4 ms·

It's weirdly déjà vu to see this sort of sentiment to appear in every thread about google and it's absolutely true — google's search quality has been on a notic

It's weirdly déjà vu to see this sort of sentiment to appear in every thread about google and it's absolutely true — google's search quality has been on a noticeable decline for years now. It's especially funny to see headlines like "google achieves quantum superiority" and "google can't understand the word 'without'" next to each other. It almost seems like the search engine is being purposefully sabotaged by google itself.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
What the average user of Google wants is not what the average user of HN wants, and it shows. The average Google user wants a semi-conversational query engine. What the average HN user wants is probably more like a fuzzy regex matcher. Google has gotten much better over the years for most of their userbase. If you put in "did the cubs win" you get a custom panel that tells you the results of their latest few non-postponed games as sub-panels, with team logos and everything. If you click though a sub-panel, it gives you some more info and links to news articles. This is obviously a vastly improved experience over previous years for what is clearly the intent behind this search. Another example that's a favorite of mine. If you search for "gay indiana mayor" the first result is the Wikipedia page for Pete Buttigieg. The next few results are recent high-impact news articles about Pete Buttigieg. Why? Because that's clearly what our hypothetical searcher was looking for. They didn't want webpages that contain the words "gay", "indiana" and "mayor". They wanted Pete Buttigieg, and his name is hard to remember how to spell.
- rukshn 6y ago
  I totally have to agree on this. Who would like to go back to the days where Google results were just a link list? No average user wants that. Plus not only that even if I Google a question regarding programming errors they usually nails it with a stack overflow answer or any good blog post within the first page.
  - kabacha 6y ago
    > No average user wants that. That's a bit ignorant. There are many search terms that are literally impossible to search for in google because it iterprets it as something else.
- kabacha 6y ago
  You are confusing two very different concepts here: search engine/indexing and assistant. The behavour you're describing is an assistant's behaviour. When I'm using a search engine I'm _searching_ for content rather than asking for assistance. Google seems to "solve" this difference with optional syntax like quotes but there's no fuzzy searching so you're stuck with either an assistant or explicit matching.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    I don't think I am confusing anything. Google has deliberately oriented Google Search to better serve queries over lookups in recent years. For example, adding BERT. You don't need a semantic NLP engine to look up keywords.

dodobirdlord 6y ago

What the average user of Google wants is not what the average user of HN wants, and it shows. The average Google user wants a semi-conversational query engine. What the average HN user wants is probably more like a fuzzy regex matcher. Google has gotten much better over the years for most of their userbase. If you put in "did the cubs win" you get a custom panel that tells you the results of their latest few non-postponed games as sub-panels, with team logos and everything. If you click though a sub-panel, it gives you some more info and links to news articles. This is obviously a vastly improved experience over previous years for what is clearly the intent behind this search. Another example that's a favorite of mine. If you search for "gay indiana mayor" the first result is the Wikipedia page for Pete Buttigieg. The next few results are recent high-impact news articles about Pete Buttigieg. Why? Because that's clearly what our hypothetical searcher was looking for. They didn't want webpages that contain the words "gay", "indiana" and "mayor". They wanted Pete Buttigieg, and his name is hard to remember how to spell.

rukshn 6y ago
I totally have to agree on this. Who would like to go back to the days where Google results were just a link list? No average user wants that. Plus not only that even if I Google a question regarding programming errors they usually nails it with a stack overflow answer or any good blog post within the first page.
- kabacha 6y ago
  > No average user wants that. That's a bit ignorant. There are many search terms that are literally impossible to search for in google because it iterprets it as something else.
kabacha 6y ago
You are confusing two very different concepts here: search engine/indexing and assistant. The behavour you're describing is an assistant's behaviour. When I'm using a search engine I'm _searching_ for content rather than asking for assistance. Google seems to "solve" this difference with optional syntax like quotes but there's no fuzzy searching so you're stuck with either an assistant or explicit matching.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  I don't think I am confusing anything. Google has deliberately oriented Google Search to better serve queries over lookups in recent years. For example, adding BERT. You don't need a semantic NLP engine to look up keywords.