6 ms·

An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or I'm

An interesting observation is that over the years, I've sort of found that if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions, or I'm not thinking about the problem the right way. For example, you come up with some weird programming idea to solve a problem and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. This has been proved to me over and over again as sort of a canary in the search coal mine. Google still solves all my questions, if I'm asking the right questions, I guess is what I'm getting at.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions" I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.
- vasco 5y ago
  Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search: > dog apple dangerous Today you should search: > can dogs eat apples And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    "you're thinking about it wrong" isn't really that great a defense of Google, you know? I'm not being flippant. The two examples you gave are different searches, with different goals.
  - jakejarvis 5y ago
    I've noticed the same, and it's an incredibly hard habit to break!
  - savanaly 5y ago
    I'm in the awkward middle area I think where I'm almost a digital native, and what you said maps perfectly to my experience. In middle school and high school I got pretty good at the first type of search you mentioned. I was young enough that I was almost learning how to "speak" google and it came easily, I was fluent. Throughout the end of high school and into college I had more and more issues finding what I wanted and one day after I had failed to search several times I thought to myself "Fuck it. I'm just going to type in exactly what I want in plain English, as if I was a moron, and see what happens." And it worked, and that day a lightbulb went off in my head.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    I’d argue that it’s not a “better way”, but rather a regression: I assume Google genuinely wants to understand my query, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t still be obvious to Google what kind of results it should return. Otherwise, it there truly is a “right way of asking Google questions”, why doesn’t Google release and promote a guide about it so people can be more successful in their search?
    - grogenaut 5y ago
      Okay, so answer me this... I'm trying to find out about the extra controls in the old space suits. I believe they used a chin switch or chin toggle (resistive). If I google "did astronauts control things with their chin" I see: 'It's All Different for Women in Space | Marie Claire' and 'Pillsbury Space Food Sticks were sweet Slim Jims in space' as the first 2 answers... nothing about switches. If I google 'space suit chin switch' I get links to resistivity toggle switches.
      - grogenaut 5y ago
        heck I was putting in exact model numbers today like MS3015S20-27SZ and google was returning me OTHER models such as MS3015S20-27PZ which is the male or female version of a part (PZ vs SZ), or changing the20-27 to a 29-4 which are all completely different parts. This is with verbatim on.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    If “you’re doing it wrong” didn’t fly with Apple. It doesn’t fly with Google.
    - neoromantique 5y ago
      I hate it as much as any other geek, but it did pretty much fly with apple. Even when it was as bad as "You're holding your phone wrong" bad.
  - KMag 5y ago
    I could very well be biased, but the first example still seems more useful than the second. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerous https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerou... https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20apples https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20app... Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem, and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the owner is.): https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feeding+apples+to+dogs&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feed...
  - mostdataisnice 5y ago
    Another thing for us on HN to note. This is how most people ask questions. It is not just that the other way is wrong - it is also less common.
    - mitchdoogle 5y ago
      Ya of course, but my natural inclination is not to ask a question to a web page
      - mostdataisnice 5y ago
        Right - I think this is part of the "scaling" of the internet. Those of us (relatively small set of earlier heavy internet users) are forced to change as the product is built for the wider audience.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    I think this also indicates why Google seems to have gotten worse at programming questions.
- KMag 5y ago
  Back when I started at Google, they at least said they actively targeted "long-tail" queries to gain market share. The thinking was that people would use a search engine until they hit some query that their usual search engine failed on. Then they'd give another search engine (perhaps Google) a try, so if you really targeted those tough queries and were at least decent at the common queries, you'd gain market share. Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case. (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].) Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator. (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas" user info database kept track of the last time you used an operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all the time. I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight the uncommon/difficult queries. They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries, and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only on later queries in these related query sequences. That way, they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from over-fitting the median/easy queries.
  - Gollapalli 5y ago
    They taught us the search engine operators in elementary school computer class. It’s a shame that they’ve gone away now, and the internet is so much worse than it was then.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  >answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query Google has come full circle and turned into Ask Jeeves.
KMag 5y ago
Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem. I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.
- mort96 5y ago
  This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when I'm looking for something in the "long tail". I just wish I could find obscure things again.
  - flenserboy 5y ago
    I wish there was a way to get rid of all sellers from results. Of late I have had to dig 2-3 pages in to get to anything which wasn't an online store.
    - headsoup 5y ago
      There is, use a different search engine. I've even found something as new as Andisearch good for finding research papers and Qwant good for general searching. There are many more and they keep up with Google pretty well now without the trash.
  - chaxor 5y ago
    What is a common query? facebook.com? Some very impressive search capabilities needed for that query there.
    - ByteJockey 5y ago
      Probably something like: "food delivery near me"
    - 5y ago
cryptoz 5y ago
I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got my answer. The rest of the results were websites for physical locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of which had any relationship to the phone number. Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.
- jsnell 5y ago
  1. Show visited locations in search results 2. ??? 3. Make as much money as possible
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    > 2. ??? oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed and be on my way. I should include that Google said next to each result ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my query, but shows them anyway. Why?
    - jsnell 5y ago
      So was there even a single ad on that search result page? From your original description it certainly didn't sound so. If not, how did it contribute to you being shown more ads?
DancesWTurtles 5y ago
> For example, you come up with some (...) idea (...) and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and that you should think in some way and not in some other way. I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- devteambravo 5y ago
  And what do you do about this discomfort? Asking for a friend who is also uncomfortable with that "guidance".
mostdataisnice 5y ago
This resonated a lot with me. Often if I'm learning a language and I see no one is doing what I'm querying for, I take a step back and try to ask a more basic question
onion2k 5y ago
For code maybe that's true. It's hard to see how I might be wrong about the place I want to travel to or the recipe I want to cook though.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

>"if there are not many good results, maybe I'm not asking the right questions" I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.

vasco 5y ago
Nowadays you should google using what in 2005 would be considered "the wrong way to search". Back then it was all about keywords, quotes and so on. For example if you wanted to know if dogs could eat apples you'd search: > dog apple dangerous Today you should search: > can dogs eat apples And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  "you're thinking about it wrong" isn't really that great a defense of Google, you know? I'm not being flippant. The two examples you gave are different searches, with different goals.
- jakejarvis 5y ago
  I've noticed the same, and it's an incredibly hard habit to break!
- savanaly 5y ago
  I'm in the awkward middle area I think where I'm almost a digital native, and what you said maps perfectly to my experience. In middle school and high school I got pretty good at the first type of search you mentioned. I was young enough that I was almost learning how to "speak" google and it came easily, I was fluent. Throughout the end of high school and into college I had more and more issues finding what I wanted and one day after I had failed to search several times I thought to myself "Fuck it. I'm just going to type in exactly what I want in plain English, as if I was a moron, and see what happens." And it worked, and that day a lightbulb went off in my head.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  I’d argue that it’s not a “better way”, but rather a regression: I assume Google genuinely wants to understand my query, and I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t still be obvious to Google what kind of results it should return. Otherwise, it there truly is a “right way of asking Google questions”, why doesn’t Google release and promote a guide about it so people can be more successful in their search?
  - grogenaut 5y ago
    Okay, so answer me this... I'm trying to find out about the extra controls in the old space suits. I believe they used a chin switch or chin toggle (resistive). If I google "did astronauts control things with their chin" I see: 'It's All Different for Women in Space | Marie Claire' and 'Pillsbury Space Food Sticks were sweet Slim Jims in space' as the first 2 answers... nothing about switches. If I google 'space suit chin switch' I get links to resistivity toggle switches.
    - grogenaut 5y ago
      heck I was putting in exact model numbers today like MS3015S20-27SZ and google was returning me OTHER models such as MS3015S20-27PZ which is the male or female version of a part (PZ vs SZ), or changing the20-27 to a 29-4 which are all completely different parts. This is with verbatim on.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  If “you’re doing it wrong” didn’t fly with Apple. It doesn’t fly with Google.
  - neoromantique 5y ago
    I hate it as much as any other geek, but it did pretty much fly with apple. Even when it was as bad as "You're holding your phone wrong" bad.
- KMag 5y ago
  I could very well be biased, but the first example still seems more useful than the second. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerous https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerou... https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20apples https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20app... Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem, and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the owner is.): https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feeding+apples+to+dogs&hl=en https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feed...
- mostdataisnice 5y ago
  Another thing for us on HN to note. This is how most people ask questions. It is not just that the other way is wrong - it is also less common.
  - mitchdoogle 5y ago
    Ya of course, but my natural inclination is not to ask a question to a web page
    - mostdataisnice 5y ago
      Right - I think this is part of the "scaling" of the internet. Those of us (relatively small set of earlier heavy internet users) are forced to change as the product is built for the wider audience.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  I think this also indicates why Google seems to have gotten worse at programming questions.
KMag 5y ago
Back when I started at Google, they at least said they actively targeted "long-tail" queries to gain market share. The thinking was that people would use a search engine until they hit some query that their usual search engine failed on. Then they'd give another search engine (perhaps Google) a try, so if you really targeted those tough queries and were at least decent at the common queries, you'd gain market share. Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case. (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].) Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator. (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas" user info database kept track of the last time you used an operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all the time. I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight the uncommon/difficult queries. They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries, and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only on later queries in these related query sequences. That way, they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from over-fitting the median/easy queries.
- Gollapalli 5y ago
  They taught us the search engine operators in elementary school computer class. It’s a shame that they’ve gone away now, and the internet is so much worse than it was then.
the_snooze 5y ago
>answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query Google has come full circle and turned into Ask Jeeves.

KMag 5y ago

Be careful. Maybe it's a useful rule of thumb, but be careful of the "searching for your keys under the light pole" problem. I worked at Google on rich content indexing for 4 years, more than a decade ago now. Google is pretty good. It used to really cater to "long tail" searches, but a combination of SEOs getting better (and specifically targeting Google) and "learn to rank" over-optimizing for the median query, means that lots of long-tail queries don't do very well on Google.

mort96 5y ago
This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when I'm looking for something in the "long tail". I just wish I could find obscure things again.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  I wish there was a way to get rid of all sellers from results. Of late I have had to dig 2-3 pages in to get to anything which wasn't an online store.
  - headsoup 5y ago
    There is, use a different search engine. I've even found something as new as Andisearch good for finding research papers and Qwant good for general searching. There are many more and they keep up with Google pretty well now without the trash.
- chaxor 5y ago
  What is a common query? facebook.com? Some very impressive search capabilities needed for that query there.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    Probably something like: "food delivery near me"
  - 5y ago

cryptoz 5y ago

I googled a phone number recently. It was the first result, got my answer. The rest of the results were websites for physical locations I had been recently, including a hospital, none of which had any relationship to the phone number. Google is _not_ a good guideline for asking the right questions. It is trying to make as much money as possible and it will scramble anything it can think of to do that. Don't use that as a guideline for how you are thinking about questions.

jsnell 5y ago
1. Show visited locations in search results 2. ??? 3. Make as much money as possible
- cryptoz 5y ago
  > 2. ??? oh Haha, funny old meme. Step 2 though is very clearly to show more ads and more content, to show more 'full results pages', etc, rather than just show me the 1 thing I needed and be on my way. I should include that Google said next to each result ('"555-555-555" is not on this page') and then show the page. Totally knows that the results are unrelated to my query, but shows them anyway. Why?
  - jsnell 5y ago
    So was there even a single ad on that search result page? From your original description it certainly didn't sound so. If not, how did it contribute to you being shown more ads?

DancesWTurtles 5y ago

> For example, you come up with some (...) idea (...) and no results are found -- I'm almost always headed down the wrong path. And by that you mean, Google is telling you how to think, and that you should think in some way and not in some other way. I'm quite sure I am not comfortable with that.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
devteambravo 5y ago
And what do you do about this discomfort? Asking for a friend who is also uncomfortable with that "guidance".

mostdataisnice 5y ago

This resonated a lot with me. Often if I'm learning a language and I see no one is doing what I'm querying for, I take a step back and try to ask a more basic question

onion2k 5y ago

For code maybe that's true. It's hard to see how I might be wrong about the place I want to travel to or the recipe I want to cook though.