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On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

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Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#51

Post by Nadya »

vonklaus wrote: post #42
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…

> I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results I need , so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model for the exact reason you gave as a defense. edit: If disagreement cou…

But you are given the ability to filter your results! Countless ways actually!

Qualify your searches and modify them if needed. You were looking for information about goats. You should qualify "goats" with some form of "information about" statement.

"goat" + "animal" makes the wikipedia page for goats the first search result.

"goat" + "facts" gives you countless trivia pages, information, videos, etc

Alternatively:

goat -"greatest of all time" -"goatse" will search for "goat" without including "greatest of all time" or "goatse".

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#52

Post by coolsunglasses »

vonklaus wrote: post #37
romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

You are not correct. Apache Foundation, electron/chromium & elastic are the open source components of google. meme-explorer is the paradigm but was funded by drape/jpl_nasa so work was suspended on it. heirarchical crawl index and DNS rebuild(or similar model) will lead to search platform and fix discovery, monopoly and monetization. note that Google has solved a HUGE problem, but their task is now impossible. You ca…

I maintain an Elasticsearch client and have used it for work quite a bit, but let me just say

>elastic

hahahahahahaa

you have not used Elasticsearch I see :)

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#53

Post by yardie »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #43
yardie wrote: post #39

I've long given up on Google outside of the anglosphere. I travel a lot. Location services are enabled on my phone and laptop yet Google still wants to serve up results from the US. I've had to be very careful with how I use Maps since the name of a dutch city or street just might share the same name as some bar in middle America. I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some results take…

DDG uses other search engines' indexes but I would not describe them as a "search aggregator".

I know its technical but in laymens terms they are an aggregator unless another definition exists.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#54

Post by vmorgulis »

dheera wrote: post #23
robbrown451 wrote: post #18

There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…

Not here but because of the "s=TSLA" in the Yahoo's url?

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#55

Post by soared »

stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone."

I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#56

Post by jib »

vonklaus wrote: post #42
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…

> I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results I need , so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model for the exact reason you gave as a defense. edit: If disagreement cou…

It is though. Search is about providing the highest likelihood of the desired result, not matching words, at least in one value space.

If most people searching for "goat" want to know what the word means in slang, that should be the top result. Possibly you could argue that you want a personal search profile that knows you value Wikipedia higher than other links, but for the default case it feels like optimising for highest odds of success makes sense.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#57

Post by magicalist »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #45

I don't understand this article, particularly this footnote: >OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it! That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to…

> All of the links in the second screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for

In fact, if you look at the results with "deluge.app" and "retina" in quotes, there are no results that he would be looking for.

I think this article misses its own point: it's not that the results are worse, it's that what he actually wanted was for google to tell him there were no results, not to realize there were no results and so expand his search for him.

There are two choices that google can make in this type of situation, show you that there are no results for your search terms (helpful in this situation but not when there are obvious synonyms that do have results ("help" vs "aid" example in the article)) or google could expand your search to include synonyms or not contain all terms (helpful when there are lots of useful results close to your terms in search space, not so helpful when you're looking for something very very specific).

I'd imagine it's incredibly hard to tell the difference between these situations with just a few words as a query, but if I had to bet, I'd guess they probably hit some useful level a large portion of the time. It's not clear the problem is universally solvable, however, and going back to add quotes to terms is annoying to type. We're probably never going to get the beloved + operator back, so how about just making verbatim search much quicker to toggle, google?

(I'd settle for a more consistently triggered "Search instead for [original search term]" at the top of the results)

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#58

Post by chillingeffect »

ErikAugust wrote: post #25
romaniv wrote: post #20

Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google. And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technol…

You are perpetuating a myth for the sake of a monopoly. A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no one dares.

Use duckduckgo as a first line. Use yahoo and google as backups. Eventually DDG will get enough funding to improve their quality. That's what I do.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#59

Post by soared »

zodPod wrote: post #47

There are lots of problems that I've noticed anymore too. One that I always find is the utter uselessness of searching for a phone number anymore. There are a million pages that simply list random numbers. That's not useful AT ALL. Another that I've more recently noticed is conversions on mobile. I went from being able to type any approximation of "ounces" "to/in/-" "pounds" and getting a number right away to having…

You could never find useful results for a phone number, except for businesses. Searching for a small local business's phone number brought up their page for me.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#60

Post by dheera »

Nadya wrote: post #46
dheera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…

>I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product? Because that's how lawsuits happen. They let the search engine run itself. If more people are using Yahoo Finance over Google Finance, the search results will reflect that. I genuinely believe they aren't dumb enough to open t…

Interesting. But Yahoo has their own search engine. If Yahoo listed Yahoo Finance first, and Google listed Google Finance first, is there any legal issue? Both are working search engines and nobody is forcing you to use one over the other. I don't see a "true" monopoly situation. At least not a Comcastish monopoly in which other players are explicitly blocked from entering the market.

For what it's worth, Bing and Yahoo also list Yahoo Finance first, if searched for "TSLA".

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