6 ms·

However, when searching for "haskell type inference algorithm" I get completely useless results.

klntsky 5y ago
Since it does not use synonyms, it looks like it is unable to answer "how's that thing called"-queries.
burkaman 5y ago
That query is too long apparently. But if you shorten to "haskell type inference", I think it delivers on its promise: > If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  The search engine doesn't do any type of re-ordering or synonym stuff, it only tires to construct different N-grams from the search query. So if you for example compare "SDL tutorial" with "SDL tutorials". On google you'd get the same stuff, this search engine, for better or worse doesn't. This is a design decision, for now anyway, mostly because I'm incredibly annoyed when algorithms are second-guessing me. On the other hand, it does mean you sometimes have to try different searches to get relevant results.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I like this design decision. It pays you back for choosing your search terms carefully.
    - mananaysiempre 5y ago
      I’m not against a stemmer, actually, just against the aggressive concordances (?) that Google now employs, like when it shows me X in Banach spaces (the classical, textbook case) when I’m specifically searching for X in Fréchet spaces (the generalization I want to find but am not sure exists); of course Banach spaces and Fréchet spaces are almost exclusively encountered in the same context, but it doesn’t mean that one is a popular typo for the other! (The relative rarity of both of these in the corpus probably doesn’t help. The farcical case is BRST, or Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin, in physics, as it is literally a single key away from “best” and thus almost impossible to search for.) On the other hand, Google’s unawareness of (extensive and ubiquitous) Russian noun morphology is essentially what allowed Yandex to exist: both 2011 Yandex and 2021 Google are much more helpful for Russian than 2011 Google. I suspect (but have not checked) that the engine under discussion is utterly unusable for it. English (along with other Germanic and Romance languages to a lesser extent) is quite unusual in being meaningfully searchable without any understanding of morphology, globally speaking.
      - dahauns 5y ago
        English is more the outlier in regard to Germanic languages, try German or Finnish, with their wonderful compounds :) https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pdf https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pd...
        mananaysiempre 5y ago
        Well yeah, English is kind of weird, but Finnish isn’t a Germanic language at all? It’s not even Indo-European, so even Hindi is ostensibly closer to English than Finnish. I understand Standard German (along with Icelandic) is itself a bit atypical in that it hasn’t lost its cases when most other Germanic languages did. Re compounds, I expected they would be more or less easy to deal with by relatively dumb splitting, similar to greedy solutions to the “no spaces” problem of Chinese and Japanese, and your link seems to bear that out. But yeah, cheers to more language-specific stuff in your indexing. /s
        dahauns 5y ago
        Gaaah, brain fart - you're right, of course, dunno why I included it.
      - medstrom 5y ago
        I thought you could fix that by enclosing "BRST" in quotes, but apparently not. DuckDuckGo (which uses Google) returns a couple of results that do contain "BRST" in a medical context, but most results don't contain this string at all. What's going on?
        mananaysiempre 5y ago
        I’m not certain what DDG actually uses (wasn’t it Bing?), but in my experience from the last couple of months it ignores quotes substantially more eagerly than Google does. For this particular term, a little bit of domain knowledge helps: even without quotes, brst becchi, brst formalism, brst quantization or perhaps bv brst will get you reasonable results. (I could swear Google corrected brst quantization to best quantization a year ago, but apparently not anymore.) Searching for stuff in the context of BRST is still somewhat unpleasant, though. I... don’t think anything particularly surprising is happening here, except for quotes being apparently ignored? I’ve had it explained to me that a rare word is essentially indistinguishable from a popular misspelling by NLP techniques as they currently exist, except by feeding the machine a massive dictionary (and perhaps not even then). BRST is a thing that you essentially can’t even define satisfactorily without at the very least four years of university-level physics (going by the conventional broad approach—the most direct possible road can of course be shorter if not necessarily more illuminating). “Best” is a very popular word both generally and in searches, and the R key is next to E on a Latin keyboard. If you are a perfect probabilistic reasoner with only these facts for context (and especially if you ignore case), I can very well believe that your best possible course of action is to assume a typo. How to permit overriding that decision (and indeed how to recognize you’ve actually made one worth worrying about without massive human input—e.g. Russian adjectives can have more than 20 distinct forms, can be made up on the spot by following productive word-formation processes, and you don’t want to learn all of the world’s languages!) is simply a very difficult problem for what is probably a marginal benefit in the grand scheme of things. I just dislike hitting these margins so much.
  - Razengan 5y ago
    It could simply become an option.
  - OneLeggedCat 5y ago
    Don't change it. It's good this way.
  - ford_o 5y ago
    Maybe list the synonyms under the query, so its easier to try different formulations.
    - akavel 5y ago
      Oh this sounds like it could be a really cool idea! This way it could also be subtly teaching users that the engine doesn't do automatic synonyms translation so it's worth experimenting; also kinda like giving the synonyms feature while still keeping user in full control.
LanceH 5y ago
It would be nice if we could pipe search engines.
- BenoitP 5y ago
  Definitely; We could create a meta search engine that queries them all, in desktop application format. Let's name it after a famous old scientist, and maybe add the year to prove it's modern: Galileo 2021.
  - Torwald 5y ago
    I need that with a simpler interface, so I call it after a famous dedective: Sherlock.
    - artificial 5y ago
      a magic pop sound is faintly audible as a new side project is appended to several lists Excellent, thank you!
  - gmueckl 5y ago
    Not an app, but probably comes quite close in all other respects: https://metager.org https://metager.org
  - overkalix 5y ago
    ... is this Galileo 2021 a reference that I am not understanding?
    - BenoitP 5y ago
      Yup, but so far no one got it. There was such an app in the early 2000's, before Google went mainstream, and Altavista-like engines were not good: Copernic 2000. I guess I'm officially old now.
      - tomerv 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Since it does not use synonyms, it looks like it is unable to answer "how's that thing called"-queries.

That query is too long apparently. But if you shorten to "haskell type inference", I think it delivers on its promise: > If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

marginalia_nu 5y ago
The search engine doesn't do any type of re-ordering or synonym stuff, it only tires to construct different N-grams from the search query. So if you for example compare "SDL tutorial" with "SDL tutorials". On google you'd get the same stuff, this search engine, for better or worse doesn't. This is a design decision, for now anyway, mostly because I'm incredibly annoyed when algorithms are second-guessing me. On the other hand, it does mean you sometimes have to try different searches to get relevant results.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I like this design decision. It pays you back for choosing your search terms carefully.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    I’m not against a stemmer, actually, just against the aggressive concordances (?) that Google now employs, like when it shows me X in Banach spaces (the classical, textbook case) when I’m specifically searching for X in Fréchet spaces (the generalization I want to find but am not sure exists); of course Banach spaces and Fréchet spaces are almost exclusively encountered in the same context, but it doesn’t mean that one is a popular typo for the other! (The relative rarity of both of these in the corpus probably doesn’t help. The farcical case is BRST, or Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin, in physics, as it is literally a single key away from “best” and thus almost impossible to search for.) On the other hand, Google’s unawareness of (extensive and ubiquitous) Russian noun morphology is essentially what allowed Yandex to exist: both 2011 Yandex and 2021 Google are much more helpful for Russian than 2011 Google. I suspect (but have not checked) that the engine under discussion is utterly unusable for it. English (along with other Germanic and Romance languages to a lesser extent) is quite unusual in being meaningfully searchable without any understanding of morphology, globally speaking.
    - dahauns 5y ago
      English is more the outlier in regard to Germanic languages, try German or Finnish, with their wonderful compounds :) https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pdf https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pd...
      - mananaysiempre 5y ago
        Well yeah, English is kind of weird, but Finnish isn’t a Germanic language at all? It’s not even Indo-European, so even Hindi is ostensibly closer to English than Finnish. I understand Standard German (along with Icelandic) is itself a bit atypical in that it hasn’t lost its cases when most other Germanic languages did. Re compounds, I expected they would be more or less easy to deal with by relatively dumb splitting, similar to greedy solutions to the “no spaces” problem of Chinese and Japanese, and your link seems to bear that out. But yeah, cheers to more language-specific stuff in your indexing. /s
        dahauns 5y ago
        Gaaah, brain fart - you're right, of course, dunno why I included it.
    - medstrom 5y ago
      I thought you could fix that by enclosing "BRST" in quotes, but apparently not. DuckDuckGo (which uses Google) returns a couple of results that do contain "BRST" in a medical context, but most results don't contain this string at all. What's going on?
      - mananaysiempre 5y ago
        I’m not certain what DDG actually uses (wasn’t it Bing?), but in my experience from the last couple of months it ignores quotes substantially more eagerly than Google does. For this particular term, a little bit of domain knowledge helps: even without quotes, brst becchi, brst formalism, brst quantization or perhaps bv brst will get you reasonable results. (I could swear Google corrected brst quantization to best quantization a year ago, but apparently not anymore.) Searching for stuff in the context of BRST is still somewhat unpleasant, though. I... don’t think anything particularly surprising is happening here, except for quotes being apparently ignored? I’ve had it explained to me that a rare word is essentially indistinguishable from a popular misspelling by NLP techniques as they currently exist, except by feeding the machine a massive dictionary (and perhaps not even then). BRST is a thing that you essentially can’t even define satisfactorily without at the very least four years of university-level physics (going by the conventional broad approach—the most direct possible road can of course be shorter if not necessarily more illuminating). “Best” is a very popular word both generally and in searches, and the R key is next to E on a Latin keyboard. If you are a perfect probabilistic reasoner with only these facts for context (and especially if you ignore case), I can very well believe that your best possible course of action is to assume a typo. How to permit overriding that decision (and indeed how to recognize you’ve actually made one worth worrying about without massive human input—e.g. Russian adjectives can have more than 20 distinct forms, can be made up on the spot by following productive word-formation processes, and you don’t want to learn all of the world’s languages!) is simply a very difficult problem for what is probably a marginal benefit in the grand scheme of things. I just dislike hitting these margins so much.
- Razengan 5y ago
  It could simply become an option.
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  Don't change it. It's good this way.
- ford_o 5y ago
  Maybe list the synonyms under the query, so its easier to try different formulations.
  - akavel 5y ago
    Oh this sounds like it could be a really cool idea! This way it could also be subtly teaching users that the engine doesn't do automatic synonyms translation so it's worth experimenting; also kinda like giving the synonyms feature while still keeping user in full control.

LanceH 5y ago

It would be nice if we could pipe search engines.

BenoitP 5y ago
Definitely; We could create a meta search engine that queries them all, in desktop application format. Let's name it after a famous old scientist, and maybe add the year to prove it's modern: Galileo 2021.
- Torwald 5y ago
  I need that with a simpler interface, so I call it after a famous dedective: Sherlock.
  - artificial 5y ago
    a magic pop sound is faintly audible as a new side project is appended to several lists Excellent, thank you!
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Not an app, but probably comes quite close in all other respects: https://metager.org https://metager.org
- overkalix 5y ago
  ... is this Galileo 2021 a reference that I am not understanding?
  - BenoitP 5y ago
    Yup, but so far no one got it. There was such an app in the early 2000's, before Google went mainstream, and Altavista-like engines were not good: Copernic 2000. I guess I'm officially old now.
    - tomerv 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]