Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Search Is Dying

dkb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#731

Post by dannysullivan »

ultrarunner wrote: post #554
judge2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue unt…

I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#732

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Google's home-grown recipe metadata format, and a single WordPress plugin to create recipe blogs, are the reason you can't find a decent recipe on Google.

Google's search engine is, without a doubt, superior to all alternatives. The fact that it's full of ads and junk is a conscious choice. Google could turn all that crap off tomorrow, and it would go back to being the best search results. Nobody has invested as much money in accurate results as Google has, and nobody will get close for years.

Search is, itself, dying. Search is probably one of the hardest things you can do with technology. We've gotten to the point that there's just too much shit to search through in too many ways. We need to stop relying on search, and start curating knowledge. "That's impossible", you say; I direct you to Wikipedia.org.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#733

Post by pixodaros »

I gave up on Google search around 2012 or 2013 (I occasionally use some of their specialized engines such as Google Scholar, or use a Google search as a last resort). So this feels sort of like a post marveling that blogger and blogspot are no longer as popular in the USA as medium or substack, its true but not news.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#734

Post by [deleted] »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

[deleted]

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#735

Post by allochthon »

There's disincentives for Google to do the right thing, for sure, e.g., ignoring quotation marks. I assume this is so that you never see a blank page (and so ads can be shown, which would be weird to see if there were no other results).

But, as the author mentioned, a lot of the problem is the inauthentic content on the internet that Google must sift through and filter. What makes Reddit still not half-bad (although this quality is under direct attack by brigading and troll farms) is that you have user-generated, user-curated content and a not-too-bad voting system.

In this context, I think a future iteration on search engines will be hand-curated results, under actual human-curated topics (rather than fuzzy machine-learning-inferred ones). Think of a huge directed acyclic graph of topics that goes down twelve levels or more in some cases. If you have enough people involved in this kind of crowd-sourcing, I think it can be made to work.

A challenge that arises in this context is how to prioritize content added to the wiki search engine by good contributors, and deprioritize content added by the content farms. I think this can be managed with a combination of well-conceived reputation management and providing users the ability to specify other users (people who seem trustworthy and whose tastes are solid) whose preferences will then be used to weight search results.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#738

Post by dannysullivan »

arketyp wrote: post #55
judge2020 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…

This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. Th…

I work for Google Search. We have several ways for you to do this. The easies is to put quotes around a word or a phrase that you absolutely, positively want to be present in content retrieved. And yes -- it still works. It really really does, but if you or anyone finds an example where you believe it doesn't, please let me know. We'll debug it. The reasons people sometimes think it's not working is because the text appears in ALT text, or it appears in text that's not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text), or there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat") or sometimes a page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available). You can also use verbatim mode from the toolbar so that we search for only the exact words you provide.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#739

Post by bshoemaker »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

That's so funny, because I use Google to search reddit, because Google's search of reddit is better than Reddit's.

Re: Google Search Is Dying

#740

Post by orangepurple »

softwarebeware wrote: post #6

Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…

More info about the Dead Internet Theory (DIT)

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

Archive: https://archive.ph/VoaxV

Post reply on HN