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The # 1 google result for “Shirt without stripes” is this very own HN post https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22& https://www.google.com/

The # 1 google result for “Shirt without stripes” is this very own HN post https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22& https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&

animalCrax0rz 7y ago
Google is in the business of producing quick results to sell ads while keeping the cost low. If anyone does better, they will likely do it using a costlier algorithm, and if there is more margin in reselling tangible products than ads then Amazon is incentivized to use costlier algorithms that are more accurate. But I think the margin in both cases does not justify the use of algorithms that may be more accurate in some small percentage of cases but a lot more costly.
- larl 7y ago
  animalCrax0rx is in the business of producing quick pithy posts to earn more karma while keeping understanding low and making claims that are not evidence based... See how that works? That's not really what's going on. Sure, G. is incentivized to include pages quickly, but they are also incentivized to produce them accurately, and as the above poster indicates, this is quite a hard problem to solve generally. A is also incentivized to sell items. In many cases different algorithms will lead to quantifiably different results. The algorithm changes that work better for the measurement set will be kept and those changes which dont will be discarded. And both A and G do that within different constraints.
  - animalCrax0rz 7y ago
    Google is aware of this problem in their search approach. It's a business problem, not a technical one. You're saying the same thing in suggesting they base their decisions on some measurement set. If solving the problem adds complexity, which it certainly will, and there is not enough improvement in accuracy for the majority of cases in their measurement set, why bother? You sound like the kind of person that attacks people for their opinion. So weird, dude.
  - nailer 7y ago
    Your ad hominem on the other poster is unnecessary, violates the HN guidelines and not an apt comparison. Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
      - 6510 7y ago
        > This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them. I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while. Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name. People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do. edit: With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.
        7y ago
  - dEnigma 7y ago
    My cursor was hovering over the downvote arrow while reading your first sentence, before I realized what was going on in your post. Thank you for pleasantly surprising me!
albertzeyer 7y ago
I guess, even in the original results, the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (which is possible with today's models). Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? The search query was just unusual, and it is not too unreasonable to guess that the query was not meant literally. At least this is a valid possibility, that the query was not meant literally. So it is reasonable to just return some results which might be related to the query, which will also be shirts with stripes. If you argue this is bad behavior: Maybe we need a web query which really only takes the query literally. Putting the query in quotes will not quite have this effect for Google. Maybe some other syntax?
- tcgv 7y ago
  > the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (...) Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? In this very specific case I don't buy it. Sure, it probably applies for other queries, but if you approach a salesperson and ask him for "shirts without stripes" it's pretty clear what you want, and he wont bring you any piece with stripes on it.
  - indecisive_user 7y ago
    Agreed, it's not that weird of a search. Other, similar queries like "shirt without buttons/collar/pocket" seem to work just fine. The only difference is that those are all physical properties of a shirt while stripes is a type of pattern.
    - zaat 7y ago
      Shirt without paisley - fails shirt without buttons - preety much fail. shirt without red button - as already expected, shirts with red buttons
      - ghayes 7y ago

animalCrax0rz 7y ago

Google is in the business of producing quick results to sell ads while keeping the cost low. If anyone does better, they will likely do it using a costlier algorithm, and if there is more margin in reselling tangible products than ads then Amazon is incentivized to use costlier algorithms that are more accurate. But I think the margin in both cases does not justify the use of algorithms that may be more accurate in some small percentage of cases but a lot more costly.

larl 7y ago
animalCrax0rx is in the business of producing quick pithy posts to earn more karma while keeping understanding low and making claims that are not evidence based... See how that works? That's not really what's going on. Sure, G. is incentivized to include pages quickly, but they are also incentivized to produce them accurately, and as the above poster indicates, this is quite a hard problem to solve generally. A is also incentivized to sell items. In many cases different algorithms will lead to quantifiably different results. The algorithm changes that work better for the measurement set will be kept and those changes which dont will be discarded. And both A and G do that within different constraints.
- animalCrax0rz 7y ago
  Google is aware of this problem in their search approach. It's a business problem, not a technical one. You're saying the same thing in suggesting they base their decisions on some measurement set. If solving the problem adds complexity, which it certainly will, and there is not enough improvement in accuracy for the majority of cases in their measurement set, why bother? You sound like the kind of person that attacks people for their opinion. So weird, dude.
- nailer 7y ago
  Your ad hominem on the other poster is unnecessary, violates the HN guidelines and not an apt comparison. Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
    - 6510 7y ago
      > This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them. I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while. Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name. People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do. edit: With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.
      - 7y ago
- dEnigma 7y ago
  My cursor was hovering over the downvote arrow while reading your first sentence, before I realized what was going on in your post. Thank you for pleasantly surprising me!

albertzeyer 7y ago

I guess, even in the original results, the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (which is possible with today's models). Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? The search query was just unusual, and it is not too unreasonable to guess that the query was not meant literally. At least this is a valid possibility, that the query was not meant literally. So it is reasonable to just return some results which might be related to the query, which will also be shirts with stripes. If you argue this is bad behavior: Maybe we need a web query which really only takes the query literally. Putting the query in quotes will not quite have this effect for Google. Maybe some other syntax?

tcgv 7y ago
> the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (...) Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? In this very specific case I don't buy it. Sure, it probably applies for other queries, but if you approach a salesperson and ask him for "shirts without stripes" it's pretty clear what you want, and he wont bring you any piece with stripes on it.
- indecisive_user 7y ago
  Agreed, it's not that weird of a search. Other, similar queries like "shirt without buttons/collar/pocket" seem to work just fine. The only difference is that those are all physical properties of a shirt while stripes is a type of pattern.
  - zaat 7y ago
    Shirt without paisley - fails shirt without buttons - preety much fail. shirt without red button - as already expected, shirts with red buttons
    - ghayes 7y ago