5 ms·
Google Books and the open web
- testplzignore 8y agoGoogle Search is like when you go into a store and an employee asks, "do you need help finding something?". I tell them no, but they awkwardly follow me around the store anyways.
- lihaciudaniel 8y agoThere's no room for reasoning with those people.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoIt's more like going into a store, approaching an employee, telling them what you're looking for, and then complaining about them doing their best to help you achieve your aim.
- brandonhorst 8y agoGoogle has been doing this for ages, not only with Books results but web search results. If the query is associated with some Entity, it will return various (hopefully useful) about that entity even if they do not contain text involved at all. This is how, for example the query "that movie where there are two magicians" returns varied results about The Prestige, whereas "that movie where there are four magicians" returns various results about Now You See Me. A pure text search would likely return very similar results, but the entity mapping heavily impacts the search results.
- enriquto 8y agoIf you quote a part of your search query, then google only returns pages containing that text.
- reaperducer 8y agoUsed to. My recent experience is that this has either been disabled, or is applied unevenly.
- aendruk 8y agoRelegated to Tools → All results → Verbatim.
- VikingCoder 8y agoI felt like I arrived in the future when I spoke into my phone, "George Clooney movie with the penis chair," and "Burn After Reading (2008)" was the top result.
- Jaruzel 8y agoSearch can no longer be relied upon to return standard results. Using the book index as a synonym, when you pick up a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, you know that the index is the same as it was when the book was printed. It's not been secretly updated based how many people looked up each section in that volume globally. You know that if you are the first ever person to look up Early Chinese Pottery that if the entry isn't indexed, then it's not in that volume, and it's not because the index decided that it wasn't a popular enough topic and removed it from the index. I know Google don't actually remove non-popular items from their indexes, they just bury them behind results pages of more popular 'relevant' results. To the lay person, the result they are looking for may as well be removed. I appreciate that Google and Bing spend millions of dollars trying to purge their indexes of spam, but they also seem to spend millions of dollars creating adaptive results based on an unknown list of parameters and variables that are opaque even to the search organisations themselves. It's time a new search player stepped up with a proper mature indexing concept that allows for deep hierarchical filter searching based on a semi-static system that only removes results from search when they actually go offline, and doesn't prioritise social media posts above everything else. We need to bring the internet back to the primary function of an information resource first and foremost. The clickbait-ad-selling junkie that it has become is creating a closed circle of idiotic users consuming and creating yet more idiotic content, like a fish eating its own tail. What's more, Google and Bing are the primary enablers of this whole problem. I don't know how to fix it, but somebody has to do something before the internet becomes nothing more than an ad-ridden gogglebox in the same way television has already become.
- amelius 8y agoWhat we basically need is universities taking the lead in developing a variety of search algorithms for different purposes, and publishing them.
- klez 8y agoI may be mistaken, but I think universities are publishing more than enough papers on the subject. The actual problem is that implementing and operating this kind of things is costly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]