8 ms·

People say google search is terrible these days, but I find the opposite. I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, a

by 323 5y ago

People say google search is terrible these days, but I find the opposite. I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, and the proper result will usually be in the first page. Of course, it doesn't always work, sometimes there are "hash collisions" so to speak, but I don't think the old algorithm would have been more successfully either, since if I knew the exact keywords to use, I wouldn't need to start with a vague description in the first place.

Jemaclus 5y ago
I've literally gone to Google and typed something very similar to "That guy in that thing with the dog" and the correct answer shows up as the first result. It's quite brilliant and magical how they do that. But sometimes it's a total miss when I want something very specific, and it just shows me other things I didn't ask for.
bitcharmer 5y ago
I have the exact opposite experience. Search results are nowadays ridden with crap from companies that learned how to game SEO. If not that, you get scam websites or other ad/malware infested trash.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Wish there was an easy way to remove forbes.com results
  - greybeardgeek 5y ago
    you can append -site:forbes.* to your query string
  - jiveturkey 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433
  - hidden-spyder 5y ago
    You can blacklist it using the uBlacklist extension. It's currently on the front page.
tux3 5y ago
I'd like to join the chorus disappointed in Google search results. It seems to do more correction for you, which is great if you're searching for common popular things. But any uncommon or precise query will often be misunderstood as something else. Plenty of times, no matter how I reword my sentence or what sort of analogies I try to give it, I've had Google fail to give me something that I know exists and that I have to find some other way.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  seems like it would be simple to reintroduce advanced search but these guys are monomaniacal
est31 5y ago
Yeah I remember that in the past, maybe so 5+ years ago, I used to phrase things in a certain way to please their algorithm. This is not needed any more. Sometimes it doesn't grasp concepts and returns false results. But this has become rarer as well.
dqv 5y ago
>I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, and the proper result will usually be in the first page. For the specific context of "I can find something I've already found", yes, it's useful. I just wish there was a way to change that context to "discovery mode" where it uses a different algorithm that is oriented toward finding new information. I want to find sites in the spirit of those old-fashioned sites that are minimally styled with dense information. And not just Wikipedia or a few "trusted" sources like it used to be in earlier times, but a more well-rounded result set.
- idealmedtech 5y ago
  > sites in the spirit of those old-fashioned sites I think the problem is that such sites are very difficult to find algorithmically, especially when it comes to their poor SEO. The reason they used to be so prevalent in the early 2000s search results is because that's mostly what the web was back then; a bunch of personal websites, blogs, etc. To do that nowadays would require heavy (manual) curation, which obviously Google isn't interested in.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    I don't think it's entirely true that the current Google results are merely a matter of decent sites being hard to find. I'm pretty sure that two years ago, Google found a great portion of "real content" pages than it finds today and SEO was already huge then. And Google does a significant amount of human testing right now. It especially noticeable to me that just in the last few months, Google has changed their algorithm so some product will be the first item on even the most generic search.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > I think the problem is that such sites are very difficult to find algorithmically I don't even think it's that. The issue with older content isn't the search but the sorting. Google and to a lesser extent Bing (and thus DDG) have prioritized content claiming to be more recent relative to the time they were indexed in their display of results. Showing more recent content is likely generally a safer bet for a search engine. More recent content is less likely to have suffered link rot and covers more recent developments in a subject. Unfortunately Google et al don't really respect user preferences with respect to sorting. They have a financial incentive to show results they can turn into dollars (or cents).
nightpool 5y ago
Note that this article is careful to never say that this "vector search" technology powers the classic Google Search. This sort of automated classification space is probably part of Google's general search algorithm, but it's probably a very small part. Youtube recommendations (based on description + thumbnail + potentially video content?) and Google Image Search are the two in-practice examples that it focuses on.
makeset 5y ago
If you don't know what you're looking for, it works well. If you know exactly what you want, specific keywords etc., good luck because it's gone from the mildly condescending "Did you mean..." corrections to "Yeah I am going to ignore all that, I bet what you really want to find is some ads."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
authed 5y ago
I have more trouble finding exactly what I'm looking for using Google, for me it started going down hill when they removed the Plus operator (and no quotes don't work the same). Also, Yandex is much better for reverse image search (similar images).
porker 5y ago
> I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, and the proper result will usually be in the first page. I can never do that. What I remember is so far from the wording used or how Google identifies the image that it never comes up. I end up scrolling back through my history trying to do it from the page title or domain
joe_the_user 5y ago
I disagree about the quality of Google search but I should note this has nothing to do with the utility of Google's vector search library, which is just one low level part of the process of creating a final Google and I'd expect the technical quality here to be excellent by default. Whether one likes or hates current Google search results, their qualities and the changes from early search processes are clearly intentional and don't relate to how well Google does raw indexing.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
I defended Google search without realizing my country was among the last countries getting all the stupid updates. I do not use Google search anymore. Why would I? I get top results that are clearly manipulated. Sites filled with ngrams and so on.
ac130kz 5y ago
I think Google used to be better by weighting incoming links higher than outcoming, e.g. these days searching for a programming problem you get irrelevant "StackOverflow/Github clones". Cosine similarity only considers, obviously, similarities, which can be helpful in contextless scenarios, but the amount of undetected duplicates in a specific context is stupid.

by 323 5y ago

Jemaclus 5y ago

I've literally gone to Google and typed something very similar to "That guy in that thing with the dog" and the correct answer shows up as the first result. It's quite brilliant and magical how they do that. But sometimes it's a total miss when I want something very specific, and it just shows me other things I didn't ask for.

bitcharmer 5y ago

I have the exact opposite experience. Search results are nowadays ridden with crap from companies that learned how to game SEO. If not that, you get scam websites or other ad/malware infested trash.

radicaldreamer 5y ago
Wish there was an easy way to remove forbes.com results
- greybeardgeek 5y ago
  you can append -site:forbes.* to your query string
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29546433
- hidden-spyder 5y ago
  You can blacklist it using the uBlacklist extension. It's currently on the front page.

tux3 5y ago

I'd like to join the chorus disappointed in Google search results. It seems to do more correction for you, which is great if you're searching for common popular things. But any uncommon or precise query will often be misunderstood as something else. Plenty of times, no matter how I reword my sentence or what sort of analogies I try to give it, I've had Google fail to give me something that I know exists and that I have to find some other way.

tehjoker 5y ago
seems like it would be simple to reintroduce advanced search but these guys are monomaniacal

est31 5y ago

Yeah I remember that in the past, maybe so 5+ years ago, I used to phrase things in a certain way to please their algorithm. This is not needed any more. Sometimes it doesn't grasp concepts and returns false results. But this has become rarer as well.

dqv 5y ago

>I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, and the proper result will usually be in the first page. For the specific context of "I can find something I've already found", yes, it's useful. I just wish there was a way to change that context to "discovery mode" where it uses a different algorithm that is oriented toward finding new information. I want to find sites in the spirit of those old-fashioned sites that are minimally styled with dense information. And not just Wikipedia or a few "trusted" sources like it used to be in earlier times, but a more well-rounded result set.

idealmedtech 5y ago
> sites in the spirit of those old-fashioned sites I think the problem is that such sites are very difficult to find algorithmically, especially when it comes to their poor SEO. The reason they used to be so prevalent in the early 2000s search results is because that's mostly what the web was back then; a bunch of personal websites, blogs, etc. To do that nowadays would require heavy (manual) curation, which obviously Google isn't interested in.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I don't think it's entirely true that the current Google results are merely a matter of decent sites being hard to find. I'm pretty sure that two years ago, Google found a great portion of "real content" pages than it finds today and SEO was already huge then. And Google does a significant amount of human testing right now. It especially noticeable to me that just in the last few months, Google has changed their algorithm so some product will be the first item on even the most generic search.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > I think the problem is that such sites are very difficult to find algorithmically I don't even think it's that. The issue with older content isn't the search but the sorting. Google and to a lesser extent Bing (and thus DDG) have prioritized content claiming to be more recent relative to the time they were indexed in their display of results. Showing more recent content is likely generally a safer bet for a search engine. More recent content is less likely to have suffered link rot and covers more recent developments in a subject. Unfortunately Google et al don't really respect user preferences with respect to sorting. They have a financial incentive to show results they can turn into dollars (or cents).

nightpool 5y ago

Note that this article is careful to never say that this "vector search" technology powers the classic Google Search. This sort of automated classification space is probably part of Google's general search algorithm, but it's probably a very small part. Youtube recommendations (based on description + thumbnail + potentially video content?) and Google Image Search are the two in-practice examples that it focuses on.

makeset 5y ago

If you don't know what you're looking for, it works well. If you know exactly what you want, specific keywords etc., good luck because it's gone from the mildly condescending "Did you mean..." corrections to "Yeah I am going to ignore all that, I bet what you really want to find is some ads."

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

authed 5y ago

I have more trouble finding exactly what I'm looking for using Google, for me it started going down hill when they removed the Plus operator (and no quotes don't work the same). Also, Yandex is much better for reverse image search (similar images).

porker 5y ago

> I can vaguely describe in a sentence the gist of an article I've read, or an image, and the proper result will usually be in the first page. I can never do that. What I remember is so far from the wording used or how Google identifies the image that it never comes up. I end up scrolling back through my history trying to do it from the page title or domain

joe_the_user 5y ago

I disagree about the quality of Google search but I should note this has nothing to do with the utility of Google's vector search library, which is just one low level part of the process of creating a final Google and I'd expect the technical quality here to be excellent by default. Whether one likes or hates current Google search results, their qualities and the changes from early search processes are clearly intentional and don't relate to how well Google does raw indexing.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

I defended Google search without realizing my country was among the last countries getting all the stupid updates. I do not use Google search anymore. Why would I? I get top results that are clearly manipulated. Sites filled with ngrams and so on.

ac130kz 5y ago

I think Google used to be better by weighting incoming links higher than outcoming, e.g. these days searching for a programming problem you get irrelevant "StackOverflow/Github clones". Cosine similarity only considers, obviously, similarities, which can be helpful in contextless scenarios, but the amount of undetected duplicates in a specific context is stupid.