Website search hurts my feelings

#1

Post by earthboundkid » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:18 PM UTC

Website search hurts my feelings
openmymind.net

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#2

Post by samirillian » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

Tangential, but Librivox's search leaves a lot to be desired. I love that project, and can mostly just use Google, but it would be a great volunteer project for some good Samaritan with a little more experience enhancing search than me.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#3

Post by vasco » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:55 PM UTC

If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot.

The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#4

Post by bozhark » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

Even web search sucks now

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#5

Post by jddj » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down.

Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example.

What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own data"?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#6

Post by dbetteridge » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search (Like these examples)

You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres, At least it will show the words you typed in in the results!

And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products, but do people not test these things?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#7

Post by satyrnein » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #3

If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot. The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.

Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#8

Post by alehlopeh » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#9

Post by okasaki » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful.

    n -> suggests nothing
    ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
    new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
    news -> suggests nothing
    news. -> suggests nothing
    news.y -> suggests nothing
    news.yc -> suggests nothing
    news.yco -> suggests nothing
    news.ycom -> suggests nothing
    news.ycomb -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombi -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombin -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombina -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinat -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinato -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinator -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinator. -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinator.c -> suggests nothing
    news.ycombinator.co -> suggests news.ycombinator.com
    news.ycombinator.com -> suggests news.ycombinator.com

huh???

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#10

Post by Gracana » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function on a manufacturer’s website doesn’t recognize their own part numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.