381–390 of 437 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i would often use `site:news.ycombinator.com` to search a topic to see if it has been talked about, and what comments that topic has. It's good, but not really _that_ often useful.
Hacker News has a really good dedicated search engine: https://hn.algolia.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They own the web through Chrome, it’s one of their best investments. They’re killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed IE with it (rest in piss). We’re getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.
For sure, and it’s only Safari that gets a bad reputation
How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate. Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?
1. search something
2. click links until you get your info
3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results based on which ones were useful
Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL . Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran…
Unfortunately the fuzzy search thing is in a kind of feedback loop in terms of user expectation. Because of Google users are used to typing the wrong thing and getting the right answer. If I search for "how old is Roger Redford" Google tells me that Robert Redford was born in 1936 (it doesn't even display the "Did you mean...?" correction). And to be fair, in 99% of cases the person probably did mean Robert Redford.…
How come nobody is doing social search yet? Why can't I up and down vote results and maybe even comment on them or something? I don't want to ever see some of these recipe sites that show up again... I can't imagine I would if people were helping curate. Seems like an "easy" solution to SEO crapola?
I vaguely remember Wiki's search engine doing this; maybe it was called WikiCloud? Anyway, it was just clunky in practice to 1. search something 2. click links until you get your info 3. go back to the search page and upvote/downvote the results based on which ones were useful
Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL . Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business). Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran…
Unfortunately the fuzzy search thing is in a kind of feedback loop in terms of user expectation. Because of Google users are used to typing the wrong thing and getting the right answer. If I search for "how old is Roger Redford" Google tells me that Robert Redford was born in 1936 (it doesn't even display the "Did you mean...?" correction). And to be fair, in 99% of cases the person probably did mean Robert Redford.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL There used to be a 'verbatim' mode that would do exactly that. The quotes symbol were also a way to enforce verbatim mode. Sadly this behaviour of "let me assume what you want" is not exclusive of google as I also now experience this on ddg.
As an anecdote, we have implemented a really strict exact match at Kagi (meaning quotes do exactly what they are supposed to do). We did receive some feedback that we should relax it a bit mostly because non-alphanum character matching (some users wanted them ignored) and occasional empty results page (some users were not used to getting an empty result page as Google almost always returns something, even if it is no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your expectations are too low. We all remember google in it's heyday when it returned honest results, so we know what's possible.
I remember the days when internet as a whole were simpler in terms of contents and users, and search engines reflected that simpicity. I am not sure if it's possible to go back to those days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an anecdote, we have implemented a really strict exact match at Kagi (meaning quotes do exactly what they are supposed to do). We did receive some feedback that we should relax it a bit mostly because non-alphanum character matching (some users wanted them ignored) and occasional empty results page (some users were not used to getting an empty result page as Google almost always returns something, even if it is no…
how capable is your Boolean searching? could I do `(catalog* OR classif*) AND (archiv* OR librar* OR museum*)`? does it support AND/OR booleans?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not a Google problem Oh it is definitelt a Google problem. I was in mood yesterday and I tried Google versus Kagi and You Code. Results of N out of N queries in other search engines were miles better in other search engines than Google. I have now switched completely to code.you.com and Kagi from Google. They are ready.
Kagi is jaw-droppingly amazing. With Google search quality declining, Bing being on average 95% as good as Google, and DuckDuckGo being 90% as good, I was doubting there was any way that search engines would ever improve. Kagi has removed that doubt completely. I ask for stuff and it finds it. I couldn't believe there could be such a useful product.