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You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users li

You mentioned things I hadn't thought of. Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. It treats its power users like kids, and offers no complex filtering to do things like removing search results that require logins. Librarians love when you come to them to specifically refine your search. Google still has the most useful search, but they've taken away methods to get better results. I remember I was pretty upset when i couldn't search for images by exact dimensions anymore. Bing allows this. Google's product direction has been inching backwards for a decade.

onetokeoverthe 5y ago
dlsa 5y ago
Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many. There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.
- mrjin 5y ago
  Googles priorities have been long shifted from products to money. They are now deliberately doing evil things for more money. It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Google has been came such a monster, even we know it's dying, but its momentum will keep it going for a very long time. And if it can correct its trajectory just a little bit, the collapsing process will be even longer.
  - ornornor 5y ago
    > It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Very debatable.
    - beebeepka 5y ago
      No fun allowed. Or the implication is taking drugs for anything but recreation won't kill you. I need more guidance!
      - ornornor 5y ago
        Taking drugs for fun won’t necessarily make you an addict or kill you.
        mrjin 5y ago
        Hmmm, only if you know when to stop and can actually stop, sure, no it won't kill you. But what if you cannot stop? Most importantly, I did not even mention which drug as those was never the point.
        ornornor 5y ago
        > I did not even mention which drug Exactly. Heroin is pretty addictive, pretty fast. Otoh, there is no lethal dose that we know of for magic mushrooms (psylocibin). You can take a lot and have a hell of a trip but no one ever died from a psylocibin overdose. And it’s not addictive in the sense that you’ll get physical effects of you stop taking it. It builds a tolerance that will make it have much less effect if you take too much too often so it kinda takes care of the problem this way. Alcohol which is freely available to any adult can make you addicted and will Jill you if you take too much of it. What about sugar? We’re pretty much all addicted to it, and it can kill in the long term (obesity, diabetes…) I’m not a drug expert but I think it’s very detrimental to say that all drugs are bad, they’ll make you an addict and kill you, and they’ll liquefy your brain. This is FUD and it results in shaming. It also creates abysmally poor public policy like the “war on drugs” which has been nothing but a colossal failure and a misery generating system.
pessimizer 5y ago
> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
  - rvnx 5y ago
    Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads
    - richardfey 5y ago
      Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.
    - 35mm 5y ago
      Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.
  - derefr 5y ago
    > It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day. > the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long. That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.
mtgx 5y ago
everdrive 5y ago
>It treats its power users like kids It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it. I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results. It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it." This. So much this. And it is so...bloody...annoying.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  > Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results. Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing
  - erklik 5y ago
    > the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing Weirdly the same is the case for reddit. What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.
    - etherealG 5y ago
      What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.
Geonode 5y ago
Honestly, Yandex has really good image search. I now do all three (Google, Bing, and Yandex) when I'm researching for a design.
mrkramer 5y ago
I agree with you but I think the problem is that majority of internet users are casual users who don't care about complex queries. Maybe good business idea would be to make internet search engine which enables complex queries like the one you described. Google was made for masses not for power users.

onetokeoverthe 5y ago

dlsa 5y ago

Going backwards and standing still often look the same. I think its both in this case to varying degrees. Google is competing against itself, obvious competitors but also obvious refinements that appear so regardless of actually being implemented. The no-login filter is a refinement that would be useful to many. There are so many obvious improvements that could be made to gmail but there's no real way to do them as a consumer.

mrjin 5y ago
Googles priorities have been long shifted from products to money. They are now deliberately doing evil things for more money. It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Google has been came such a monster, even we know it's dying, but its momentum will keep it going for a very long time. And if it can correct its trajectory just a little bit, the collapsing process will be even longer.
- ornornor 5y ago
  > It is like taking small dose of drugs for fun, for sure it won't kill you immediately but it eventually will as people can hardly resist the temptation. Very debatable.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    No fun allowed. Or the implication is taking drugs for anything but recreation won't kill you. I need more guidance!
    - ornornor 5y ago
      Taking drugs for fun won’t necessarily make you an addict or kill you.
      - mrjin 5y ago
        Hmmm, only if you know when to stop and can actually stop, sure, no it won't kill you. But what if you cannot stop? Most importantly, I did not even mention which drug as those was never the point.
        ornornor 5y ago
        > I did not even mention which drug Exactly. Heroin is pretty addictive, pretty fast. Otoh, there is no lethal dose that we know of for magic mushrooms (psylocibin). You can take a lot and have a hell of a trip but no one ever died from a psylocibin overdose. And it’s not addictive in the sense that you’ll get physical effects of you stop taking it. It builds a tolerance that will make it have much less effect if you take too much too often so it kinda takes care of the problem this way. Alcohol which is freely available to any adult can make you addicted and will Jill you if you take too much of it. What about sugar? We’re pretty much all addicted to it, and it can kill in the long term (obesity, diabetes…) I’m not a drug expert but I think it’s very detrimental to say that all drugs are bad, they’ll make you an addict and kill you, and they’ll liquefy your brain. This is FUD and it results in shaming. It also creates abysmally poor public policy like the “war on drugs” which has been nothing but a colossal failure and a misery generating system.

pessimizer 5y ago

> Google's Search accomplishes the goals of 10 years ago, but steps no further than that. Google has removed features that it had 10 years ago.

IgorPartola 5y ago
I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
- rvnx 5y ago
  Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads
  - richardfey 5y ago
    Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.
  - 35mm 5y ago
    Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.
- derefr 5y ago
  > It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day. > the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long. That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.

mtgx 5y ago

everdrive 5y ago

>It treats its power users like kids It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it. I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results. It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.

zeruch 5y ago
"Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it." This. So much this. And it is so...bloody...annoying.
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
> Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results. Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing
- erklik 5y ago
  > the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing Weirdly the same is the case for reddit. What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.
  - etherealG 5y ago
    What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

Geonode 5y ago

Honestly, Yandex has really good image search. I now do all three (Google, Bing, and Yandex) when I'm researching for a design.

mrkramer 5y ago

I agree with you but I think the problem is that majority of internet users are casual users who don't care about complex queries. Maybe good business idea would be to make internet search engine which enables complex queries like the one you described. Google was made for masses not for power users.