Three areas where Google Search lags behind competitors: code, cooking, travel

I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got my answer. The rest of the results were websites for physical locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of which had any relationship to the phone number.

Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.

> I already know what an Exception is, so I don't want to scroll halfway down the page to find what I'm looking for.

I can’t relate to this. That example, of the first result being the canonical documentation on the subject, is a search engine working exactly the way I want.

Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search:

> dog apple dangerous

Today you should search:

> can dogs eat apples

And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.

Back when I started at Google, they at least said they actively targeted "long-tail" queries to gain market share. The thinking was that people would use a search engine until they hit some query that their usual search engine failed on. Then they'd give another search engine (perhaps Google) a try, so if you really targeted those tough queries and were at least decent at the common queries, you'd gain market share.

Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case. (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].)

Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator. (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas" user info database kept track of the last time you used an operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all the time.

I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight the uncommon/difficult queries.

They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries, and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only on later queries in these related query sequences. That way, they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from over-fitting the median/easy queries.

I know google search is probably not the same as google flights, but I spent a few hours recently (over a few days) using google flights and it was a delight to use compared to the Expedia children.

We had a bereavement in the family and had to book multiple independent tickets because we could not travel together. This was just after the Ukraine war started so prices had gone through the roof. Exact number of days was not that important as compared to the price and the duration and using google flights UI to slice and dice the data was such a joy. Want to freeze the airline and look at the alternatives - which include from and to dates, number of days of trips, or freeze any other parameter and analyze others, the response was sub-second. Did not eventually book through them since I did not want to get into the google payment system (they offer booking through others that I did not explore).

On the opposite side was Expedia children where they would show a price of 2800 and when you click the price invariably it has gone up to 3600. Again. And again. And again. Not sure if that problem existed with google although I paid the exact same price as the airline as shown by google, it could just be a coincidence.