50 ms·

How is search so bad? A case study

319 points by Tenoke 7y ago

anuraj 7y ago
Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.
  - Pxtl 7y ago
    To be fair, Google has always been trash at searching for recentness. I don't remember a time when searching "recommended X (current year)" didn't return old out-of-date info. I think Google has had a habit of returning 3-year-old pages since its inception.
    - gundmc 7y ago
      Did you try clicking Search Tools and limiting the date range there instead of in the query string? Always works for me.
  - wickedOne 7y ago
    searching for best cell phone to buy site:reddit.com and setting it to results from last month works fine...
    - Tenoke 7y ago
      Did you click on the results? I just checked that exact query and it's mostly the same links - the first one is the one from 6 years ago, as with my original search.
    - soheil 7y ago
      Still getting results that are outdated if you click on the links, even though the date on the search results page is recent.
- orev 7y ago
  This is good advice. I used to be very good at formatting queries in search-engine-ese, but that stopped working well. I finally tried switching to asking questions in normal language, and my results started getting good again. It seems that AI has reached a point where natural language is better than trying to talk like a computer.
arielweisberg 7y ago
Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
  - echelon 7y ago
    Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely computer friendly for ingestion and remixing. It not only turned search into a problem we could all solve, but gave us rails to start linking disparate content into a graph of meaningful relationships. But instead Google wanted to make things less strict, less semantic, harder to search, and easier to author whatever the hell you wanted. I'm sure it has nothing to do with making it difficult for other entrants to find their way into search space or take away ad-viewing eyeballs. It was all about making HTML easy and forgiving. It's a good thing they like other machine-friendly semantic formats like RSS and Atom... "Human friendly authorship" was on the other end of the axis from "easy for machines to consume". I can't believe we trusted the search monopoly to choose the winner of that race.
    - pbourke 7y ago
      It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.
      - 7y ago
overcast 7y ago
Don't get me started on Outlook search. For a company that runs a global search engine, the most prominent mail client in the world is absolutely shit for searching.
- amiga_500 7y ago
  Outlook is poor in every aspect.
ma2rten 7y ago
This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.
- aldoushuxley001 7y ago
  everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.
  - yusef555 7y ago
    But does anyone know why search on Reddit is broken? Perhaps intentionally? I don't want to get tin foil hatty but perhaps more not readily apparent false positives = more user clicks = more revenue via ad serving?
    - antonvs 7y ago
      Because search is difficult to get right. So most sites just implement a basic feature and then assume users will use Google.
    - tsian2 7y ago
      I often wonder why some fairly large companies that rely heavily on their own website don't seem to put more than a sole web developer worth of resources into them. Reddit fits into that category for me (Reddit has 400 employees). Initially I had the impression that search was hard to implement. However, spending a work week figuring it out with ElasticSearch, Solr and Sphinx changed my mind. Getting the solution to work with the scale of the website would take more work, but all the know-how is there, and they could put a whole team to the task for a month.
      - yusef555 7y ago
        I wouldn't say it's a trivial ask, but yeah, if you have 400 employees at least assign some resources to get it right. Unless it's intentionally broken. Facebook's prioritization but also randomization of the feed is a feature not a bug.
nothis 7y ago
I'm a bit cynical with this but I believe a lot of the "super smart" AI tech they no doubt run over all their search these days isn't actually that super smart. If we actually handled metadata properly "last month" would be a trivial, "dumb" thing to search for but apparently that's broken. Why?
- kqr 7y ago
  You might be surprised at how many ways "last month" is encoded just in a single data set. One of the biggest problems with search -- just about any kind of search-- is the low quality of markup/metadata. If only data was structured properly, we would barely need search in the first place!
  - nothis 7y ago
    Right! It's just... the internet isn't exactly in beta anymore. You'd think there's a timestamp type value that just tells you the date of an article or forum post that's linked. But no, we have to run a sophisticated algorithm to search for it on the page – and fail. Honestly, my second theory is that google knows exactly when a given reddit article was posted but doesn't trust the user to judge the relevancy of that information. Which might even be reasonable in many, many cases. But it's also annoying. I'm definitely seeing a trend towards "editorializing" search results on Google, where often the first half of the page isn't even websites anymore but some random info box and whatnot, and your search terms are interpreted very liberally, even when in quotes. It's one of those things that is probably better for 99% of users/uses but super annoying when you actually want precise results.
sean_pedersen 7y ago
Cuz it is goddamn hard!?
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
All search is being devoured by SEO
- arkitaip 7y ago
  This. For ever engineer that somehow works with search quality, there are thousands of experts who are working to subvert SERPs in some fashion. Pretty sure that if we gained true knowledge about the challenges that search faces due to abuse, it would be like facing one of Lovecraft's cosmic horrors.
bobosha 7y ago
I think web information access needs a new paradigm, that needs to make "search" itself irrelevant. Much like search replaced the taxonomy-based browsing (Yahoo/"Portals" of the 90s). I don't know what that is, but there needs to be paradigmatic change.
ses1984 7y ago
The worst thing for me is that I have become accustomed to search working a certain way. If I put a word in the query, it had better fracking be in the results. That's why I put it in the fracking query. I guess whatever sauce Google applies to the query maybe works better according to some metrics for some users, but it is a source of endless frustration for me.
anotheryou 7y ago
For power users it is. Probably we are just too niche to be worth supporting
ronilan 7y ago
> This is a query for checking out what reddit thinks in regards to buying a phone [reddit phone to buy] What is astonishing, is that the most obvious part of the non-progress in search over the last two decades, is just accepted as the starting point to the way things are.
rahulchhabra07 7y ago
I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews. It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better. However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings. A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Goodhart‘s Law in action. I wonder how we make a new measure that buys us more time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    The backtick in your link broke it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law (Were you on mobile and using a smart keyboard?)
    - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
      I manually added the comma on a mobile smart keyboard. :) Didn't know that doesn't work haha.
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        That damn ‘Smart Quotes’ misfeature is still causing havoc even after 30 years.
cygned 7y ago
In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me: 1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace. 2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in. 3. It tries to be smarter than me, which it fails in understanding what I am searching for. And by “understanding” I basically mean to honor what I typed and not replacing it with other words. I try to use DDG more often but Google gives me the best results most of the time if I put in more time.
- mszcz 7y ago
  Yeah, number 3 really pisses me off recently. If I type in 3 words I would like to search by those 3 words. What ends up happening is Google just decides that it's too much of a hassle or that I've made a mistake and just searches using 2. So now I have to input all the words in quotes so that it works like it supposed to in the first place. This functionallity literaly never helped me during search. Not once.
  - reportgunner 7y ago
    "try" "putting" "the" "words" "in" "respective" "quotes" "like" "this"
    - mszcz 7y ago
      That's what I'm doing, sorry it wasn't clear ;)
- voldacar 7y ago
  Agreed on all three but especially #1. The "modern" web is full of so much whitespace it's infuriating
- berkut 7y ago
  You don't even seem to be able to simply get the URL of a search result any more: some hierarchical token thing is used instead to display each search result's address, and copying any link just gives you: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=15&ved=2 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... with the url buried somewhere in the GET params.
allovernow 7y ago
I've been screaming about this for years and only recently have people begun agreeing with me - and I know exactly what the major problems are, and they are synergistic: 1. SEO has totally warped result rankings. Now instead of getting results which naturally match my keywords because of content, I'm presented with almost exclusively commercial websites which are trying to sell me something. Gone are the days where you could search for technical terms and not be bombarded by marketing websites. 2. Google's AI is far too aggressive for technical searching. It is clear that Google is using NLP to parse queries and substitute synonyms based on some sort of BERT-like encoding. The problem is that a given word may have synonyms that are actually orthogonal in meaning space. For example, if I search for trunk, Google may return results for "boot" as in car trunk, instead of anything related to SVN. Contrived example, sure - but here's where the real problem is: Google's AI is regressing to the layman's mean. It is effectively overfitting to Grandma's average search query. Think of it as the endless summer of search...and since there's no way to usefully customize your search now (can't give people too many options or they might get confused!), you're stuck combing through unrelated results and it is increasingly difficult to disambiguate your search query. Remember when advanced search existed and typing in a question to search was terrible practice? That shouldn't have changed - but as more and more non-technical people started searching, Google (rightly, from a marketing perspective) seized the opportunity aggressively. 3. Primarily because of a combination of points 1 and 2 above, and the endless summer of non-technical users, informative websites have all but disappeared in search results, replaced by shitty SEO optimized blog spam and commercial websites which offer high level summaries primarily to generate traffic and sell you shit. Curious about how to repair your own roof in detail? Well don't bother searching "roof repair" (and quotes seem to be broken too btw) because the first two pages will be full of roof repair company websites. So what is the result? The portal to the greatest asset in the history of the civilization, the internet, has gradually turned into a neutered, commercialized corporate service where users are a product. It's tragic to see all of that empowerment thrown away in the name of profit. As they say, if the user doesn't see it, it isn't there, and for this reason Google is effectively killing the internet. I haven't even gotten into the demonstrated potential for search curation and autocomplete abuse, where Google becomes an effective, centralized arbiter of truth as the defacto portal to the internet, and how dangerous such a concentrated power over society can be. Google really was admirable when it wasn't evil - now I'm about convinced that it needs to die.
mraudiobook_com 7y ago
It's Reddit, not search that is the problem you idiot.
deleted 7y ago
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drivebycomment 7y ago
Yawn. Anecdote doesn't make it a data. Search is now a sufficiently complicated and difficult problem that can't be represented by a few queries. You need qualitative analysis as well as quantitative to draw meaningful comparison.
LastZactionHero 7y ago
You're located in Berlin. It found a page on Reddit about buying phones in Berlin. Not saying you're wrong about the dates but... I dunno... seems like an odd query. "Phone to buy?" And why not just search Reddit? This site feels like we're just complaining about nothing these days. (Downvote away!)
- netsharc 7y ago
  I'm downvoting you because your response is totally useless. He wasn't looking for where to buy a phone in Berlin, and besides, it's an old reddit thread.
- flokie 7y ago
  agree..OP does a poorly formed search query and complains. try "reddit best phone to buy 2020" you're welcome!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jobseeker990 7y ago
I always wondered why a search engine can't use SEO tactics as a kind of anti-signal. What comes to the top of a google search if you filter out anyone gaming SEO?
- lordnacho 7y ago
  "The site you're after" will also try SEO tactics, because they also want to be seen. And if not using SEO gave you a better rank, then that would also become an SEO tactic. Turtles all the way down.
- CM30 7y ago
  Likely because a lot of SEO tactics are not necessarily things that hurt the quality of the site for the user. Using the right heading tags, image alt texts, meta data/schema markup, a good title and meta description etc are all SEO tactics, and they're also all things that help the user experience. Similarly, a lot of inbound/offsite SEO tactics are theoretically things that help the user as well. Providing content people want to link to, getting authorities to link to said relevant content, etc are all things a user would appreciate. Using SEO tactics as an anti signal would boost poorly designed sites, inaccessible sites, etc. What really needs to be done is something that filters out sites creating thin content just for the purposes of getting traffic, and that's harder to filter out.
carusooneliner 7y ago
From the author's search result and a quick test I ran, it appears that the specific problem here is Google doesn't seem to "understand" Reddit. If it did, search results would be based on relevancy of comments on the Reddit page, posted in the specified timeframe.
failuser 7y ago
A person using google search is not google’s customer, there is no money is building a good search engine itself.
lordnacho 7y ago
I find I agree with the article, but mainly on queries that are purchase related, or those that overlap with some kind of business. If I'm looking for some coding question, usually the right SO question comes up on the first page. Makes sense that it is so. Clearly there's incentives to show up first on a "where to buy phone" search. The actual answer without vested interests has nobody to pay for it. I bet there's some street in Berlin where there's a number of phone shops, but without coordination (eg a shopping centre) there's no way any of them will tell you that the selection is best if you just show up somewhere on that street. Also on a deeper note, I fear the internet is being flooded with terrible authority sites. Superficial articles that sound right and have lots of affilicate links. But the incentive is not to be informative and correct, rather to look right to people who don't know better - that's why they're there! - in order to funnel them to certain shops. I can just imagine there's an anti-vaxx site somewhere that purports to have real evidence and sells vaginal anti-cancer eggs.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
It's a hard problem because what is relevant is inherently subjective and context specific and only a minority of users uses the advanced search functionality so it is also not a big priority to solve it. Both Google and Duck Duck Go optimize for the simple use case where there's a bit of user context and some short query that the user typed. That's what needs to work well. For that Google is still pretty good. I try duck duck go once in a while but it's just not good enough for me right now. And of course when Google fails me, that's probably also a hard case for Duck Duck Go. The other problem is that websites provide very inconsistent meta-data, and worse, are actively trying to game the system by abusing that metadata. So, things like timestamps are not standardized at all (well, a little bit via things like microformats). So recency of data is important as one of many relevance signals but not necessarily super accurate. And given that it's a relevance signal, you have people doing SEO trying to game that as well. Anyway, Hacker News could also do with some search improvements to its ranking. It always pulls up some ancient article as the most relevant thing as opposed as the article from last week that I remembered and wanted to find back. I consult people on building search engines with Elasticsearch, so I have some idea what I'm talking about. It seems the ranking is basically "sort by points". Probably not that hard to fix that with some additional ranking signals. I just searched for "search" expecting to find this article near the top 5 (because it is recent and has search in the title). Nope; not a thing.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Hacker News doesn't even have search at the moment. It just redirects you to some crappy external site.
  - detaro 7y ago
    It giving the YC startup running the search backend some visibility doesn't mean it somehow "doesn't even have seaarch".
    - jillesvangurp 7y ago
      Exactly, there's a search box on the web site. How it's implemented is an implementation detail. Given that it happens to be something by a company (Algolia) selling this as a SAAS solution, I don't think this is a great advertisement for them either.
timwaagh 7y ago
Should not be hard to solve if they would have an algorithm to search Reddit built in. But perhaps they do not, in which case it gets much harder.
whoisjuan 7y ago
Isn’t last month supposed to be, last month chronologically speaking instead of calendar month? If I search “last month” today I would expect to get results from Dec 19,2019 and Jan 19,2020.
mellosouls 7y ago
I don't agree with the premise of the article, although I accept that the example given is clearly terrible. I haven't noticed it before, is it a recent bug? It certainly seems a significant one, but not representative of my experience using Google - which I also acknowledge is skewed according to the data they have on you and SEO gaming. But generally - those constraints acknowledged - I still find Google's search to be one of the modern wonders of the world, still the go to, and - yes - not perfect.
scottlocklin 7y ago
I agree google is shit, which is why I never use it. They're too busy being woke to run a search engine which compares to what they were doing 10-15 years ago. It's pretty obviously entirely that; smart people don't want to work in dying Brezhnevian bureaucratic hellscapes. Try Yandex for an example of a much smaller company doing a fine job at search: https://yandex.com/search/?text=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&lr=102589 https://yandex.com/search/?text=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&lr... Produces exactly what OP was looking for. QED. Qwant isn't bad either; don't remember if they piggyback off of other search results: https://www.qwant.com/?q=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&t=web https://www.qwant.com/?q=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&t=web
- klingonopera 7y ago
  IIRC, Qwant piggybacks (-ed?) off Bing.
Grimm1 7y ago
This is something I'm currently focused on solving actually. Currently on Show a ways down is the alpha but the basic gist is a search engine focused on discovery while maintaining topical relevance. We thoroughly agree that search results are kind of garbage on major engines at the moment.
avionicsguy 7y ago
This should probably be a separate submission but why is search so bad everywhere? - Confluence: Native search is horrible IME - Microsoft Help (Applications): .chm files Need I say more. - Microsoft Task Bar: Native search okay and then horrible beyond a few key words and then ... BING :-( - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? - Adobe PDFs: Readers all versions. What? You mean you want to search for TWO words. Sacrilege. Don't do it. Seriously though with all the interview code tests bubble sort, quick sort, bloom filters, etc. Why can't companies or even websites get this right? And I agree with other commenters as far as Google, Bing, DDG, or other search sites it's been going down hill but the speed of uselessness is picking up. The other nagging problem (at least for me) is that explicit searches which used to yield more relevant results now are front loaded with garbage. If I'm looking for datasheet on an STM (ST Microsystems) Chip and I start search with STM as of today STM is no longer relevant (it is, meaning it shows up after a few pages). But wow it seems like the SEOs are winning but companies that use this technique won't get my business.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  > - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? Does turning it off speed it up? I think disk indexing (the way Windows does it) is a remnant from HDD times, and might make things worse when used together with a modern SSD. > Adobe PDFs: Readers all versions. What? You mean you want to search for TWO words. Sacrilege. Don't do it. If you're just viewing and searching PDFs (and don't have to fill out PDF forms on a regular basis), check out SumatraPDF. Fastest PDF reader on Windows I've come accross so far.
- erklik 7y ago
  > - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? I use this software utility called Search Everywhere, its surprisingly good, fast and fairly accurate most of the times :)
- kops 7y ago
brownbat 7y ago
I feel like Google has often turned strict commands into fuzzy searching, maybe for a decade? I never heard a clear explanation as to why, I just imagined that it was some sort of A/B tested paternalism. Maybe most users really want fuzzy searches when using the commands I use for a strict search.
- drivebycomment 7y ago
  I think it's simply a human bias in action - people don't realize when their queries benefit from the "fuzzy matching", and they only notice/remember when they don't get what they want from search and then (often mistakenly) blame fuzzy matching for it as that's what's visible to them.
fortran77 7y ago
I just did a google search for "piano". Just the word "piano" Only one link on the first page, the wikipedia entry for "piano" had anything to do with pianos, (i.e., the instrument invented in Italy 300+ years ago that has hammers, strings, and an iron frame).
- CM30 7y ago
  What do you get when you search for that? Did a test right now, and apart from the Wikipedia page, I get videos about piano music/pianos, shop pages for buying pianos and local businesses that sell either pianos or piano lessons. So I'm curious whether the issue is that there are too many shopping/business related pages (which is fair, but at least those seem to be piano related), or whether you're getting something completely different.
  - fortran77 7y ago
    The first three links after the ad were for the same "virtual piano" (not a piano) on different websites. See https://imgur.com/a/cMC9wQH https://imgur.com/a/cMC9wQH Then the wikipedia page, then a couple of "online" non-pianos, then a company that happens to be called piano.io https://imgur.com/a/uRcyx84 https://imgur.com/a/uRcyx84 Shopping pages are fine, if we'd get links to, say Steinway, Yamaha, and Bosendorfer, or links to Lang Lang's home page, or something that has more to do with _pianos_.
jszymborski 7y ago
Not sure if DDG patched this, but querying DDG w/o the month based tick results in a result that'll point you to the correct subreddit for finding which phone to buy in <current month> [0]. Although it's not using the "This Month" dropdown, doing the vanilla search still gets you the "most correct" answer imho. [0] https://jszym.com/dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png https://jszym.com/dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png
dmfdmf 7y ago
The problem as I see it is that popularity ranking worked fine in the pre Eternal September era for the web (~10 years ago?). I think it is safe to say that most HN users skew toward searching for more technical, intellectual or scientific topics and get frustrated by their searches getting swamped by popular topics. What I'd like to see is a check box or slider bar to exclude or adjust the weighting for popularity in a search. I don't need to see links for the latest Taylor Swift breakup or what the Kardashians are up to that appear in a technical search due to a randomly shared keyword. Often, the topics I am searching for will never be popular and current search operates on the assumption that it will. A second problem is that now that Google likes to rudely assume to know what you want, i.e. ignoring quotes and negation in search or even modifying keywords, its even harder to find what you want especially if its not on the first page or two of results. Because of this interference even changing your search parameters doesn't change the results much and you see the essentially the same links. What I'd like to see is a search engine that will do a delta between say Google and Bing and drop the links common to the two services. This might lead to uncovering the more esoteric or hidden links buried by the assumptions of the algorithm. Finally, a last problem that I see right now is the filter bubble effect. I had to search for how to spell "kardashians" in the above paragraph. Now my searches and ads for the next 2-3 weeks will be poisoned by articles or ads about the Kardashians. Taking one for team to make my point, I suppose.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  > pre Eternal September era for the web (~10 years ago?) LOL, was that by chance the time that single from Green Day was released? ;) ["Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993"]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September EDIT: TIL Green Day's single has nothing to do with that September. Huh. I gave them more nerdcred than they deserved...
Razengan 7y ago
Why can't every web server just remember (index) all the content that it serves? Much like resolving DNS queries, I could then ask every server near me for specific terms. If they serve that content, they'll return a list of links containing those search terms. We could have different apps with different algorithms to sort the bare results according to the criteria that's most relevant to each individual user.
jsilence 7y ago
Maybe it is time for s personal meta search aggregator with indexing proxy. One that delegates the query to reddit/SO/github-lab search and filters the results down to those that actually match your query. The proxy indexes all the pages you surf over and includes those in the search.
soheil 7y ago
> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo. For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.
- krastanov 7y ago
  This line from the wikipedia article about DDG somewhat contradicts you, but it is rather vague: > DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. Could you elaborate on your comment, I am sincerely interested in learning the details.
  - EternalAugust 7y ago
    You can open up two web pages side by side, search the same term in both Bing and DuckDuckGo, and see many of the results are the same in similar order (at least they were the last time I did this, maybe two months ago). DuckDuckGo appears to get most of its results from Bing.
- EternalAugust 7y ago
  Yes, it gets the majority of its results from Bing. But it's not _just_ a proxy, it's an anonymizing proxy, at least if we believe their pinky swear.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing. Every time the topic of search comes up on HN, someone always jumps in and says this. Then there are a bunch of other people who jump in and say that Duck is much more than that. So, which is correct?
  - Kiro 7y ago
    https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... Interpret it as you wish. To me it sounds like they are using 400 sources and their own crawler for the Instant Answers stuff but get all their "traditional links in the search result" from Verizon(?) and Bing.
nova22033 7y ago
As for the Case Study part, and me saying this isn’t simply a rant - I lied, hence the quotation marks in the title So it's NOT a case study...
- Tenoke 7y ago
  For what is worth, I'm not sure why they changed the title here. The flippancy in my original title makes the level of diligence a bit clearer from the get go.
thoughtstheseus 7y ago
The author is not using a "search" engine, Google is a recommendation engine.
ovx99 7y ago
Using shopping engines is even worse. Google shopping and Amazon, I've been having an incredibly difficult time finding products within a price range and sorting it by price. Searching for items in quotes on Google Shopping often returns all sorts of irrelevant results. In Amazon, the 'price low to high' filter doesn't even seem to work most of the time and it includes sponsored results way out of my price range in the middle of the results. Amazon also seems to have removed any type of price range filter on the left sidebar.
lettergram 7y ago
I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads. Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. Their goal is to quickly and often get you to search things. As long as you keep using their platform, the more you search the better. [1] https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/
- l0b0 7y ago
  Is it time for paid search engines? Make users vote with their wallets and pay for the eternal arms race. Problem is, whoever is behind something like that would have to start with an already sufficiently superior experience (or massive geek cred) to make people pay from the early days. Maybe going back to manually curated results of a subset of topics would work? Or some Stack Overflow-esque model of user powered metadata generation?
  - seshagiric 7y ago
    Probably not. The problem with current search engines is that they need some way to rank the pages and hence inherently susceptible to clever SEO (that curates pages to get ranked high for certain type of queries). So having a paid search engine does not fully solve the SEO problem. Having no Ads does not takeout the SEO problem of boosting pages to top.
    - dylan604 7y ago
      If the paid for search engine ignores SEO "optimizations" and actually ranks on content AND these results prove better that attracts actual paying users, then we don't have to wait for SEO to die. Just like SEO rose to prominence to win Google result ranking because that's where the users were, the sites would stop the SEO crap. Getting this hypothetical site to get users is the real problem. Same thing with getting users to a Facebook alternative.
l0b0 7y ago
SEO is the new spam. We solved spam pretty well, but it was a very different solution space to what is available for the web: - Spammers had basically two ways to verify their efficacy – they could either sign up to every provider under the stars and test each email with each of them individually, or they could use the absence of a signal as "proof" of being caught by a filter. But neither of these are very efficient. An SEO expert can simply wait for the search engine to detect their changes and verify the result with two or three search engines quickly and automatically. - For practical purposes whether an email is spam is answered in a binary form: either it ends up in your spam box or it does not. Removing spam-looking things from search results entirely would be devastating for any site victim of a false positive. And how do you implement the equivalent of a spam box in a search engine in a useable way? - Spam filtering was implemented in different ways on every mail provider, so the bar to entry was "randomized" and spammers would have to be quite careful to pass the filters on a large subset of providers. ISPs and users currently have nowhere near the resources to implement their own ranking rules, but maybe this could be a solution in the mid to long term with massively cheaper hardware.
lqet 7y ago
Well, how do you actually determine the age of a web page? Is it the post date? How do you even find that out? Is it the last comment post date? Is it the last edit of the main post, or the last edit of a comment? How do you find this out automatically? Is it the last change the HTTP server responds with? Is it the last time the entire page has been modified? If the page is built up of multiple components like iframes, do their post dates matter? Do ads matter? If the page is dynamic, everything gets a few orders of magnitude more complicated. Point is, it is not a trivial task at all to automatically find out the time that corresponds to the intuitive understanding of the "age" of a web page.
- rwmj 7y ago
  It's the first time Google saw the page. Reddit posts have unique URLs and Google scans popular sites very regularly (in fact is rumoured to have site-specific optimizations).
  - undefined_user6 7y ago
    That can't be right if, according to OP, the first result was a reddit post from six years ago, yet the date according to Google was Jan 11, 2020. So the first time Google saw that page would likely have been the day it was published.
gglon 7y ago
https://yippy.com/ https://yippy.com/
rmetzler 7y ago
I think a main issue is the vagueness of the query. I was searching for "what phone should i buy in 2020 site:reddit.com" and while a few results where from a year ago, most where from January 2020.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Google have moved on from allowing exact searches to me made, sometimes you have to think "if I didn't know what I actually wanted to see, and was trying to make a question-form query about it, what would I write" and that gets better results, IME, than something where you know the exact words you want (which even with "" might not be in the link).
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    No, I didn't use quotes (exact match) in my query. This was only to express delimiters. Sorry for the confusion.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  Adding 2020 might kind of work in January. It wouldn't help as much for getting this month's results in November.
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    I tried it and I think you're not right. The reason why this works most of the time (at least on reddit) because there are lot's of threads which put the date in the title. Query was: what phone should i buy nov 2019 site:reddit.com
nvarsj 7y ago
The first time I realized that Google search was bad was when del.icio.us got big. I was an avid user - and I stopped using Google except for basic things. You could search tags on del.icio.us - and the results were incredibly good, far better than Google, especially for niche areas. I think, unfortunately, this kind of curated, social approach to search will never be compatible with monetization by ads. I'm not quite sure how to make a search engine profitable without significantly distorting its results. Maybe, depressingly, Google is the best thing possible given the constraint of making a profit?
z3t4 7y ago
Public information should not be filtered by one single private entity. We need a distributed system with an open standard. Search should work more like DNS... In order to get your web site indexed, you only have to publish your search URL. There should be many index cache servers, so that your search URL only get a hit when a search string expires...
discobot 7y ago
Google filters the results on date of web page update, not date of the post reddit post creation, which is the correct behaviour. And you are just making unjustified bold statements
kops 7y ago
A shoutout for duckduckgo here. I tried both qwant and duckduckgo about a couple of years ago but the quality of search results forced me back to google in a couple of days. But I gave it another shot a few weeks ago and I have been pretty happy with the search results from duckduckgo and the fact that the ads do not follow me around the web based on my searches is rather pleasant. I must admit that google hasn't done anything bad to me but their sheer size and scale is scary enough for me to look for alternatives. Now back to the search quality, I wanted to find out when exactly world economic forum 2020 is happening and google won hands down (search term = world economic forum 2020 dates). But for now and for most of my day to day search terms duckduckgo is doing okay. I know this won't last for long as they also are looking at advertising dollars but I hope then someone else will stand up to challenge duckduckgo+google combined.
miket 7y ago
The article hardly supports its conclusion with these cherry-picked examples; however, the core reason these results don't meet the author's expectations is that Google's AI does not understand the content of webpages well enough to identify the publication date accurately (at least anywhere near as accurately as a human can). Google's publication date is based on whether it found changes to the HTML on its own crawl date (which is very noisy due to today's dynamically generated website) or based on schema.org/microdata, which as other commentators point it is game-able for purposes of SEO, or simply missing on most sites. As a contrast, take a look at how Diffbot, an AI system that understands the content of the page by using computer vision and NLP techniques on it, interprets the page in question: https://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?url=https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/1mwxx3/best_place_to_by_a_cheap_new_smartphone/ https://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?url=https://www.reddit.co... It can reliably extract the publication date on each post, without resorting to using site-specific rules. (You can try it on other discussion threads and article pages, that have a visible publication date).
mariushn 7y ago
Any suggestions on how could one start an open source search engine business? Being able to index the whole internet as an MVP and quickly serve queries on top of this data has a major initial and operating cost.
james_impliu 7y ago
I increasingly just use google to search sites I already know have better content than the web at large, since it so often feels like it sucks for any depth of information. Want to get in touch with someone? name job site:linkedin.com. Want to find how to solve a tech issue? "issue" site:stackoverflow.com, and so on. Google's search of sites like this is pretty good (although the recency working well would be really good... but perhaps impossible to solve well), and often better than in site search. But that + very basic fact finding "how much is a lb in kg", "where is restaurant X" are pretty much all I feel it's good for. Then again, I guess it's not supposed to be an encyclopaedia (or it can be, site:wikipedia.org!)
3xblah 7y ago
What was the query the author used? Did he try something like this "https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=reddit.com&q=best+place+to+buy+a+cheap+new+smartphone&num=100" https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=reddit.com&q=best+p...
- fluffy87 7y ago
  Watch out with doing more complicated searches like extending those to a date range - they get people “banned” from using google search.
  - CriticalCathed 7y ago
    Elaborate. I was doing some deep searching in very specific date ranges with lots of modifiers and google gave me the "your query reminds us of bots or some shit try again later" and I had to stop because it wouldn't let the queries through anymore. Is that what that was?
    - jborichevskiy 7y ago
      Yes, that sounds like that same thing. I've encountered Google ReCaptcha as well a few times when searching from a logged out browser.
  - clarry 7y ago
    Even browsing beyond the first few pages of results can end you up having to play with captchas. Also it's funny how they lie about having about a quadrillion results, and then when you're on page 12, suddenly that's all the 150 results they have, sorry.
    - 3xblah 7y ago
      That quadrillion results bit is like a relic from a bygone era, when people actually cared. I have not hit captchas very often. Even IP bans only last hours. It is annoying, but low risk. I do searching from shell prompt, never browser. What always amazed me about Google is that they are not willing to let users to skip pages 1-11 and immediately jump to, say, page 12. Sometimes queries are non-commercial and there are no ads. Still, jumping straight to page 12 can trigger a captcha. I wrote a script that reverses or randomises the order of Google results, as an experiment.
contingencies 7y ago
How is search so bad? My broad take is that previously search worked (Altavista era through early-mid Google) because it referenced organic links put in place by real humans and keywords, plus basic metadata like physical location of servers, freshness of content, frequency of update, metadata behind domains, etc. Since the mid 1990s that has increasingly been gamed heavily, PageRank style approaches have come and sort of gone, and a vast majority of content accessed by consumers has moved to one of a small number of platforms or walled gardens, often mobile applications. I don't know for sure, but I'd assume with confidence that the majority of result inclusion decisions made by Google are now based on rejection blacklists, 'known good' safe hits and effectively minimizing anomalous results above the fold. Simultaneously, the internet has become an international place and the bar has been raised for new entrants such that an incapacity to return meaningful results in multiple languages bars a search engine from any significant market position. A huge percentage of results are either Wikipedia/reference pages, local news or Q&A sites. Further, huge amounts of what is out there is behind Cloudflare or similar firewalls which will probably frustrate new and emerging spiders. The existing monopolies, having some established capacity and reputation in this regard, may have become somewhat entrenched and lazy, and do not care enough about improvement. They are literally able to sail happily on market inertia, while generating ridiculous advertising revenues. In China we have Baidu, and in most rest of the world, Google. Who will bring about a new search engine? Greg Lindahl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greglindahl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greglindahl who formerly made Blekko is apparently working on another one. I once wrote a small one (~2001) which was based upon the concept of multilingual semantic indices (a sort of non-rigorously obtained language-neutral epistemology was the core database). I still think this would be a meaningful approach to follow, since so much is lost in translation, particularly around current events. One problem with evolving public utilities in this area are that such approaches border on open source intelligence (OSI) and most people with linguistic or computational chops in that area leave academia and get eaten up by the military industrial complex or Google. Now we have https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ which makes reasonable quality sample crawl data super-available. Now "all" we need is people to hack on algorithms and a means to commercialize them as alternatives to the status quo.
aaron695 7y ago
Everyone can make a better search engine in the comments, but strangely, barley no one is actually commenting on the actual case study. Search based around time of publishing. I guess another committee to paint the whole garden shed is easy, talking about what paint to use is hard. I suspect Reddit needs to add meta data of the publishing date. It is complicated in a forum, is it publish date or last comment date. But Google is still getting the basics wrong ie Every comment date is a year ago, still less than a month in search. It still doesn't help many time based issues (News always displays new headlines on old articles. So you'll see Iran funeral crowd crush on 'old' news articles in search) but it's a start.
peterwwillis 7y ago
The user probably would be less pissed off if they had no way to filter by time. An interesting lesson in UX.
dbetteridge 7y ago
Does anyone else no longer see the date at all in their google search results? Drives me mad, Especially when I only want results from a certain year/month.
WarOnPrivacy 7y ago
GOOGLE IGNORES SEARCH OPERANDS So I went to DDG, 2 years back. Now DDG ignores search operands too.
williesleg 7y ago
They all censor the results. Fuckers.
anonu 7y ago
We need a taxonomy. In the old days finding links was done by going to a directory: dmoz or Yahoo. I'm not saying we regress back to the past... I'm sure there is some hidden underlying directory structure in web search today. What I'm suggesting is making it more accessible to users as a way of navigating the web for good content.
cf512 7y ago
As a point of clarification, "Past Month" is not the same thing as "Last Month" or "Previous Month". "Past Month" in this context actually means the past 30 days from today. It's a really subtle and confusing nuance in English. In any case, Google Search having results from 5 days ago is accurate when filtering for Past Month. Google (being a global resource) really should reword "Past Month" to "Past 30 Days" to eliminate any confusion.
- radicalriddler 7y ago
  But still, none of the reddit posts he referenced are from the past month. They say things like Jan 11, 2020; which would be correct, but the actual post on Reddit is 6 years ago. Whether this is Google or Reddit causing this is another issue.
JDiculous 7y ago
Google search is absymal at generic questions like the one the author mentioned about the best phones, or others like "Redux vs. Mobx" or "styled-components vs emotion". I end up just searching Reddit (or sometimes stackoverflow) not because Reddit is particularly good for technical discussions, but because Google's default search literally just returns blogspam from dev agencies. Why hasn't a superior competitor emerged yet? I get that the web is super broad and indexing the entire thing is an enormous task. But perhaps there's room for more niche search engines (eg. focused on tech) to stab away at this Google search monopoly.
sj4nz 7y ago
When I'm ready to flip the table over about search results, I remember that https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ exists and I give that a whirl. Then when I'm sick of seeing links to sites that are highly-SEOed but low-signal, Tampermonkey is there to give me a nice little [block] button to remove them. Fantasy-future: Mozilla could "widen out" their library and hire 20,000 librarians to curate the "New Web" in a non-wiki-format. If you paid each librarian about $150K/annum, that's about $0.60/annum from 5B subscribers, just for their salaries for the advertising-free library.
asdff 7y ago
What kind of cluster do I need to just grep the web?
syphilis2 7y ago
It's worse than the author described. Google won't even sort by date correctly. I ran into this problem years ago and it still exists. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+buy+a+phone&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/2019,cd_max:1/1/2020,sbd:1&tbm=nws&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixnoaswJHnAhWNl-AKHe0pAVAQpwUIHw&biw=442&bih=727&dpr=3 https://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+buy+a+phone&hl=en&t...
zejn 7y ago
Well, searching for "phone to buy" isn't going to do much good, is it. "Reddit best 2020 phone" works for me much better, though ... User friendly it is? No.
yusef555 7y ago
eat my asshole
fiatjaf 7y ago
The point no one is making in these comments is: How is search so good? I've tried to implement search on small websites and always failed miserably. Results were always terrible no matter what library/database/indexer I used. I cannot even imagine how one would proceed to implement search over the entire internet. I also have the experience that Google is much worse the some years ago, I'm also frustrated by everything, but still, it does the job much better than anyone else probably -- otherwise someone would have better results overall. (Also, yes, I use DuckDuckGo and I don't think it's so much worse than Google, which is good, because I used to think no one would ever be able to do be as good as Google but today there are many competitors that come close.)

319 points by Tenoke 7y ago

Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.

Tenoke 7y ago
A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.
- Pxtl 7y ago
  To be fair, Google has always been trash at searching for recentness. I don't remember a time when searching "recommended X (current year)" didn't return old out-of-date info. I think Google has had a habit of returning 3-year-old pages since its inception.
  - gundmc 7y ago
    Did you try clicking Search Tools and limiting the date range there instead of in the query string? Always works for me.
- wickedOne 7y ago
  searching for best cell phone to buy site:reddit.com and setting it to results from last month works fine...
  - Tenoke 7y ago
    Did you click on the results? I just checked that exact query and it's mostly the same links - the first one is the one from 6 years ago, as with my original search.
  - soheil 7y ago
    Still getting results that are outdated if you click on the links, even though the date on the search results page is recent.
orev 7y ago
This is good advice. I used to be very good at formatting queries in search-engine-ese, but that stopped working well. I finally tried switching to asking questions in normal language, and my results started getting good again. It seems that AI has reached a point where natural language is better than trying to talk like a computer.

arielweisberg 7y ago

Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?

MrEldritch 7y ago
I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
- echelon 7y ago
  Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely computer friendly for ingestion and remixing. It not only turned search into a problem we could all solve, but gave us rails to start linking disparate content into a graph of meaningful relationships. But instead Google wanted to make things less strict, less semantic, harder to search, and easier to author whatever the hell you wanted. I'm sure it has nothing to do with making it difficult for other entrants to find their way into search space or take away ad-viewing eyeballs. It was all about making HTML easy and forgiving. It's a good thing they like other machine-friendly semantic formats like RSS and Atom... "Human friendly authorship" was on the other end of the axis from "easy for machines to consume". I can't believe we trusted the search monopoly to choose the winner of that race.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.
    - 7y ago

overcast 7y ago

Don't get me started on Outlook search. For a company that runs a global search engine, the most prominent mail client in the world is absolutely shit for searching.

amiga_500 7y ago
Outlook is poor in every aspect.

ma2rten 7y ago

This article is essentially just complaining that DDG and Google don't have special parsing for reddit pages ("How come it doesn't know that thread didn't get many upvotes?", "How come it thinks some change to the site's layout was an update to the page?") Maybe if you want to search reddit, the best search engine is the search bar on reddit.com.

aldoushuxley001 7y ago
everyone knows the best way to search reddit is via google. The search engine bar in reddit is for optics only.
- yusef555 7y ago
  But does anyone know why search on Reddit is broken? Perhaps intentionally? I don't want to get tin foil hatty but perhaps more not readily apparent false positives = more user clicks = more revenue via ad serving?
  - antonvs 7y ago
    Because search is difficult to get right. So most sites just implement a basic feature and then assume users will use Google.
  - tsian2 7y ago
    I often wonder why some fairly large companies that rely heavily on their own website don't seem to put more than a sole web developer worth of resources into them. Reddit fits into that category for me (Reddit has 400 employees). Initially I had the impression that search was hard to implement. However, spending a work week figuring it out with ElasticSearch, Solr and Sphinx changed my mind. Getting the solution to work with the scale of the website would take more work, but all the know-how is there, and they could put a whole team to the task for a month.
    - yusef555 7y ago
      I wouldn't say it's a trivial ask, but yeah, if you have 400 employees at least assign some resources to get it right. Unless it's intentionally broken. Facebook's prioritization but also randomization of the feed is a feature not a bug.

nothis 7y ago

I'm a bit cynical with this but I believe a lot of the "super smart" AI tech they no doubt run over all their search these days isn't actually that super smart. If we actually handled metadata properly "last month" would be a trivial, "dumb" thing to search for but apparently that's broken. Why?

kqr 7y ago
You might be surprised at how many ways "last month" is encoded just in a single data set. One of the biggest problems with search -- just about any kind of search-- is the low quality of markup/metadata. If only data was structured properly, we would barely need search in the first place!
- nothis 7y ago
  Right! It's just... the internet isn't exactly in beta anymore. You'd think there's a timestamp type value that just tells you the date of an article or forum post that's linked. But no, we have to run a sophisticated algorithm to search for it on the page – and fail. Honestly, my second theory is that google knows exactly when a given reddit article was posted but doesn't trust the user to judge the relevancy of that information. Which might even be reasonable in many, many cases. But it's also annoying. I'm definitely seeing a trend towards "editorializing" search results on Google, where often the first half of the page isn't even websites anymore but some random info box and whatnot, and your search terms are interpreted very liberally, even when in quotes. It's one of those things that is probably better for 99% of users/uses but super annoying when you actually want precise results.

sean_pedersen 7y ago

Cuz it is goddamn hard!?

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

All search is being devoured by SEO

arkitaip 7y ago
This. For ever engineer that somehow works with search quality, there are thousands of experts who are working to subvert SERPs in some fashion. Pretty sure that if we gained true knowledge about the challenges that search faces due to abuse, it would be like facing one of Lovecraft's cosmic horrors.

bobosha 7y ago

I think web information access needs a new paradigm, that needs to make "search" itself irrelevant. Much like search replaced the taxonomy-based browsing (Yahoo/"Portals" of the 90s). I don't know what that is, but there needs to be paradigmatic change.

ses1984 7y ago

The worst thing for me is that I have become accustomed to search working a certain way. If I put a word in the query, it had better fracking be in the results. That's why I put it in the fracking query. I guess whatever sauce Google applies to the query maybe works better according to some metrics for some users, but it is a source of endless frustration for me.

anotheryou 7y ago

For power users it is. Probably we are just too niche to be worth supporting

ronilan 7y ago

> This is a query for checking out what reddit thinks in regards to buying a phone [reddit phone to buy] What is astonishing, is that the most obvious part of the non-progress in search over the last two decades, is just accepted as the starting point to the way things are.

rahulchhabra07 7y ago

I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews. It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better. However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings. A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Goodhart‘s Law in action. I wonder how we make a new measure that buys us more time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- vanderZwan 7y ago
  The backtick in your link broke it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law (Were you on mobile and using a smart keyboard?)
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    I manually added the comma on a mobile smart keyboard. :) Didn't know that doesn't work haha.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      That damn ‘Smart Quotes’ misfeature is still causing havoc even after 30 years.

cygned 7y ago

In my opinion, Google is getting worse constantly, which boils down to basically the following aspects for me: 1. I don’t like the UI anymore. I preferred the condensed view, with more information and less whitespace. 2. Popping up some kind of menu when you return from a search results page shifts down the rest of the items resulting in me clicking search links I am not interested in. 3. It tries to be smarter than me, which it fails in understanding what I am searching for. And by “understanding” I basically mean to honor what I typed and not replacing it with other words. I try to use DDG more often but Google gives me the best results most of the time if I put in more time.

mszcz 7y ago
Yeah, number 3 really pisses me off recently. If I type in 3 words I would like to search by those 3 words. What ends up happening is Google just decides that it's too much of a hassle or that I've made a mistake and just searches using 2. So now I have to input all the words in quotes so that it works like it supposed to in the first place. This functionallity literaly never helped me during search. Not once.
- reportgunner 7y ago
  "try" "putting" "the" "words" "in" "respective" "quotes" "like" "this"
  - mszcz 7y ago
    That's what I'm doing, sorry it wasn't clear ;)
voldacar 7y ago
Agreed on all three but especially #1. The "modern" web is full of so much whitespace it's infuriating
berkut 7y ago
You don't even seem to be able to simply get the URL of a search result any more: some hierarchical token thing is used instead to display each search result's address, and copying any link just gives you: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=15&ved=2 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... with the url buried somewhere in the GET params.

allovernow 7y ago

I've been screaming about this for years and only recently have people begun agreeing with me - and I know exactly what the major problems are, and they are synergistic: 1. SEO has totally warped result rankings. Now instead of getting results which naturally match my keywords because of content, I'm presented with almost exclusively commercial websites which are trying to sell me something. Gone are the days where you could search for technical terms and not be bombarded by marketing websites. 2. Google's AI is far too aggressive for technical searching. It is clear that Google is using NLP to parse queries and substitute synonyms based on some sort of BERT-like encoding. The problem is that a given word may have synonyms that are actually orthogonal in meaning space. For example, if I search for trunk, Google may return results for "boot" as in car trunk, instead of anything related to SVN. Contrived example, sure - but here's where the real problem is: Google's AI is regressing to the layman's mean. It is effectively overfitting to Grandma's average search query. Think of it as the endless summer of search...and since there's no way to usefully customize your search now (can't give people too many options or they might get confused!), you're stuck combing through unrelated results and it is increasingly difficult to disambiguate your search query. Remember when advanced search existed and typing in a question to search was terrible practice? That shouldn't have changed - but as more and more non-technical people started searching, Google (rightly, from a marketing perspective) seized the opportunity aggressively. 3. Primarily because of a combination of points 1 and 2 above, and the endless summer of non-technical users, informative websites have all but disappeared in search results, replaced by shitty SEO optimized blog spam and commercial websites which offer high level summaries primarily to generate traffic and sell you shit. Curious about how to repair your own roof in detail? Well don't bother searching "roof repair" (and quotes seem to be broken too btw) because the first two pages will be full of roof repair company websites. So what is the result? The portal to the greatest asset in the history of the civilization, the internet, has gradually turned into a neutered, commercialized corporate service where users are a product. It's tragic to see all of that empowerment thrown away in the name of profit. As they say, if the user doesn't see it, it isn't there, and for this reason Google is effectively killing the internet. I haven't even gotten into the demonstrated potential for search curation and autocomplete abuse, where Google becomes an effective, centralized arbiter of truth as the defacto portal to the internet, and how dangerous such a concentrated power over society can be. Google really was admirable when it wasn't evil - now I'm about convinced that it needs to die.

mraudiobook_com 7y ago

It's Reddit, not search that is the problem you idiot.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

drivebycomment 7y ago

Yawn. Anecdote doesn't make it a data. Search is now a sufficiently complicated and difficult problem that can't be represented by a few queries. You need qualitative analysis as well as quantitative to draw meaningful comparison.

LastZactionHero 7y ago

You're located in Berlin. It found a page on Reddit about buying phones in Berlin. Not saying you're wrong about the dates but... I dunno... seems like an odd query. "Phone to buy?" And why not just search Reddit? This site feels like we're just complaining about nothing these days. (Downvote away!)

netsharc 7y ago
I'm downvoting you because your response is totally useless. He wasn't looking for where to buy a phone in Berlin, and besides, it's an old reddit thread.
flokie 7y ago
agree..OP does a poorly formed search query and complains. try "reddit best phone to buy 2020" you're welcome!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jobseeker990 7y ago

I always wondered why a search engine can't use SEO tactics as a kind of anti-signal. What comes to the top of a google search if you filter out anyone gaming SEO?

lordnacho 7y ago
"The site you're after" will also try SEO tactics, because they also want to be seen. And if not using SEO gave you a better rank, then that would also become an SEO tactic. Turtles all the way down.
CM30 7y ago
Likely because a lot of SEO tactics are not necessarily things that hurt the quality of the site for the user. Using the right heading tags, image alt texts, meta data/schema markup, a good title and meta description etc are all SEO tactics, and they're also all things that help the user experience. Similarly, a lot of inbound/offsite SEO tactics are theoretically things that help the user as well. Providing content people want to link to, getting authorities to link to said relevant content, etc are all things a user would appreciate. Using SEO tactics as an anti signal would boost poorly designed sites, inaccessible sites, etc. What really needs to be done is something that filters out sites creating thin content just for the purposes of getting traffic, and that's harder to filter out.

carusooneliner 7y ago

From the author's search result and a quick test I ran, it appears that the specific problem here is Google doesn't seem to "understand" Reddit. If it did, search results would be based on relevancy of comments on the Reddit page, posted in the specified timeframe.

failuser 7y ago

A person using google search is not google’s customer, there is no money is building a good search engine itself.

lordnacho 7y ago

I find I agree with the article, but mainly on queries that are purchase related, or those that overlap with some kind of business. If I'm looking for some coding question, usually the right SO question comes up on the first page. Makes sense that it is so. Clearly there's incentives to show up first on a "where to buy phone" search. The actual answer without vested interests has nobody to pay for it. I bet there's some street in Berlin where there's a number of phone shops, but without coordination (eg a shopping centre) there's no way any of them will tell you that the selection is best if you just show up somewhere on that street. Also on a deeper note, I fear the internet is being flooded with terrible authority sites. Superficial articles that sound right and have lots of affilicate links. But the incentive is not to be informative and correct, rather to look right to people who don't know better - that's why they're there! - in order to funnel them to certain shops. I can just imagine there's an anti-vaxx site somewhere that purports to have real evidence and sells vaginal anti-cancer eggs.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

It's a hard problem because what is relevant is inherently subjective and context specific and only a minority of users uses the advanced search functionality so it is also not a big priority to solve it. Both Google and Duck Duck Go optimize for the simple use case where there's a bit of user context and some short query that the user typed. That's what needs to work well. For that Google is still pretty good. I try duck duck go once in a while but it's just not good enough for me right now. And of course when Google fails me, that's probably also a hard case for Duck Duck Go. The other problem is that websites provide very inconsistent meta-data, and worse, are actively trying to game the system by abusing that metadata. So, things like timestamps are not standardized at all (well, a little bit via things like microformats). So recency of data is important as one of many relevance signals but not necessarily super accurate. And given that it's a relevance signal, you have people doing SEO trying to game that as well. Anyway, Hacker News could also do with some search improvements to its ranking. It always pulls up some ancient article as the most relevant thing as opposed as the article from last week that I remembered and wanted to find back. I consult people on building search engines with Elasticsearch, so I have some idea what I'm talking about. It seems the ranking is basically "sort by points". Probably not that hard to fix that with some additional ranking signals. I just searched for "search" expecting to find this article near the top 5 (because it is recent and has search in the title). Nope; not a thing.

zozbot234 7y ago
Hacker News doesn't even have search at the moment. It just redirects you to some crappy external site.
- detaro 7y ago
  It giving the YC startup running the search backend some visibility doesn't mean it somehow "doesn't even have seaarch".
  - jillesvangurp 7y ago
    Exactly, there's a search box on the web site. How it's implemented is an implementation detail. Given that it happens to be something by a company (Algolia) selling this as a SAAS solution, I don't think this is a great advertisement for them either.

timwaagh 7y ago

Should not be hard to solve if they would have an algorithm to search Reddit built in. But perhaps they do not, in which case it gets much harder.

whoisjuan 7y ago

Isn’t last month supposed to be, last month chronologically speaking instead of calendar month? If I search “last month” today I would expect to get results from Dec 19,2019 and Jan 19,2020.

mellosouls 7y ago

I don't agree with the premise of the article, although I accept that the example given is clearly terrible. I haven't noticed it before, is it a recent bug? It certainly seems a significant one, but not representative of my experience using Google - which I also acknowledge is skewed according to the data they have on you and SEO gaming. But generally - those constraints acknowledged - I still find Google's search to be one of the modern wonders of the world, still the go to, and - yes - not perfect.

scottlocklin 7y ago

I agree google is shit, which is why I never use it. They're too busy being woke to run a search engine which compares to what they were doing 10-15 years ago. It's pretty obviously entirely that; smart people don't want to work in dying Brezhnevian bureaucratic hellscapes. Try Yandex for an example of a much smaller company doing a fine job at search: https://yandex.com/search/?text=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&lr=102589 https://yandex.com/search/?text=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&lr... Produces exactly what OP was looking for. QED. Qwant isn't bad either; don't remember if they piggyback off of other search results: https://www.qwant.com/?q=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&t=web https://www.qwant.com/?q=reddit%20phone%20to%20buy&t=web

klingonopera 7y ago
IIRC, Qwant piggybacks (-ed?) off Bing.

Grimm1 7y ago

This is something I'm currently focused on solving actually. Currently on Show a ways down is the alpha but the basic gist is a search engine focused on discovery while maintaining topical relevance. We thoroughly agree that search results are kind of garbage on major engines at the moment.

avionicsguy 7y ago

This should probably be a separate submission but why is search so bad everywhere? - Confluence: Native search is horrible IME - Microsoft Help (Applications): .chm files Need I say more. - Microsoft Task Bar: Native search okay and then horrible beyond a few key words and then ... BING :-( - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? - Adobe PDFs: Readers all versions. What? You mean you want to search for TWO words. Sacrilege. Don't do it. Seriously though with all the interview code tests bubble sort, quick sort, bloom filters, etc. Why can't companies or even websites get this right? And I agree with other commenters as far as Google, Bing, DDG, or other search sites it's been going down hill but the speed of uselessness is picking up. The other nagging problem (at least for me) is that explicit searches which used to yield more relevant results now are front loaded with garbage. If I'm looking for datasheet on an STM (ST Microsystems) Chip and I start search with STM as of today STM is no longer relevant (it is, meaning it shows up after a few pages). But wow it seems like the SEOs are winning but companies that use this technique won't get my business.

klingonopera 7y ago
> - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? Does turning it off speed it up? I think disk indexing (the way Windows does it) is a remnant from HDD times, and might make things worse when used together with a modern SSD. > Adobe PDFs: Readers all versions. What? You mean you want to search for TWO words. Sacrilege. Don't do it. If you're just viewing and searching PDFs (and don't have to fill out PDF forms on a regular basis), check out SumatraPDF. Fastest PDF reader on Windows I've come accross so far.
erklik 7y ago
> - Microsoft File Search: Even with full disk indexing (I turned it on) it still takes 15-20 minutes to find all jpegs with an SSD. What's going on there? I use this software utility called Search Everywhere, its surprisingly good, fast and fairly accurate most of the times :)
kops 7y ago

brownbat 7y ago

I feel like Google has often turned strict commands into fuzzy searching, maybe for a decade? I never heard a clear explanation as to why, I just imagined that it was some sort of A/B tested paternalism. Maybe most users really want fuzzy searches when using the commands I use for a strict search.

drivebycomment 7y ago
I think it's simply a human bias in action - people don't realize when their queries benefit from the "fuzzy matching", and they only notice/remember when they don't get what they want from search and then (often mistakenly) blame fuzzy matching for it as that's what's visible to them.

fortran77 7y ago

I just did a google search for "piano". Just the word "piano" Only one link on the first page, the wikipedia entry for "piano" had anything to do with pianos, (i.e., the instrument invented in Italy 300+ years ago that has hammers, strings, and an iron frame).

CM30 7y ago
What do you get when you search for that? Did a test right now, and apart from the Wikipedia page, I get videos about piano music/pianos, shop pages for buying pianos and local businesses that sell either pianos or piano lessons. So I'm curious whether the issue is that there are too many shopping/business related pages (which is fair, but at least those seem to be piano related), or whether you're getting something completely different.
- fortran77 7y ago
  The first three links after the ad were for the same "virtual piano" (not a piano) on different websites. See https://imgur.com/a/cMC9wQH https://imgur.com/a/cMC9wQH Then the wikipedia page, then a couple of "online" non-pianos, then a company that happens to be called piano.io https://imgur.com/a/uRcyx84 https://imgur.com/a/uRcyx84 Shopping pages are fine, if we'd get links to, say Steinway, Yamaha, and Bosendorfer, or links to Lang Lang's home page, or something that has more to do with _pianos_.

jszymborski 7y ago

Not sure if DDG patched this, but querying DDG w/o the month based tick results in a result that'll point you to the correct subreddit for finding which phone to buy in <current month> [0]. Although it's not using the "This Month" dropdown, doing the vanilla search still gets you the "most correct" answer imho. [0] https://jszym.com/dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png https://jszym.com/dl/imgs/20200119-ddg-example.png

dmfdmf 7y ago

The problem as I see it is that popularity ranking worked fine in the pre Eternal September era for the web (~10 years ago?). I think it is safe to say that most HN users skew toward searching for more technical, intellectual or scientific topics and get frustrated by their searches getting swamped by popular topics. What I'd like to see is a check box or slider bar to exclude or adjust the weighting for popularity in a search. I don't need to see links for the latest Taylor Swift breakup or what the Kardashians are up to that appear in a technical search due to a randomly shared keyword. Often, the topics I am searching for will never be popular and current search operates on the assumption that it will. A second problem is that now that Google likes to rudely assume to know what you want, i.e. ignoring quotes and negation in search or even modifying keywords, its even harder to find what you want especially if its not on the first page or two of results. Because of this interference even changing your search parameters doesn't change the results much and you see the essentially the same links. What I'd like to see is a search engine that will do a delta between say Google and Bing and drop the links common to the two services. This might lead to uncovering the more esoteric or hidden links buried by the assumptions of the algorithm. Finally, a last problem that I see right now is the filter bubble effect. I had to search for how to spell "kardashians" in the above paragraph. Now my searches and ads for the next 2-3 weeks will be poisoned by articles or ads about the Kardashians. Taking one for team to make my point, I suppose.

klingonopera 7y ago
> pre Eternal September era for the web (~10 years ago?) LOL, was that by chance the time that single from Green Day was released? ;) ["Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993"]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September EDIT: TIL Green Day's single has nothing to do with that September. Huh. I gave them more nerdcred than they deserved...

Razengan 7y ago

Why can't every web server just remember (index) all the content that it serves? Much like resolving DNS queries, I could then ask every server near me for specific terms. If they serve that content, they'll return a list of links containing those search terms. We could have different apps with different algorithms to sort the bare results according to the criteria that's most relevant to each individual user.

jsilence 7y ago

Maybe it is time for s personal meta search aggregator with indexing proxy. One that delegates the query to reddit/SO/github-lab search and filters the results down to those that actually match your query. The proxy indexes all the pages you surf over and includes those in the search.

soheil 7y ago

> At any rate, I got annoyed at this point (mentioning for those who couldn’t tell), so I switched to DuckDuckGo. For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing.

krastanov 7y ago
This line from the wikipedia article about DDG somewhat contradicts you, but it is rather vague: > DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[15] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. Could you elaborate on your comment, I am sincerely interested in learning the details.
- EternalAugust 7y ago
  You can open up two web pages side by side, search the same term in both Bing and DuckDuckGo, and see many of the results are the same in similar order (at least they were the last time I did this, maybe two months ago). DuckDuckGo appears to get most of its results from Bing.
EternalAugust 7y ago
Yes, it gets the majority of its results from Bing. But it's not _just_ a proxy, it's an anonymizing proxy, at least if we believe their pinky swear.
reaperducer 7y ago
For those who might be misled like I used to be DuckDuckGo is just a proxy for Bing. Every time the topic of search comes up on HN, someone always jumps in and says this. Then there are a bunch of other people who jump in and say that Duck is much more than that. So, which is correct?
- Kiro 7y ago
  https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... Interpret it as you wish. To me it sounds like they are using 400 sources and their own crawler for the Instant Answers stuff but get all their "traditional links in the search result" from Verizon(?) and Bing.

nova22033 7y ago

As for the Case Study part, and me saying this isn’t simply a rant - I lied, hence the quotation marks in the title So it's NOT a case study...

Tenoke 7y ago
For what is worth, I'm not sure why they changed the title here. The flippancy in my original title makes the level of diligence a bit clearer from the get go.

thoughtstheseus 7y ago

The author is not using a "search" engine, Google is a recommendation engine.

ovx99 7y ago

Using shopping engines is even worse. Google shopping and Amazon, I've been having an incredibly difficult time finding products within a price range and sorting it by price. Searching for items in quotes on Google Shopping often returns all sorts of irrelevant results. In Amazon, the 'price low to high' filter doesn't even seem to work most of the time and it includes sponsored results way out of my price range in the middle of the results. Amazon also seems to have removed any type of price range filter on the left sidebar.

lettergram 7y ago

I've been thinking about this for years[1]. The truth is, what Google solved was parsing the search query, not identifying the best results. In fact, Google is not incentivized to give you the best results, they are designed to maximize their revenue, derived from getting you to view / click ads. Google is not a search company, they are an advertising company. The more searches you make, the more revenue they make. Their goal is to quickly and often get you to search things. As long as you keep using their platform, the more you search the better. [1] https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/ https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/

l0b0 7y ago
Is it time for paid search engines? Make users vote with their wallets and pay for the eternal arms race. Problem is, whoever is behind something like that would have to start with an already sufficiently superior experience (or massive geek cred) to make people pay from the early days. Maybe going back to manually curated results of a subset of topics would work? Or some Stack Overflow-esque model of user powered metadata generation?
- seshagiric 7y ago
  Probably not. The problem with current search engines is that they need some way to rank the pages and hence inherently susceptible to clever SEO (that curates pages to get ranked high for certain type of queries). So having a paid search engine does not fully solve the SEO problem. Having no Ads does not takeout the SEO problem of boosting pages to top.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    If the paid for search engine ignores SEO "optimizations" and actually ranks on content AND these results prove better that attracts actual paying users, then we don't have to wait for SEO to die. Just like SEO rose to prominence to win Google result ranking because that's where the users were, the sites would stop the SEO crap. Getting this hypothetical site to get users is the real problem. Same thing with getting users to a Facebook alternative.

l0b0 7y ago

SEO is the new spam. We solved spam pretty well, but it was a very different solution space to what is available for the web: - Spammers had basically two ways to verify their efficacy – they could either sign up to every provider under the stars and test each email with each of them individually, or they could use the absence of a signal as "proof" of being caught by a filter. But neither of these are very efficient. An SEO expert can simply wait for the search engine to detect their changes and verify the result with two or three search engines quickly and automatically. - For practical purposes whether an email is spam is answered in a binary form: either it ends up in your spam box or it does not. Removing spam-looking things from search results entirely would be devastating for any site victim of a false positive. And how do you implement the equivalent of a spam box in a search engine in a useable way? - Spam filtering was implemented in different ways on every mail provider, so the bar to entry was "randomized" and spammers would have to be quite careful to pass the filters on a large subset of providers. ISPs and users currently have nowhere near the resources to implement their own ranking rules, but maybe this could be a solution in the mid to long term with massively cheaper hardware.

lqet 7y ago

Well, how do you actually determine the age of a web page? Is it the post date? How do you even find that out? Is it the last comment post date? Is it the last edit of the main post, or the last edit of a comment? How do you find this out automatically? Is it the last change the HTTP server responds with? Is it the last time the entire page has been modified? If the page is built up of multiple components like iframes, do their post dates matter? Do ads matter? If the page is dynamic, everything gets a few orders of magnitude more complicated. Point is, it is not a trivial task at all to automatically find out the time that corresponds to the intuitive understanding of the "age" of a web page.

rwmj 7y ago
It's the first time Google saw the page. Reddit posts have unique URLs and Google scans popular sites very regularly (in fact is rumoured to have site-specific optimizations).
- undefined_user6 7y ago
  That can't be right if, according to OP, the first result was a reddit post from six years ago, yet the date according to Google was Jan 11, 2020. So the first time Google saw that page would likely have been the day it was published.

gglon 7y ago

https://yippy.com/ https://yippy.com/

rmetzler 7y ago

I think a main issue is the vagueness of the query. I was searching for "what phone should i buy in 2020 site:reddit.com" and while a few results where from a year ago, most where from January 2020.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Google have moved on from allowing exact searches to me made, sometimes you have to think "if I didn't know what I actually wanted to see, and was trying to make a question-form query about it, what would I write" and that gets better results, IME, than something where you know the exact words you want (which even with "" might not be in the link).
- rmetzler 7y ago
  No, I didn't use quotes (exact match) in my query. This was only to express delimiters. Sorry for the confusion.
Tenoke 7y ago
Adding 2020 might kind of work in January. It wouldn't help as much for getting this month's results in November.
- rmetzler 7y ago
  I tried it and I think you're not right. The reason why this works most of the time (at least on reddit) because there are lot's of threads which put the date in the title. Query was: what phone should i buy nov 2019 site:reddit.com

nvarsj 7y ago

The first time I realized that Google search was bad was when del.icio.us got big. I was an avid user - and I stopped using Google except for basic things. You could search tags on del.icio.us - and the results were incredibly good, far better than Google, especially for niche areas. I think, unfortunately, this kind of curated, social approach to search will never be compatible with monetization by ads. I'm not quite sure how to make a search engine profitable without significantly distorting its results. Maybe, depressingly, Google is the best thing possible given the constraint of making a profit?

z3t4 7y ago

Public information should not be filtered by one single private entity. We need a distributed system with an open standard. Search should work more like DNS... In order to get your web site indexed, you only have to publish your search URL. There should be many index cache servers, so that your search URL only get a hit when a search string expires...

discobot 7y ago

Google filters the results on date of web page update, not date of the post reddit post creation, which is the correct behaviour. And you are just making unjustified bold statements

kops 7y ago

A shoutout for duckduckgo here. I tried both qwant and duckduckgo about a couple of years ago but the quality of search results forced me back to google in a couple of days. But I gave it another shot a few weeks ago and I have been pretty happy with the search results from duckduckgo and the fact that the ads do not follow me around the web based on my searches is rather pleasant. I must admit that google hasn't done anything bad to me but their sheer size and scale is scary enough for me to look for alternatives. Now back to the search quality, I wanted to find out when exactly world economic forum 2020 is happening and google won hands down (search term = world economic forum 2020 dates). But for now and for most of my day to day search terms duckduckgo is doing okay. I know this won't last for long as they also are looking at advertising dollars but I hope then someone else will stand up to challenge duckduckgo+google combined.

miket 7y ago

The article hardly supports its conclusion with these cherry-picked examples; however, the core reason these results don't meet the author's expectations is that Google's AI does not understand the content of webpages well enough to identify the publication date accurately (at least anywhere near as accurately as a human can). Google's publication date is based on whether it found changes to the HTML on its own crawl date (which is very noisy due to today's dynamically generated website) or based on schema.org/microdata, which as other commentators point it is game-able for purposes of SEO, or simply missing on most sites. As a contrast, take a look at how Diffbot, an AI system that understands the content of the page by using computer vision and NLP techniques on it, interprets the page in question: https://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?url=https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/1mwxx3/best_place_to_by_a_cheap_new_smartphone/ https://www.diffbot.com/testdrive/?url=https://www.reddit.co... It can reliably extract the publication date on each post, without resorting to using site-specific rules. (You can try it on other discussion threads and article pages, that have a visible publication date).

mariushn 7y ago

Any suggestions on how could one start an open source search engine business? Being able to index the whole internet as an MVP and quickly serve queries on top of this data has a major initial and operating cost.

james_impliu 7y ago

I increasingly just use google to search sites I already know have better content than the web at large, since it so often feels like it sucks for any depth of information. Want to get in touch with someone? name job site:linkedin.com. Want to find how to solve a tech issue? "issue" site:stackoverflow.com, and so on. Google's search of sites like this is pretty good (although the recency working well would be really good... but perhaps impossible to solve well), and often better than in site search. But that + very basic fact finding "how much is a lb in kg", "where is restaurant X" are pretty much all I feel it's good for. Then again, I guess it's not supposed to be an encyclopaedia (or it can be, site:wikipedia.org!)

3xblah 7y ago

What was the query the author used? Did he try something like this "https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=reddit.com&q=best+place+to+buy+a+cheap+new+smartphone&num=100" https://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=reddit.com&q=best+p...

fluffy87 7y ago
Watch out with doing more complicated searches like extending those to a date range - they get people “banned” from using google search.
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
  Elaborate. I was doing some deep searching in very specific date ranges with lots of modifiers and google gave me the "your query reminds us of bots or some shit try again later" and I had to stop because it wouldn't let the queries through anymore. Is that what that was?
  - jborichevskiy 7y ago
    Yes, that sounds like that same thing. I've encountered Google ReCaptcha as well a few times when searching from a logged out browser.
- clarry 7y ago
  Even browsing beyond the first few pages of results can end you up having to play with captchas. Also it's funny how they lie about having about a quadrillion results, and then when you're on page 12, suddenly that's all the 150 results they have, sorry.
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    That quadrillion results bit is like a relic from a bygone era, when people actually cared. I have not hit captchas very often. Even IP bans only last hours. It is annoying, but low risk. I do searching from shell prompt, never browser. What always amazed me about Google is that they are not willing to let users to skip pages 1-11 and immediately jump to, say, page 12. Sometimes queries are non-commercial and there are no ads. Still, jumping straight to page 12 can trigger a captcha. I wrote a script that reverses or randomises the order of Google results, as an experiment.

contingencies 7y ago

How is search so bad? My broad take is that previously search worked (Altavista era through early-mid Google) because it referenced organic links put in place by real humans and keywords, plus basic metadata like physical location of servers, freshness of content, frequency of update, metadata behind domains, etc. Since the mid 1990s that has increasingly been gamed heavily, PageRank style approaches have come and sort of gone, and a vast majority of content accessed by consumers has moved to one of a small number of platforms or walled gardens, often mobile applications. I don't know for sure, but I'd assume with confidence that the majority of result inclusion decisions made by Google are now based on rejection blacklists, 'known good' safe hits and effectively minimizing anomalous results above the fold. Simultaneously, the internet has become an international place and the bar has been raised for new entrants such that an incapacity to return meaningful results in multiple languages bars a search engine from any significant market position. A huge percentage of results are either Wikipedia/reference pages, local news or Q&A sites. Further, huge amounts of what is out there is behind Cloudflare or similar firewalls which will probably frustrate new and emerging spiders. The existing monopolies, having some established capacity and reputation in this regard, may have become somewhat entrenched and lazy, and do not care enough about improvement. They are literally able to sail happily on market inertia, while generating ridiculous advertising revenues. In China we have Baidu, and in most rest of the world, Google. Who will bring about a new search engine? Greg Lindahl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greglindahl https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greglindahl who formerly made Blekko is apparently working on another one. I once wrote a small one (~2001) which was based upon the concept of multilingual semantic indices (a sort of non-rigorously obtained language-neutral epistemology was the core database). I still think this would be a meaningful approach to follow, since so much is lost in translation, particularly around current events. One problem with evolving public utilities in this area are that such approaches border on open source intelligence (OSI) and most people with linguistic or computational chops in that area leave academia and get eaten up by the military industrial complex or Google. Now we have https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ https://commoncrawl.org/the-data/get-started/ which makes reasonable quality sample crawl data super-available. Now "all" we need is people to hack on algorithms and a means to commercialize them as alternatives to the status quo.

aaron695 7y ago

Everyone can make a better search engine in the comments, but strangely, barley no one is actually commenting on the actual case study. Search based around time of publishing. I guess another committee to paint the whole garden shed is easy, talking about what paint to use is hard. I suspect Reddit needs to add meta data of the publishing date. It is complicated in a forum, is it publish date or last comment date. But Google is still getting the basics wrong ie Every comment date is a year ago, still less than a month in search. It still doesn't help many time based issues (News always displays new headlines on old articles. So you'll see Iran funeral crowd crush on 'old' news articles in search) but it's a start.

peterwwillis 7y ago

The user probably would be less pissed off if they had no way to filter by time. An interesting lesson in UX.

dbetteridge 7y ago

Does anyone else no longer see the date at all in their google search results? Drives me mad, Especially when I only want results from a certain year/month.

WarOnPrivacy 7y ago

GOOGLE IGNORES SEARCH OPERANDS So I went to DDG, 2 years back. Now DDG ignores search operands too.

williesleg 7y ago

They all censor the results. Fuckers.

anonu 7y ago

We need a taxonomy. In the old days finding links was done by going to a directory: dmoz or Yahoo. I'm not saying we regress back to the past... I'm sure there is some hidden underlying directory structure in web search today. What I'm suggesting is making it more accessible to users as a way of navigating the web for good content.

cf512 7y ago

As a point of clarification, "Past Month" is not the same thing as "Last Month" or "Previous Month". "Past Month" in this context actually means the past 30 days from today. It's a really subtle and confusing nuance in English. In any case, Google Search having results from 5 days ago is accurate when filtering for Past Month. Google (being a global resource) really should reword "Past Month" to "Past 30 Days" to eliminate any confusion.

radicalriddler 7y ago
But still, none of the reddit posts he referenced are from the past month. They say things like Jan 11, 2020; which would be correct, but the actual post on Reddit is 6 years ago. Whether this is Google or Reddit causing this is another issue.

JDiculous 7y ago

Google search is absymal at generic questions like the one the author mentioned about the best phones, or others like "Redux vs. Mobx" or "styled-components vs emotion". I end up just searching Reddit (or sometimes stackoverflow) not because Reddit is particularly good for technical discussions, but because Google's default search literally just returns blogspam from dev agencies. Why hasn't a superior competitor emerged yet? I get that the web is super broad and indexing the entire thing is an enormous task. But perhaps there's room for more niche search engines (eg. focused on tech) to stab away at this Google search monopoly.

sj4nz 7y ago

When I'm ready to flip the table over about search results, I remember that https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ exists and I give that a whirl. Then when I'm sick of seeing links to sites that are highly-SEOed but low-signal, Tampermonkey is there to give me a nice little [block] button to remove them. Fantasy-future: Mozilla could "widen out" their library and hire 20,000 librarians to curate the "New Web" in a non-wiki-format. If you paid each librarian about $150K/annum, that's about $0.60/annum from 5B subscribers, just for their salaries for the advertising-free library.

asdff 7y ago

What kind of cluster do I need to just grep the web?

syphilis2 7y ago

It's worse than the author described. Google won't even sort by date correctly. I ran into this problem years ago and it still exists. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+buy+a+phone&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/2019,cd_max:1/1/2020,sbd:1&tbm=nws&source=lnt&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixnoaswJHnAhWNl-AKHe0pAVAQpwUIHw&biw=442&bih=727&dpr=3 https://www.google.com/search?q=where+to+buy+a+phone&hl=en&t...

zejn 7y ago

Well, searching for "phone to buy" isn't going to do much good, is it. "Reddit best 2020 phone" works for me much better, though ... User friendly it is? No.

yusef555 7y ago

eat my asshole

fiatjaf 7y ago

The point no one is making in these comments is: How is search so good? I've tried to implement search on small websites and always failed miserably. Results were always terrible no matter what library/database/indexer I used. I cannot even imagine how one would proceed to implement search over the entire internet. I also have the experience that Google is much worse the some years ago, I'm also frustrated by everything, but still, it does the job much better than anyone else probably -- otherwise someone would have better results overall. (Also, yes, I use DuckDuckGo and I don't think it's so much worse than Google, which is good, because I used to think no one would ever be able to do be as good as Google but today there are many competitors that come close.)