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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

#71

Post by swe »

adevine wrote: post #30
ErikAugust wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a small company could design a credible alternative to Google, I'm sure it would have been done - the incentives are too great. Entrenched businesses are RARELY displaced from their top position. Instead, what usually happens is the world changes around them, and the entrenched business is ill suited to compete in the new world. Nobody ever managed to seriously challenge Microsoft for desktop/laptop OS dominance:…

Search, or the quest for knowledge, is not going to be displaced or marginalized. If a small company builds true AI, Google is done.

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

#72

Post by zeven7 »

rsync wrote: post #63

Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this. There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless. The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier do…

I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you mean by that. From the article you linked:

When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. Examples: jaguar speed -car or pandas -site:wikipedia.org

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

#73

Post by dragandj »

webmasterraj wrote: post #28
ErikAugust wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. Search is a resource-intensive algorithmic problem. So you need one of two things to beat Google: more resources or a much better algorithm. You're not going to get the first unless you're Facebook or Amazon or God, but maybe you can build a smarter algorithm. You are up against an army of some of the smartest computer scientists and mathematicians ever assembled -- but what you have going for you is a complet…

Additionally, you'll still have to find a way to make money. Even if you manage to get on par with Google's search results, it is difficult to replicate their advertising cash cow, and even more difficult to invent a completely new monetization strategy and make it successful.

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

#74

Post by rsync »

zeven7 wrote: post #72
rsync wrote: post #63

Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this. There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless. The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier do…

I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you mean by that. From the article you linked: When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, li…

"Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped..."

That is the definition of not working. The point of the quotes is to allow searching for literal strings.

You have elucidated the entire problem. Unless, of course, you're just searching for movie star names, in which case the rubbery nature of the search results really doesn't matter.

It appears that -negative searching does work, which is amazing - that's nice to know. But it immediately reminds me of a terrible, glaring problem: searching for command line switches. You cannot effectively search for things like:

rsync --ignore-existing

... since they are interpreted as -negative keywords, even if you quote them.

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

#75

Post by vonklaus »

zeven7 wrote: post #72
rsync wrote: post #63

Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this. There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless. The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier do…

I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you mean by that. From the article you linked: When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, li…

> I think most of your points are wrong.

I believe s/he makes a good case.

Google provides no concept of time. Best case conception of time seems to be either provided by the site directly, e.g. "article date" or something to this effect, or t0 = when google first learned about the page.

Top anser for: "nodejs" + "2016" mongo api

returns top hit: 2015, 2nd hit 2014.

and that I can't give it context myself:

Qouted strings can't possibly work. There is almost certainly an algorithm in the background to provide confidence that they could work before being run. Even with the best case optimization, how could they check every page in index for:

"does google respect qoutes?", I mean even if it finds pages with "google", "respect", "quotes" then runs query on all of them, how could it be fast enough for a human.

In above case, it is possible, however smaller phrases with common words can't ever be respected.

> Google is a natural language search engine

Eeryone has a google search profile. Allowing someone to calibrate theirs would provide them best results. Outline down thread, I explain why it would be nearly impossible for google to do this better than you.

Your appraisal of the not or "-" operator falls into the same problems in terms of time. I can't define my percentage of crawl index that is authoritative, have to have the applied "-" operator applied to a larger base than google and this may not be possible in limited time.

One idea I had is that google could actually take longer, and update itself on the rolling basis. So immediate best guess would come up, and then it would continue running in bg and rerank if you waited another 3 seconds for better results.

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

#76

Post by grey-area »

romaniv wrote: post #31
hotcool wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newcomers might be better off approaching the challenge in a totally different way.

A newcomer can index, store, search and display data differently, but first they still have to get that data. Which means dealing with JavaScript, paywalls and other fun stuff like that. Besides, regardless of what you do, you would need to have tons of storage, bandwidth, CPU power and a high-availability infrastructure.

The vast majority of the data on the internet is dross or spam, if someone finds a way to index only quality content, the crawling burden could be radically smaller.

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

#77

Post by vonklaus »

adevine wrote: post #30
ErikAugust wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a small company could design a credible alternative to Google, I'm sure it would have been done - the incentives are too great. Entrenched businesses are RARELY displaced from their top position. Instead, what usually happens is the world changes around them, and the entrenched business is ill suited to compete in the new world. Nobody ever managed to seriously challenge Microsoft for desktop/laptop OS dominance:…

i started working on a model, i discovered memex-explorer after and they had apparently designed a slightly less decentralized model but had already implemented it however the project was suspended indefinitely.

memex-explorer + blockchain is the model. A company can not do it. A company can design a platform, and many companies can sell on the optimization & information marketplace to fix problem.

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

#78

Post by vonklaus »

chillingeffect wrote: post #58
ErikAugust wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe the model will be a programatic hierarchical lookup:

local cache ===> personal cloud cache ===> centralized crawl repo ===> small specialized data cache sold into marketplace ===> faiil

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

#79

Post by Nadya »

vonklaus wrote: post #64
Nadya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Correct. However the problems (as I see them now) are 2fold: No concept of time. Best case conception of time seems to be either provided by the site, "article date" or something to this effect, or t0 = when google first learned about the page. So yes, "goat" + "animal" will return your results. Try: https://www.google.com/#q=%22nodejs%22+%2B+%222016%22++mongo... Top anser for: "nodejs" + "2016" mongo api returns top…

You can set a time range under "Search Tools". See here: http://i.imgur.com/n5BNkei.png

As for filtering by backend technology - I'm not sure that would always be feasible. While it may be possible to filter default Wordpress sites, I'm not so sure about sites whom backbone architecture may not be known or publicly available.

E:

As for your computer issue, try searching for "problem/error name" + "solved" rather than "how to fix" + "problem/error name".

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

#80

Post by solveforall »

vonklaus wrote: post #22
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know your reasoning as to why search cannot be decoupled from the browser; I would like to know why you think that a browser war began about six months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11134798 Trying to find time to continue work on something a bit more polished but it is not ready. This is my response in another thread, either ctrl+f my un or "-2" and you will see response to similar query. Idea is "so obviously crazy", mentioning it publicly for several months and begging people to consider it and work on it has been met with down votes or completely ignoring…

Can you explain the image and what it's trying to show? That the number of text links should be more than the number of image links to well known sites? I'm asking because I do something similar on my site, solveforall.com, but to a much lesser degree of course.
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