3 ms·

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.

• 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.