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We laud Google for being our goto for everything, but it surprises me that search hasn't fragmented into specialised fields. Building a Google just for farming

by Jedi72 8y ago

We laud Google for being our goto for everything, but it surprises me that search hasn't fragmented into specialised fields. Building a Google just for farming for example, seems like it could be better at serving that niche than gigantic Google, and people definitely have enough headspace for a few more websites if they provide value.

TomMarius 8y ago
Google has one killer feature: It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. And so on. Google also understands simple plain language questions ("how do i do ... on ford mondeo mk4" works perfectly - but only Google can do that). It is even able to detect irrelevant results - e.g. it really filters just MK4 mondeos when I am looking for something, but I also had MK3 and putting MK3 into the query really did filter MK4 results away. I never had such success and productivity with any other search engine, and I really tried to like DuckDuckGo.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore. DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time. > It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    i'm sorry but ddg fails very rapidly on anything that requires semantics
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    I have to agree with the other commenter, Google understands semantics, DDG just replaces words, working even worse than without it in some cases. I seriously hope they will improve it soon (and I donated some money to them), I'd love to switch.
megous 8y ago
Well yeah, but existence of Google and similar warps people's usage of the web. Search is not just typing something into search field. You can search by surfing, by going through a link dictionary, by going through links on websites. People say, that most people are connected by i don't know how many direct relationships (6?). The same may have been true for web pages. When the search engines were much worse, people were using webrings, pingbacks, whatever - I remember going through lists of links at the end of paper magazines. Web was optimized for this kind of searching. It was called surfing for a reason. Search engines like google hugely distorted the incentives on the web. In the name of seo and adsense people did crazy things to the web (as an ecosystem). There has been an entire cottage industry of individuals creating websites specialized just for getting pagerank for other websites, or for capturing audiences via other tricks (mirroring other websites or public/national databases), or for making the website a soup of boldened keywords. Anyway, there are specialized searches all around, if you look. Product searches, torrent searches, Shodan, whois, transportation, pretty much anything that's annoying to search for in Google has a better alternative somewhere.

by Jedi72 8y ago

TomMarius 8y ago

Google has one killer feature: It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. And so on. Google also understands simple plain language questions ("how do i do ... on ford mondeo mk4" works perfectly - but only Google can do that). It is even able to detect irrelevant results - e.g. it really filters just MK4 mondeos when I am looking for something, but I also had MK3 and putting MK3 into the query really did filter MK4 results away. I never had such success and productivity with any other search engine, and I really tried to like DuckDuckGo.

reitanqild 8y ago
> It (barely, but) understands. It can find sentences that use different structure but meaning is similar. Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore. DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time. > It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words. DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  i'm sorry but ddg fails very rapidly on anything that requires semantics
- TomMarius 8y ago
  I have to agree with the other commenter, Google understands semantics, DDG just replaces words, working even worse than without it in some cases. I seriously hope they will improve it soon (and I donated some money to them), I'd love to switch.

megous 8y ago

Well yeah, but existence of Google and similar warps people's usage of the web. Search is not just typing something into search field. You can search by surfing, by going through a link dictionary, by going through links on websites. People say, that most people are connected by i don't know how many direct relationships (6?). The same may have been true for web pages. When the search engines were much worse, people were using webrings, pingbacks, whatever - I remember going through lists of links at the end of paper magazines. Web was optimized for this kind of searching. It was called surfing for a reason. Search engines like google hugely distorted the incentives on the web. In the name of seo and adsense people did crazy things to the web (as an ecosystem). There has been an entire cottage industry of individuals creating websites specialized just for getting pagerank for other websites, or for capturing audiences via other tricks (mirroring other websites or public/national databases), or for making the website a soup of boldened keywords. Anyway, there are specialized searches all around, if you look. Product searches, torrent searches, Shodan, whois, transportation, pretty much anything that's annoying to search for in Google has a better alternative somewhere.