search-engine results were too messy for the throngs that were looking for the Dancing Baby, so the business world invented portals. Then portals became useless because their curatorial layers were not scalable, but by then search engines had made improvements and the pendulum swung the other way.

It's a natural see-saw between specialization and generalizations (there's probably a one-word term for this in evolutionary biology). We see the same in thin-client/thick-client talk in client-server/webapp contexts.

Re: Search Still Sucks

#35

Post by pasbesoin »

If "the customer's always right", then, for the current search situation, you have to ask: Who's the customer?

--

P.S. Google: I'd accept, gratefully, as a stopgap, being able to specify multiple "site:foo" parameters. I don't know what the computational (or financial) impact to you would be.

(So far, I've held off trying browser extensions to accomplish this, but I guess I can start looking for one having a good reputation.)

Re: Search Still Sucks

#36

Post by pasbesoin »

pasbesoin wrote: post #35

If "the customer's always right", then, for the current search situation, you have to ask: Who's the customer? -- P.S. Google: I'd accept, gratefully, as a stopgap, being able to specify multiple "site:foo" parameters. I don't know what the computational (or financial) impact to you would be. (So far, I've held off trying browser extensions to accomplish this, but I guess I can start looking for one having a good rep…

Just tried DuckDuckGo on "windows autorun". What a world of difference. Top two links are recent news, and the third link is the authoritative KB from MS on disabling/re-enabling.

I tried DDG some months (years?) ago, but it was too inconsistent. Maybe it's ready for prime time, or at least the Late Late Show, now. Jazz hands!

Re: Search Still Sucks

#37

Post by tomkarlo »

chris_j wrote: post #9
tomkarlo wrote: post #4

At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results. If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace G…

I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow. Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search? Here's my example: In gdb, I…

Mea culpa. SO was definitely my weak example there... if they had a better on-site search it wouldn't be an issue but I guess they mostly just optimize for Google search. So a lot of the time I end up Googling tech issues, but then clicking on the SO link because I know there will be multiple answers on that page instead of just one.

Re: Search Still Sucks

#38

Post by vanessafox »

pasbesoin wrote: post #35

If "the customer's always right", then, for the current search situation, you have to ask: Who's the customer? -- P.S. Google: I'd accept, gratefully, as a stopgap, being able to specify multiple "site:foo" parameters. I don't know what the computational (or financial) impact to you would be. (So far, I've held off trying browser extensions to accomplish this, but I guess I can start looking for one having a good rep…

If you want this ability for one-off searches, you can use the OR operator.

site:http://news.ycombinator.com OR site:stackoverflow.com

I don't know if there's a max # of sites you can add. I tried it with three and it seemed to work great.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:searchengineland.com+OR+...

(Yes, I did an ego search. Isn't that the best way to know if the results are likely accurate? :)

If there's a set of sites you want to search through often, you can set up a custom search engine for what you describe. For instance, see this page:

http://www.toddnemet.com/

Re: Search Still Sucks

#39

Post by vanessafox »

photon_off wrote: post #6

Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content. I think Google results could…

There has been a bunch of research on use of delicious tags in particular. See for instance: http://heymann.stanford.edu/improvewebsearch.html

If I recall correctly, Yahoo tested using this data a few years ago and found the signals not to be as useful as others they used at the time.

Of course, Bing and Google have been working to include more social signals in rankings: http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bi...

Re: Search Still Sucks

#40

Post by hammock »

Is this an article about how search sucks? Or is it an article about how Google can only do 50 things right instead of 500?

Google /= search, it's just one engine. No need to throw all your eggs in one basket.

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