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Why I hate search

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Re: Why I hate search

#31

Post by goostavos »

Sembiance wrote: post #15

He will fit right in at Microsoft then. They call bing lots of things like "decision engine" and "doing engine", but never a "search engine". Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"

Haha! I thought that was going to be dropped in at some point as well. "We need less search, and more decision."

These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution?

I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices.. Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?

Re: Why I hate search

#32

Post by Porter_423 »

"Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for."

One word: competition.

Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is very difficult to get them back.

Re: Why I hate search

#33

Post by username3 »

tatsuke95 wrote: post #2

>"Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we" Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there. Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found , in the vast swamp of the internet.

The alternative is a directory organized and categorized better. You would then need search to find categories faster than clicking through each level. Google killed their directory. Google Directory is no longer available. We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web. If you prefer to browse a directory of the web, visit the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org

Re: Why I hate search

#34

Post by radarsat1 »

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads.

To me this makes his assertion,

> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed.

Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.

Re: Why I hate search

#35

Post by gcp »

mgkimsal wrote: post #9

He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb , and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can trac…

I've found the cases you describe to be one of these areas where Firefox seems to behave way superior than Chrome. It's not entirely as advanced as you describe of course, but usually just typing parts of a few key words returns a list of relevant sites you've ever been to, and the ranking is very good. The algorithm seems to even take into account whether you originally typed in the link etc.

In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.

If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move into this direction.

Re: Why I hate search

#36

Post by lubutu »

gcp wrote: post #35
mgkimsal wrote: post #9

He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb , and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can trac…

I've found the cases you describe to be one of these areas where Firefox seems to behave way superior than Chrome. It's not entirely as advanced as you describe of course, but usually just typing parts of a few key words returns a list of relevant sites you've ever been to, and the ranking is very good. The algorithm seems to even take into account whether you originally typed in the link etc. In general, if you've v…

This is the one reason I stick with Firefox. In Chrome if you search for the name of a YouTube video, with a string you know was in the title of the page, you're very unlikely to get that page as a result. If you're lucky you'll get another page with a link to the page you want in the suggestions list. In Firefox it'll almost always be an instant result, right at the top of the list. It seems strange, but Firefox's search really blows Chrome's out of the water.

Re: Why I hate search

#37

Post by nitid_name »

mgkimsal wrote: post #9

He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb , and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can trac…

>I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).

Doesn't google do this "in the cloud" (ugh) already?

They use your past history to tailor results to you (as DuckDuckGo calls it, "in your bubble"). It's done on their servers because they want the information, and quite frankly, have better resources to compute it on (not to mention they benefit from comparing you to others like you and so on and so forth).

Re: Why I hate search

#38

Post by danso »

radarsat1 wrote: post #34

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads. To me this makes his assertion, > There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect…

My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex" http://goo.gl/5YPtb

"Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” "

I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image.

--- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html

Re: Why I hate search

#39

Post by dcminter »

radarsat1 wrote: post #34

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads. To me this makes his assertion, > There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect…

I don't think Google were the first to do search well - in my opinion that was DEC's AltaVista. But Altavista and the other keyword matchers suffered from the later pollution of their results by spammers and then compounded the problem by polluting their own search results with barely distinguishable adverts. We stopped trusting them.

Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.

Re: Why I hate search

#40

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

mgkimsal wrote: post #9

He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb , and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can trac…

> Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course)

Just thought I'd point out that Chrome supports different search engines and even politely asks you which one you'd like to use at first launch.

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