4 ms·

European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has

by lawl 9y ago

European here. First of all, this is okay. But not good. I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time. E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings from what I've tried this seems to work even without a search history on google. I've tried this across different cookieless browsers and IP's. Google just seems to get it. This seems to return (almost) the exact same shit as bing on Qwant. So I do not see how this is an improvement over bing/ddg/whatever. Man I'd love to get rid of google in my personal life, but... for my searches nobody else seems to perform. Google just seems to know what I want to search, even if I don't have a search history on that machine. Edit: For searches in german it seems to perform similarily shitty to bing. Do they get search results from bing?

fstephany 9y ago
I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.
- ehllo 9y ago
  I think qwant is a company from france.
Iv 9y ago
The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion. To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection. To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click. There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.
- nottorp 9y ago
  This privacy invasion is a two edged sword too. Google is getting very good at searching for stuff you use daily, especially if it's gaming or some other media in fashion. However, it's becoming useless for infrequent searches. Try googling any random error message and notice 90% of the results don't even contain it.
  - carvalho 9y ago
    Can you give an example of a random error message where the results do not match?
    - Annatar 9y ago
      Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.
      - carvalho 9y ago
        Thanks, but can you please give a specific example? One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded). Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results. As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.
        nottorp 9y ago
        Dude, you're treating it like a bug. It's not. It's intentional behaviour that started 2-3 years ago. Instead of giving you just the formerly relevant results, they give you all kinds of crap that they think you are interested in. You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure some marketing head will remove even that option. Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some technology that's "in fashion".
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
> First of all, this is okay. But not good. They are going through aggressive growth phase right now and could need a hand fix many things. As you mentioned (the NLP problem): https://about.qwant.com/job/ml-engineer-specialized-natural-language-processing/ https://about.qwant.com/job/ml-engineer-specialized-natural-...
frik 9y ago
Unfortunately (according to Wikipedia) like DuckDuckGo, also Qwant is mainly a meta search engine, meaning the are using Bing & Yandex and have only a small scale own web crawler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism Sponsored by European Union, France and a Germany and dubbed as Google clone a few years ago is "Exalead", a real large scale web search engine. Unfortunately it got bought by Daussault (Catia 3D CAD), but it's still online and works: https://www.exalead.com/search/ https://www.exalead.com/search/

by lawl 9y ago

fstephany 9y ago

I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.

ehllo 9y ago
I think qwant is a company from france.

Iv 9y ago

The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion. To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection. To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click. There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.

nottorp 9y ago
This privacy invasion is a two edged sword too. Google is getting very good at searching for stuff you use daily, especially if it's gaming or some other media in fashion. However, it's becoming useless for infrequent searches. Try googling any random error message and notice 90% of the results don't even contain it.
- carvalho 9y ago
  Can you give an example of a random error message where the results do not match?
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.
    - carvalho 9y ago
      Thanks, but can you please give a specific example? One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded). Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results. As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.
      - nottorp 9y ago
        Dude, you're treating it like a bug. It's not. It's intentional behaviour that started 2-3 years ago. Instead of giving you just the formerly relevant results, they give you all kinds of crap that they think you are interested in. You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure some marketing head will remove even that option. Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some technology that's "in fashion".

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

> First of all, this is okay. But not good. They are going through aggressive growth phase right now and could need a hand fix many things. As you mentioned (the NLP problem): https://about.qwant.com/job/ml-engineer-specialized-natural-language-processing/ https://about.qwant.com/job/ml-engineer-specialized-natural-...

frik 9y ago

Unfortunately (according to Wikipedia) like DuckDuckGo, also Qwant is mainly a meta search engine, meaning the are using Bing & Yandex and have only a small scale own web crawler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism Sponsored by European Union, France and a Germany and dubbed as Google clone a few years ago is "Exalead", a real large scale web search engine. Unfortunately it got bought by Daussault (Catia 3D CAD), but it's still online and works: https://www.exalead.com/search/ https://www.exalead.com/search/