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Although search within apps can be even worse. I was looking through Google Movies the other day for the film 2001 and instead it swamps the results with those
by nmstoker 7y ago
Although search within apps can be even worse.
I was looking through Google Movies the other day for the film 2001 and instead it swamps the results with those from the year 2001 - one could argue that there are lots of people who are massively keen to buy films based on the year of production, but I suspect it's better to satisfy those looking for years in the title first and then after that brief interruption list the year based results, rather than the other way around.
Similarly looking for "The Book of Why" on Audible is dismal: even when it's in quotes it isn't until the 42 result that the exact match shows up, with a load of useless not-obviously connected results turning up first.
Both these failures interest me as they have a tangible financial implication (I clearly had money to spend) and yet they remain unfixed.
- noworriesnate 7y agoI realize the obvious fix for the Audible problem is to interpret double quotes as "only search for this phrase," but I wonder if an alternative solution would be do TFIDF for combinations of wordsm, not just individual words. For example, the search crawler could watch for the phrase "the book", "the book of", "the book of why", "book of", "book of why", and "of why", and weight the search results accordingly.
- nmstoker 7y agoYes, that would be a better user experience as: 1. not everyone will think to use quotes 2. it would probably be more resilient to minor user errors too (eg if it had been misused misheard as The Book of Way you'd still have a fair chance of it returning the desired result fairly high in the list)