4 ms·

My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that yo

My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary, including: searching for synonyms for words I searched for instead of the specific words I chose, excluding words to increase the number of results (even though the words they exclude are usually the most important to the query), trying to figure out what it thinks I asked for instead of what I actually asked for. I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).

klint 7y ago
I was going to reply with something along the same lines. Dropping the keyest keywords is a particularly big pet peeve of mine. For those "needle in a haystack" type queries, instead of pages that include both $keyword1 and $keyword2, I often get a mix of the top results for each keyword. The problem is compounded by news sites that include links to other recent stories in their sidebars. So I might find articles about $keyword1 that just happen to have completely unrelated but recent articles about $keyword2 in the sidebar. It also appears that Google and DDG both often ignore "advanced" options like putting exact phrase searches in quotation marks, using a - sign to exclude keywords, etc. None of this seems to have cut down on SEO spam results either, especially once you get past the first page or two of results. I suspect it all comes down to trying to handle the most common types of queries. Indeed, if I'm searching for something uncomplicated, like the name of the CEO of a company or something like that, the results come out just fine. Longtail searches probably aren't much of a priority, especially when there's not much competition.
plausible 7y ago
> They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary You just described how YouTube's search has been working lately. When you type in a somewhat obscure keyword - or any keyword, really - the search results include not only the videos that match, but videos related to your search. And searches related to your keywords. Sometimes it even shows you a part of the "for you" section that belongs to the home page! The search results are so cluttered now.
- brownbat 7y ago
  Searching gibberish to try to get as few results as possible. I got down to one with "qwerqnalkwea" "AEWRLKJAFsdalkjas" returns nothing, but youtube helpfully replaces that search with the likewise nonsensical "AEWR LKJAsdf lkj as" which is just full of content.
brownbat 7y ago
Surely most engineers want the power of strict searching and less of the comforts of being always getting filler results, right? So... is there an internal service at Google that works correctly but they're hiding from the world? It might be useful for Google to make different search engines for different types of people. The behaviors of people are probably multi-modal, rather than normally distributed along some continuum where you should just assume the most common behavior and preferences. \ It would even be easier to target ads... Or maybe this doesn't exist and spam is too hard.
Izkata 7y ago
> I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. Yeeaap, sometime in gradeschool - I think somewhere around 5th grade, age 11 or so, which would be around 1999 - we had a section on computers, where we'd learn the basics about how to use them. One of the topics I remember was "how to do web searches", where a friend was surprised at how easily I found what I was looking for - the other kids had to be trained to use keywords instead of asking it questions.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Tyranny of the minimum viable user.
asdff 7y ago
It's surprisingly easy to get zero results returned pasting cryptic error messages. It doesn't mean there is nothing, though. Omit half the string, and there's the dozen stack overflow threads with the error. Maybe it didn't read over the line break on stack overflow or something, but I haven't tested anything.

klint 7y ago

I was going to reply with something along the same lines. Dropping the keyest keywords is a particularly big pet peeve of mine. For those "needle in a haystack" type queries, instead of pages that include both $keyword1 and $keyword2, I often get a mix of the top results for each keyword. The problem is compounded by news sites that include links to other recent stories in their sidebars. So I might find articles about $keyword1 that just happen to have completely unrelated but recent articles about $keyword2 in the sidebar. It also appears that Google and DDG both often ignore "advanced" options like putting exact phrase searches in quotation marks, using a - sign to exclude keywords, etc. None of this seems to have cut down on SEO spam results either, especially once you get past the first page or two of results. I suspect it all comes down to trying to handle the most common types of queries. Indeed, if I'm searching for something uncomplicated, like the name of the CEO of a company or something like that, the results come out just fine. Longtail searches probably aren't much of a priority, especially when there's not much competition.

plausible 7y ago

> They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary You just described how YouTube's search has been working lately. When you type in a somewhat obscure keyword - or any keyword, really - the search results include not only the videos that match, but videos related to your search. And searches related to your keywords. Sometimes it even shows you a part of the "for you" section that belongs to the home page! The search results are so cluttered now.

brownbat 7y ago
Searching gibberish to try to get as few results as possible. I got down to one with "qwerqnalkwea" "AEWRLKJAFsdalkjas" returns nothing, but youtube helpfully replaces that search with the likewise nonsensical "AEWR LKJAsdf lkj as" which is just full of content.

brownbat 7y ago

Surely most engineers want the power of strict searching and less of the comforts of being always getting filler results, right? So... is there an internal service at Google that works correctly but they're hiding from the world? It might be useful for Google to make different search engines for different types of people. The behaviors of people are probably multi-modal, rather than normally distributed along some continuum where you should just assume the most common behavior and preferences. \ It would even be easier to target ads... Or maybe this doesn't exist and spam is too hard.

Izkata 7y ago

> I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. Yeeaap, sometime in gradeschool - I think somewhere around 5th grade, age 11 or so, which would be around 1999 - we had a section on computers, where we'd learn the basics about how to use them. One of the topics I remember was "how to do web searches", where a friend was surprised at how easily I found what I was looking for - the other kids had to be trained to use keywords instead of asking it questions.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Tyranny of the minimum viable user.

asdff 7y ago

It's surprisingly easy to get zero results returned pasting cryptic error messages. It doesn't mean there is nothing, though. Omit half the string, and there's the dozen stack overflow threads with the error. Maybe it didn't read over the line break on stack overflow or something, but I haven't tested anything.