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This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One o

This is a clear demonstration of the user's expectation of search having exceeded what's possible today. From the article: > Lets look at some examples. One of my favorite places in the world is Koh Lanta, Thailand. When traveling, I’m always on the lookout for places that give off the Koh Lanta vibe. What does that mean? Hard to say, exactly, but having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. I don’t know exactly; if I did, it’d be easier to find. Anyway, forgetting that Google is bad at long tails, I search for what is the koh lanta of croatia? and get: This is a near impossible query for human beings, let alone for computer given the state of the AI at this point in time.

svnpenn 4y ago
Vectoring Words (Word Embeddings) - Computerphile https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8?t=835 https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8?t=835
cfeduke 4y ago
Maybe. If this were a couple of decades ago and this search were performed, the searcher may simply see zero results. This used to be an acceptable response from a search engine - unless there's some website that specifically contains the search term being sought, simply return zero results. Not thousands or tens of thousands results. What we get instead are incorrect results which are being presented as reasonable answers to the search query in the name of advertising revenue.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I remember, in the 90's, I typed "hexdit" in altavista and spent the time visiting exactly 100 websites to find exactly the hex editor I was searching for. I remember the number exactly because it was in the last position (10) of the last page and there were 10 pages.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Ugh. I distinctly remember a dinner party in 1993-94 where we talked about how amazing the web was and how impossible it was to find anything. We discussed registered keywords a la AOL, and I’m sure someone suggested search engines would eventually solve it, but I certainly wouldn’t have wagered significant money on that based on Altavista. When I discovered Google (I think it was running at beta.stanford.edu at the time) it was just short of a miracle.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Around 20 years ago I was trying to intersect data sets on two machines without transferring the entire set across the wire. I was slowly, painfully trying to invent Bloom Filters, because none of my searches turned up Bloom Filters. The company folded before I could well and truly embarrass myself.
- RileyJames 4y ago
  This is a big part of the problem. The incentives. There is no blank space to fill with something useful. Instead everything is filled with SEO driven, ad riddled, bullshit. And creating something useful is more cost and effort than creating more SEO driven crap. And even if you do create something useful, you’d then need to focus on SEO in order to compete. There’s no way this problem isn’t solvable. But google seems to lack any motivation to solve it.
trebbble 4y ago
It did used to be possible to craft searches that'd find that kind of thing, with Google. Not in natural language, but you could guess enough unusual words that might show up on a page that had that info to zero in on it. Their apparently paying a lot less attention to certain things (like link text—"what might someone use to describe a link to this resource, but which might not appear on the resource itself?" used to be a very fruitful way to search), and freely substituting words or dropping terms that are merely not common on hits (but not totally absent from 100% of results) has made this kind of thing impossible.
- varispeed 4y ago
  Indeed. It was so much easier to find stuff you are looking for a decade ago. Now it is mostly spam or (what really grinds my gears) AI written posts that only after reading it for a while you realise it is all bollocks. That being said, I remember my cousin had a blog where he was writing utter nonsense about trending topics and he was actually able to pull enough money from Ad Sense to afford a pub crawl once a month. Now of course all of this is streamlined - one button website generators with AI content and posts for given topic and self optimising for engagement and advert clicks etc. But I see Google has thrown in the towel and no longer cares for search results.
- powerhour 4y ago
  It's absurdly common for Google to completely ignore the first term I include in a search. It's not like I typed it just for fun!
chx 4y ago
Yeah unless there's a blogger who have the same train of thought of OP this is not going to be findable by "Koh Lanta vibe". Quantifying it as charming slow and cheap does lead to results: croatia off the beaten path slow cheap search result #5 is https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/jul/17/croatia-10-best-islands-beaches-crowd-free-summer-holiday-green-list https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/jul/17/croatia-10-be... which has this gem > Places where things move at a less hurried pace, where Croatian life can be savoured, where you get a flavour of what the Dalmatians call fjaka – the art of doing nothing. These islands and mainland destinations are what you want in a post-lockdown escape: peace, beauty and the chance to discover why Croatia is such an enticing country. Now I know I want to search for fjaka -- if I want to search further because this article might just be what OP wanted. The success for search always has been finding the keywords to search for. You can see here it took me just a few minutes.
dakial1 4y ago
It is not only that. This search specifically is something that it's impossible because if the search worked, those "places out of the beaten path" the author is searching for, would immediately become popular and they wouldn't be true results anymore. They not being "indexed" by Google (or the internet in general) is what makes them the way they are.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Sort of like how I hope no one ever learns about my city/state and it can keep being pleasant and affordable.
  - lupire 4y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=fres%20small%20too%20many%20people https://www.google.com/search?q=fres%20small%20too%20many%20... Once I lived in the city, it was too big and noisy So I moved to the country to stop and smell the rosies All my city friends joined me and put up nice new housies Now it's too big and noisy, think I'll move to the country
- notahacker 4y ago
  It's not difficult to find info on Ko Lanta or Croatian resorts on Google. Its not invisibility that keeps them relatively quiet, it's the sheer amount of competition. The reason even a fairly advance NLP system is going to struggle to find what the author considers to be the "Ko Lanta of Croatia" is that they can't read the author's mind about qualities associated with Ko Lanta, so they're going to highlight islands, not "small, quiet resort villages with $10-$20 rooms and hammocks" (Not really Croatia's "vibe" though I suspect the OP would probably like most Croatian islands anyway...). The same is going to be true even if you put in strings that return comparisons humans directly make themselves like "Venice of Asia".
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Some off the beaten path places stay off the beaten path because they're genuinely hard to get to. https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Previously_Off_the_beaten_path https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Previously_Off_the_beaten_pat...
halayli 4y ago
OP is asking google to search their feelings, it's ridiculous expectation for sure.
jxramos 4y ago
So true. People see sci-fi representations of technology in movies and TV shows and extrapolate that to the real world never realizing that satisfying the prerequisites for any technology to become a reality is easier said than done. It’s always handwavvy too: the computer will figure it out. Let the computer do it.
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  People want their entire worldview spoonfed to them. It sounds like this person wants to have a philosophical discussion with a friend about this type of subjective question rather than simply receive a factual search engine response.
Kye 4y ago
There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get search traffic was to write a quality article tackling questions like this. Google was thirsty for answers to the ever-growing number of queries it had never seen before and would shower traffic on anyone who answered them even if it was a bad answer. A good answer had staying power.
- samatman 4y ago
  The sobering realization is that a lot of the quality phpbb forums which would answer these questions, and link-juice quality posts, got shuttered a long time ago. Google could find them on Archive but we both know that's not the business.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I was there for it. It worked for a select group of toy problem domains and the answer for most high-concept searches would be noise or nothing. The author never manages to convince me that the information they're looking for is on the Internet for Google to index in the first place. The author then asserts "don't just hit me with garbage," which is a fine assertion, except what they're interpreting as 'garbage' is the information other people making the search could actually use. Google A/B tested the hell out of "say nothing" vs. "guess something close to what the requester might care about" and the latter won out every time.
  - trasz 4y ago
    What won was what _appeared_ to be something useful, at least at first glance.
  - nl 4y ago
    I was there too and I agree with this take. If this data is there now, it is most likely in a Facebook post which Google isn't seeing.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly optimistic about historical Google?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > But am I overly optimistic about historical Google? Well, I was about to post a similar reply. It would have taken some messing around with the search string, but I'm confident I would be able to find something like this on Google 18 years ago, and I'm certain that if it exists, I can't find it now (unless it's on some big name site).
- summerlight 4y ago
  > then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. I don't think Google of 15 years ago will do a good job on the current age of internet. The size of web has increased a lot like 100x where most of the increment comes from unstructured formats like video or image and its signal to noise ratio deteriorated considerably. SEO has become much more sophisticated ever. A large fraction of useful information is now locked in the unindexed walled garden.
  - CodeSgt 4y ago
    Surely significantly more than 100x. I'd hypothesize 10,000x at minimum from 15 years ago, at least if you measure total bits. Not sure how I could confirm that conjecture though.
    - redox99 4y ago
      However the number of actual, genuine content (so excluding SEO listicles and so on) is definitely less than 100x. In fact it could be less than 1x in many cases. People that would have blogged about their Croatia trip might now instead just have a 10 word tweet, an instagram story (of similar low quality and probably not publicly indexable), or a youtube video (so non text content)
spitfire 4y ago
I actually built this exact thing for myself when I was looking for property to buy. I built a VAE DNN to identify sandy white beaches, added in a bunch of data about economics and such, built a custom McPain index (Inverse of the distance to the nearest chain restaurant (McDonalds, Burger king, Starbucks, etc)*1000000)[1]. Fed a bunch of countries coastline into it, and popped out ranked beachfronts to investigate more. 1. I once went to Ao Nang, Thailand a few years after the tsunami and found a really cool chill cheap beach town and loved it. Went back a few years later and right on the main street there was a McDonalds. Across from that there was a Burger king, ~100M up the road was another McDonalds. I will never return.
- ck_one 4y ago
  Sounds super useful! Where did you get the data from? Do you still have the code somewhere?
HeyItsMatt 4y ago
- krapp 4y ago
  >The correct result is to return pages containing "Croatia" AND "Koh Lanta". But that isn't the correct result. "Koh Lanta" is being used by the OP to describe the vibe of a place "having tourist amenities without being touristy." It isn't a common English idiom, but one they made up based on their personal experiences as a tourist in Thailand. Results which simply contain the text "Croatia" and "Koh Lanta" aren't going to reflect what they want.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - HeyItsMatt 4y ago
tigerlily 4y ago
That’s easy, just ask DALL-E and do an image search
pixl97 4y ago
>having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost. Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist. The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran. So what do you think is going to happen to some place that 300+ million wealthy people around the world can search in a few seconds and find out it's cheap an empty. The answer is "become busy and expensive". The only reason places like this still exist is Google can't find them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jquery 4y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only one to cringe at the lack of self-awareness on the part of the author at the inherent paradox of wanting something highly ranked by google but also quiet, cheap, and slow. Here's a tip for the blog author. Learn a foreign language. Then search google in that foreign language. You might be surprised. Be the change you want to see.
  - rtsil 4y ago
    I learned a foreign language (English), I search Google in that foreign language. My browser's language is set in that foreign language. My search parameters are set to only show results in English. I use Google.com, not my localized version of Google. And yet about half the time when I search using keywords (as opposed to long expressions), there are always two or three links in my language (French) in the first page results. Youtube is worse, I have two YT accounts in English where I only watch videos in English, and Youtube keeps recommending me videos in French that are not relevant at all to my interests (even though most recommendations in English are perfectly relevant). It's as if their AI just saw my IP and decided to recommend to me the most popular French videos of the moment.
    - 4y ago
vector_spaces 4y ago
I know that search engines are optimized to facilitate commerce, and yes, depending on the extent to which you're bought into their ecosystem, Google probably knows a lot about you, like, for instance, whether or not you've been to Koh Lanta before as a tourist, but good lord what a self-centered way (for the author of this blog post, not the parent comment) to think about this. Like, Koh Lanta is surely not just a vacation destination, it's also a place where people live their lives, go to work and school, are homeless, deal with illness. The expectation that Google will assume that by "koh lanta of croatia" you're really asking "vacation destinations in Croatia that are similar to Koh Lanta, Thailand" really rubs me the wrong way
- HeyItsMatt 4y ago
- megablast 4y ago
  Can you think of a better question??
nonrandomstring 4y ago
I think it's deeper than misaligned expectations. Consider this line: > Google has gotten exceedingly good at organizing everyday life. It reliably gets me news, recipes... What I mainly hear on this site and elsewhere is people complaining about how the news is partisan rubbish, fake, and serves the "elites". And recipes. Seriously? I had a half dozen people berate me earlier for suggesting that cooking your own meals should be an enjoyable part of life. Nobody wants news and recipes. Here's the problem.. "The Internet" was military project that got loose. "The Web" was a solution for research scientists to exchange papers. That's all. Driven by a massively profitable industry, a solution looking for a problem expanded in expectations, and took over the consciousness of generations of an entire society. "Organising everyday life" is an inadequate appraisal. Most businesses had to be dragged screaming and kicking online. We still possess a vague, poorly thought-through ideal that somehow a connected, "technological" society is a better one, and a thirst for convenience and speed. But let's be honest, we don't really know what the net is for. It has no telos or guiding design principle other than what we overlay on it. Military tools in the hands of "the people" tend towards insurgency and revolution. Wasn't The Internet's "killer app" the Arab Spring? The brightest moment of the Web was in it's formative years, as an explosion of ordinary speech and new political power. Much since then has been an reaction to try dampening it, domesticating netizens, or even putting the genie back in the bottle. Maybe a reason to be optimistic, excited even, is that we're still in the infancy of the network. It's still pregnant with unimaginable possibility.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Yet Google encourages this type of search, where Google operates as some sort of oracle. What seems like an endless army of Google proponents (perhaps they are simply "status quo" proponents) discourage anyone from even attempting to think about how the web could be organised without the need for a Google. In a library, I can do searches restricted to certain subject areas. I might only be searching certain databases that pertain to certain subjects. Whether it could ever be feasible to search the www by "subject area" is left as a question for the reader. In any event, if it were I would search for "koh lanta" in a relevant subject area, e.g., "travel reviews". One can search for pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using domain names registered from the .hr registry, e.g., "koh lanta" site:.hr What if all travel sites registered names from some registry, .travelreviews, and one could search pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using registered .travelreviews domains. Even if I could just obtain a list of travel review websites, I could index those sites and then search that index for reviews that contain the terms (a) "croatia", or names of various destinations in Croatia, and (b) "koh lanta". If I was really patient I could use a script that simply performed the same search on each site, either using the site's "search" option or a search engine. I am still not sure this search even makes sense. It seems to rely on an assumption that some traveller will compare Koh Lanta with some location in Croatia. What could make more sense is to define what are the specific charactersitics of Koh Lanta that one wants to find in a Croatian destination, then search for those. Then I might search not only travel reviews but sites that describe characteristics of Croatian travel destinations. In any event, it is this sort of catgorisation of sites that is generally missing from the www. I believe it is feasible but "tech" companies like Google and its followers are not interested in promoting such facilities, preferring instead to pursue data collection about www users and programmatic online advertising. If Google is the "front page" of the www, then it can portray the www in the way it sees most beneficial to Google. For example, an endless sea of disorganised information that is impossible to utilise without Google's assistance. I certainly do not need to search billions of web pages to find the "koh lanta of croatia". I only need to search sites with travel reviews. But I do not get to limit a search like that. An advertising company gets to decide what is "relevant" to the terms I input. _Popularity_ (potential value for advertising to a wide audience) dictates what I can and cannot see of the www through Google. About 10 years ago I started a proof of concept that aimed to catgorise a web (cf. "the" web) via non-ICANN issued domain names issued by a non-commercial domain name registry not governed by ICANN. The idea is that the FQDN can contain 1. a subject matter description (subdomain) 2. a trademark (domain) and 3. a Nice trademark class (TLD). Searches can then be done largely based on FQDN instead of heuristics such as "page rank", popularity or other metrics designed for advertising purposes. This new web has value to me because it is constructed from legitimate organisations that have invested in trademarks, i.e., they have a registered address and they pay their legal bills. Registering a mark suggests they have an existing or future brand to protect, a business that needs a mark to protect consumers from becoming confused about the origin of a product or service. (How many of those Chinese sellers on Amazon today have trademarks.) Ideally, this system filters out those who are not legitimate businesses. The garbage at the top of Google would not be possible. To game this system would require obtaining trademarks, not simply gaming ICANN's system of registries and registrars. (And we know ICANN itself is not a trusted steward of DNS, but a means for a select few to make huge profits from it.) This prototype web was not meant as a replacement for "the" web, but as an experiment to separate out the commercial entities on the www from the non-commercial ones. Google and its ilk want a www where there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial www use. All www use is surveilled for commercial purposes. This mixing of commercial with non-commercial, to me poses one of the biggest threats to the www we started using in the early 1990s being wiped out. In the early days, there was this idea that TLDs would represent different categories of websites. For example, ".org" would be non-commercial websites, ".edu" would be educational institutions, and so on. Things have changed. The root.zone has exploded in size with countless "gTLDs", most of them are purely commercial. History is showing that it is infeasible to demand that TLDs enforce some sort of rules over the contents of websites that use them. One needs "Google" to help figure out what websites are worth visiting. The prototype web in theory allows one to find legitimate brands on the www by searching registered marks or subject matter descriptions within Nice trademark classes that are contained in FQDNs, not the contents of web pages. It is the antithesis of what one sees on Amazon today, what with a gazillion Chinese knock-offs, including Amazon's own "brands". There is no "SEO" on this new web because the contents of web pages, e.g., "backlinks", are not the basis for search. But do not worry, the prototype web does not exist and would never work. It is a terrible idea. Google will never die. See you in the Metaverse.
spullara 4y ago
GPT-3 prompt: I really love the vibe of Koh Lanta in Thailand. It has tourist amenities without really being touristy. I find it charming, slow and cheap. Is there a place in Croatia like it? Completion: There is no exact place in Croatia that has the same vibe as Koh Lanta in Thailand. However, there are places in Croatia that have a similar charm and slower pace. These places include Hvar Island, Korcula Island, and Istria. While these places do have some tourist amenities, they are not as touristy as Koh Lanta and still offer a more authentic Croatian experience. Another: There is no exact equivalent to Koh Lanta in Croatia, but the small town of Nin on the Dalmatian coast comes close. Nin is a charming, slow-paced town with beautiful beaches and a relaxed atmosphere. It is also quite inexpensive by Croatian standards.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the result. I'd say this isn't what the author was intending.
  - drc500free 4y ago
    Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      I believe this is the point that @drivebycomment was making, that answering such a query is not possible right now. The query needs to be reframed by using keywords like the GPT-3 prompt did, and even further refined than that, and you still have to finish the last mile of research.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Fun one today: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source Prompt: "Is Fortigate open source?" Article: "Based on the parameters we compared, it seems that pfSense is the more favorable solution because it is open source and also offers great features." Google: "It is open source!"
drexlspivey 4y ago
I asked GPT-3 "What is a place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta?" and the answer was "A place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta is Hvar."
kccqzy 4y ago
And HN just destroyed this search. When I tried the same search, HN is on the front page now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
binarysneaker 4y ago
Part of the problem is the way that data is presented. Google indexes HTML, but wouldn't it be better if sites provided a standard interface to their [shareable] data, so that data quality, and searches could get better?
- lupire 4y ago
  "Semantic web". Tried and failed. How would that prevent spam?
- fomine3 4y ago
  They tried JSON-LD
romwell 4y ago
>This is a near impossible query for human beings As is every query that we need computers for (e.g., a SELECT query that goes over millions of records). On the other hand, expecting a search engine to find pages which at least mention both Croatia and Koh Lanta is a very, very, very low bar. And it's going to be better than what Google is giving today.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

svnpenn 4y ago

Vectoring Words (Word Embeddings) - Computerphile https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8?t=835 https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8?t=835

cfeduke 4y ago

Maybe. If this were a couple of decades ago and this search were performed, the searcher may simply see zero results. This used to be an acceptable response from a search engine - unless there's some website that specifically contains the search term being sought, simply return zero results. Not thousands or tens of thousands results. What we get instead are incorrect results which are being presented as reasonable answers to the search query in the name of advertising revenue.

marcodiego 4y ago
I remember, in the 90's, I typed "hexdit" in altavista and spent the time visiting exactly 100 websites to find exactly the hex editor I was searching for. I remember the number exactly because it was in the last position (10) of the last page and there were 10 pages.
- macintux 4y ago
  Ugh. I distinctly remember a dinner party in 1993-94 where we talked about how amazing the web was and how impossible it was to find anything. We discussed registered keywords a la AOL, and I’m sure someone suggested search engines would eventually solve it, but I certainly wouldn’t have wagered significant money on that based on Altavista. When I discovered Google (I think it was running at beta.stanford.edu at the time) it was just short of a miracle.
hinkley 4y ago
Around 20 years ago I was trying to intersect data sets on two machines without transferring the entire set across the wire. I was slowly, painfully trying to invent Bloom Filters, because none of my searches turned up Bloom Filters. The company folded before I could well and truly embarrass myself.
RileyJames 4y ago
This is a big part of the problem. The incentives. There is no blank space to fill with something useful. Instead everything is filled with SEO driven, ad riddled, bullshit. And creating something useful is more cost and effort than creating more SEO driven crap. And even if you do create something useful, you’d then need to focus on SEO in order to compete. There’s no way this problem isn’t solvable. But google seems to lack any motivation to solve it.

trebbble 4y ago

It did used to be possible to craft searches that'd find that kind of thing, with Google. Not in natural language, but you could guess enough unusual words that might show up on a page that had that info to zero in on it. Their apparently paying a lot less attention to certain things (like link text—"what might someone use to describe a link to this resource, but which might not appear on the resource itself?" used to be a very fruitful way to search), and freely substituting words or dropping terms that are merely not common on hits (but not totally absent from 100% of results) has made this kind of thing impossible.

varispeed 4y ago
Indeed. It was so much easier to find stuff you are looking for a decade ago. Now it is mostly spam or (what really grinds my gears) AI written posts that only after reading it for a while you realise it is all bollocks. That being said, I remember my cousin had a blog where he was writing utter nonsense about trending topics and he was actually able to pull enough money from Ad Sense to afford a pub crawl once a month. Now of course all of this is streamlined - one button website generators with AI content and posts for given topic and self optimising for engagement and advert clicks etc. But I see Google has thrown in the towel and no longer cares for search results.
powerhour 4y ago
It's absurdly common for Google to completely ignore the first term I include in a search. It's not like I typed it just for fun!

chx 4y ago

Yeah unless there's a blogger who have the same train of thought of OP this is not going to be findable by "Koh Lanta vibe". Quantifying it as charming slow and cheap does lead to results: croatia off the beaten path slow cheap search result #5 is https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/jul/17/croatia-10-best-islands-beaches-crowd-free-summer-holiday-green-list https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/jul/17/croatia-10-be... which has this gem > Places where things move at a less hurried pace, where Croatian life can be savoured, where you get a flavour of what the Dalmatians call fjaka – the art of doing nothing. These islands and mainland destinations are what you want in a post-lockdown escape: peace, beauty and the chance to discover why Croatia is such an enticing country. Now I know I want to search for fjaka -- if I want to search further because this article might just be what OP wanted. The success for search always has been finding the keywords to search for. You can see here it took me just a few minutes.

dakial1 4y ago

It is not only that. This search specifically is something that it's impossible because if the search worked, those "places out of the beaten path" the author is searching for, would immediately become popular and they wouldn't be true results anymore. They not being "indexed" by Google (or the internet in general) is what makes them the way they are.

datavirtue 4y ago
Sort of like how I hope no one ever learns about my city/state and it can keep being pleasant and affordable.
- lupire 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=fres%20small%20too%20many%20people https://www.google.com/search?q=fres%20small%20too%20many%20... Once I lived in the city, it was too big and noisy So I moved to the country to stop and smell the rosies All my city friends joined me and put up nice new housies Now it's too big and noisy, think I'll move to the country
notahacker 4y ago
It's not difficult to find info on Ko Lanta or Croatian resorts on Google. Its not invisibility that keeps them relatively quiet, it's the sheer amount of competition. The reason even a fairly advance NLP system is going to struggle to find what the author considers to be the "Ko Lanta of Croatia" is that they can't read the author's mind about qualities associated with Ko Lanta, so they're going to highlight islands, not "small, quiet resort villages with $10-$20 rooms and hammocks" (Not really Croatia's "vibe" though I suspect the OP would probably like most Croatian islands anyway...). The same is going to be true even if you put in strings that return comparisons humans directly make themselves like "Venice of Asia".
thematrixturtle 4y ago
Some off the beaten path places stay off the beaten path because they're genuinely hard to get to. https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Previously_Off_the_beaten_path https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Previously_Off_the_beaten_pat...

halayli 4y ago

OP is asking google to search their feelings, it's ridiculous expectation for sure.

jxramos 4y ago

So true. People see sci-fi representations of technology in movies and TV shows and extrapolate that to the real world never realizing that satisfying the prerequisites for any technology to become a reality is easier said than done. It’s always handwavvy too: the computer will figure it out. Let the computer do it.

JacobThreeThree 4y ago
People want their entire worldview spoonfed to them. It sounds like this person wants to have a philosophical discussion with a friend about this type of subjective question rather than simply receive a factual search engine response.

Kye 4y ago

There's some mix of people in here who weren't around for or forgot about when Google handled stuff like this brilliantly. In fact, one of the best ways to get search traffic was to write a quality article tackling questions like this. Google was thirsty for answers to the ever-growing number of queries it had never seen before and would shower traffic on anyone who answered them even if it was a bad answer. A good answer had staying power.

samatman 4y ago
The sobering realization is that a lot of the quality phpbb forums which would answer these questions, and link-juice quality posts, got shuttered a long time ago. Google could find them on Archive but we both know that's not the business.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I was there for it. It worked for a select group of toy problem domains and the answer for most high-concept searches would be noise or nothing. The author never manages to convince me that the information they're looking for is on the Internet for Google to index in the first place. The author then asserts "don't just hit me with garbage," which is a fine assertion, except what they're interpreting as 'garbage' is the information other people making the search could actually use. Google A/B tested the hell out of "say nothing" vs. "guess something close to what the requester might care about" and the latter won out every time.
- trasz 4y ago
  What won was what _appeared_ to be something useful, at least at first glance.
- nl 4y ago
  I was there too and I agree with this take. If this data is there now, it is most likely in a Facebook post which Google isn't seeing.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly optimistic about historical Google?

marcosdumay 4y ago
> But am I overly optimistic about historical Google? Well, I was about to post a similar reply. It would have taken some messing around with the search string, but I'm confident I would be able to find something like this on Google 18 years ago, and I'm certain that if it exists, I can't find it now (unless it's on some big name site).
summerlight 4y ago
> then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. I don't think Google of 15 years ago will do a good job on the current age of internet. The size of web has increased a lot like 100x where most of the increment comes from unstructured formats like video or image and its signal to noise ratio deteriorated considerably. SEO has become much more sophisticated ever. A large fraction of useful information is now locked in the unindexed walled garden.
- CodeSgt 4y ago
  Surely significantly more than 100x. I'd hypothesize 10,000x at minimum from 15 years ago, at least if you measure total bits. Not sure how I could confirm that conjecture though.
  - redox99 4y ago
    However the number of actual, genuine content (so excluding SEO listicles and so on) is definitely less than 100x. In fact it could be less than 1x in many cases. People that would have blogged about their Croatia trip might now instead just have a 10 word tweet, an instagram story (of similar low quality and probably not publicly indexable), or a youtube video (so non text content)

spitfire 4y ago

I actually built this exact thing for myself when I was looking for property to buy. I built a VAE DNN to identify sandy white beaches, added in a bunch of data about economics and such, built a custom McPain index (Inverse of the distance to the nearest chain restaurant (McDonalds, Burger king, Starbucks, etc)*1000000)[1]. Fed a bunch of countries coastline into it, and popped out ranked beachfronts to investigate more. 1. I once went to Ao Nang, Thailand a few years after the tsunami and found a really cool chill cheap beach town and loved it. Went back a few years later and right on the main street there was a McDonalds. Across from that there was a Burger king, ~100M up the road was another McDonalds. I will never return.

ck_one 4y ago
Sounds super useful! Where did you get the data from? Do you still have the code somewhere?

HeyItsMatt 4y ago

krapp 4y ago
>The correct result is to return pages containing "Croatia" AND "Koh Lanta". But that isn't the correct result. "Koh Lanta" is being used by the OP to describe the vibe of a place "having tourist amenities without being touristy." It isn't a common English idiom, but one they made up based on their personal experiences as a tourist in Thailand. Results which simply contain the text "Croatia" and "Koh Lanta" aren't going to reflect what they want.
- deleted 4y ago
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- HeyItsMatt 4y ago

tigerlily 4y ago

That’s easy, just ask DALL-E and do an image search

pixl97 4y ago

>having tourist amenities without being touristy. Charming, slow, cheap. Ugh, this reminds me of the people that move from high tax places to low tax places but want all the benefits of high tax places at low cost. Now, back to the main point, if this was searchable it wouldn't exist. The number one complaint people have today is popular places are too busy, too many tourists come and prices go up and it's over ran. So what do you think is going to happen to some place that 300+ million wealthy people around the world can search in a few seconds and find out it's cheap an empty. The answer is "become busy and expensive". The only reason places like this still exist is Google can't find them.

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jquery 4y ago
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to cringe at the lack of self-awareness on the part of the author at the inherent paradox of wanting something highly ranked by google but also quiet, cheap, and slow. Here's a tip for the blog author. Learn a foreign language. Then search google in that foreign language. You might be surprised. Be the change you want to see.
- rtsil 4y ago
  I learned a foreign language (English), I search Google in that foreign language. My browser's language is set in that foreign language. My search parameters are set to only show results in English. I use Google.com, not my localized version of Google. And yet about half the time when I search using keywords (as opposed to long expressions), there are always two or three links in my language (French) in the first page results. Youtube is worse, I have two YT accounts in English where I only watch videos in English, and Youtube keeps recommending me videos in French that are not relevant at all to my interests (even though most recommendations in English are perfectly relevant). It's as if their AI just saw my IP and decided to recommend to me the most popular French videos of the moment.
  - 4y ago

vector_spaces 4y ago

I know that search engines are optimized to facilitate commerce, and yes, depending on the extent to which you're bought into their ecosystem, Google probably knows a lot about you, like, for instance, whether or not you've been to Koh Lanta before as a tourist, but good lord what a self-centered way (for the author of this blog post, not the parent comment) to think about this. Like, Koh Lanta is surely not just a vacation destination, it's also a place where people live their lives, go to work and school, are homeless, deal with illness. The expectation that Google will assume that by "koh lanta of croatia" you're really asking "vacation destinations in Croatia that are similar to Koh Lanta, Thailand" really rubs me the wrong way

HeyItsMatt 4y ago
megablast 4y ago
Can you think of a better question??

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I think it's deeper than misaligned expectations. Consider this line: > Google has gotten exceedingly good at organizing everyday life. It reliably gets me news, recipes... What I mainly hear on this site and elsewhere is people complaining about how the news is partisan rubbish, fake, and serves the "elites". And recipes. Seriously? I had a half dozen people berate me earlier for suggesting that cooking your own meals should be an enjoyable part of life. Nobody wants news and recipes. Here's the problem.. "The Internet" was military project that got loose. "The Web" was a solution for research scientists to exchange papers. That's all. Driven by a massively profitable industry, a solution looking for a problem expanded in expectations, and took over the consciousness of generations of an entire society. "Organising everyday life" is an inadequate appraisal. Most businesses had to be dragged screaming and kicking online. We still possess a vague, poorly thought-through ideal that somehow a connected, "technological" society is a better one, and a thirst for convenience and speed. But let's be honest, we don't really know what the net is for. It has no telos or guiding design principle other than what we overlay on it. Military tools in the hands of "the people" tend towards insurgency and revolution. Wasn't The Internet's "killer app" the Arab Spring? The brightest moment of the Web was in it's formative years, as an explosion of ordinary speech and new political power. Much since then has been an reaction to try dampening it, domesticating netizens, or even putting the genie back in the bottle. Maybe a reason to be optimistic, excited even, is that we're still in the infancy of the network. It's still pregnant with unimaginable possibility.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Yet Google encourages this type of search, where Google operates as some sort of oracle. What seems like an endless army of Google proponents (perhaps they are simply "status quo" proponents) discourage anyone from even attempting to think about how the web could be organised without the need for a Google. In a library, I can do searches restricted to certain subject areas. I might only be searching certain databases that pertain to certain subjects. Whether it could ever be feasible to search the www by "subject area" is left as a question for the reader. In any event, if it were I would search for "koh lanta" in a relevant subject area, e.g., "travel reviews". One can search for pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using domain names registered from the .hr registry, e.g., "koh lanta" site:.hr What if all travel sites registered names from some registry, .travelreviews, and one could search pages that contain "koh lanta" on www sites using registered .travelreviews domains. Even if I could just obtain a list of travel review websites, I could index those sites and then search that index for reviews that contain the terms (a) "croatia", or names of various destinations in Croatia, and (b) "koh lanta". If I was really patient I could use a script that simply performed the same search on each site, either using the site's "search" option or a search engine. I am still not sure this search even makes sense. It seems to rely on an assumption that some traveller will compare Koh Lanta with some location in Croatia. What could make more sense is to define what are the specific charactersitics of Koh Lanta that one wants to find in a Croatian destination, then search for those. Then I might search not only travel reviews but sites that describe characteristics of Croatian travel destinations. In any event, it is this sort of catgorisation of sites that is generally missing from the www. I believe it is feasible but "tech" companies like Google and its followers are not interested in promoting such facilities, preferring instead to pursue data collection about www users and programmatic online advertising. If Google is the "front page" of the www, then it can portray the www in the way it sees most beneficial to Google. For example, an endless sea of disorganised information that is impossible to utilise without Google's assistance. I certainly do not need to search billions of web pages to find the "koh lanta of croatia". I only need to search sites with travel reviews. But I do not get to limit a search like that. An advertising company gets to decide what is "relevant" to the terms I input. _Popularity_ (potential value for advertising to a wide audience) dictates what I can and cannot see of the www through Google. About 10 years ago I started a proof of concept that aimed to catgorise a web (cf. "the" web) via non-ICANN issued domain names issued by a non-commercial domain name registry not governed by ICANN. The idea is that the FQDN can contain 1. a subject matter description (subdomain) 2. a trademark (domain) and 3. a Nice trademark class (TLD). Searches can then be done largely based on FQDN instead of heuristics such as "page rank", popularity or other metrics designed for advertising purposes. This new web has value to me because it is constructed from legitimate organisations that have invested in trademarks, i.e., they have a registered address and they pay their legal bills. Registering a mark suggests they have an existing or future brand to protect, a business that needs a mark to protect consumers from becoming confused about the origin of a product or service. (How many of those Chinese sellers on Amazon today have trademarks.) Ideally, this system filters out those who are not legitimate businesses. The garbage at the top of Google would not be possible. To game this system would require obtaining trademarks, not simply gaming ICANN's system of registries and registrars. (And we know ICANN itself is not a trusted steward of DNS, but a means for a select few to make huge profits from it.) This prototype web was not meant as a replacement for "the" web, but as an experiment to separate out the commercial entities on the www from the non-commercial ones. Google and its ilk want a www where there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial www use. All www use is surveilled for commercial purposes. This mixing of commercial with non-commercial, to me poses one of the biggest threats to the www we started using in the early 1990s being wiped out. In the early days, there was this idea that TLDs would represent different categories of websites. For example, ".org" would be non-commercial websites, ".edu" would be educational institutions, and so on. Things have changed. The root.zone has exploded in size with countless "gTLDs", most of them are purely commercial. History is showing that it is infeasible to demand that TLDs enforce some sort of rules over the contents of websites that use them. One needs "Google" to help figure out what websites are worth visiting. The prototype web in theory allows one to find legitimate brands on the www by searching registered marks or subject matter descriptions within Nice trademark classes that are contained in FQDNs, not the contents of web pages. It is the antithesis of what one sees on Amazon today, what with a gazillion Chinese knock-offs, including Amazon's own "brands". There is no "SEO" on this new web because the contents of web pages, e.g., "backlinks", are not the basis for search. But do not worry, the prototype web does not exist and would never work. It is a terrible idea. Google will never die. See you in the Metaverse.

spullara 4y ago

GPT-3 prompt: I really love the vibe of Koh Lanta in Thailand. It has tourist amenities without really being touristy. I find it charming, slow and cheap. Is there a place in Croatia like it? Completion: There is no exact place in Croatia that has the same vibe as Koh Lanta in Thailand. However, there are places in Croatia that have a similar charm and slower pace. These places include Hvar Island, Korcula Island, and Istria. While these places do have some tourist amenities, they are not as touristy as Koh Lanta and still offer a more authentic Croatian experience. Another: There is no exact equivalent to Koh Lanta in Croatia, but the small town of Nin on the Dalmatian coast comes close. Nin is a charming, slow-paced town with beautiful beaches and a relaxed atmosphere. It is also quite inexpensive by Croatian standards.

soulofmischief 4y ago
The next problem is verifying all of that information. It will require multiple dozen auxillary Google searches and reading through countless articles and message boards. GPT-3 is a great research tool as a brainstorming engine, but sadly cannot currently be formally trusted to output truthful information, even with conditioning. It takes someone with prior knowledge or subsequent research in order to make use of the result. I'd say this isn't what the author was intending.
- drc500free 4y ago
  Google's answer box also can't be trusted to output truthful information.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    I believe this is the point that @drivebycomment was making, that answering such a query is not possible right now. The query needs to be reframed by using keywords like the GPT-3 prompt did, and even further refined than that, and you still have to finish the last mile of research.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Fun one today: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fortigate+open+source Prompt: "Is Fortigate open source?" Article: "Based on the parameters we compared, it seems that pfSense is the more favorable solution because it is open source and also offers great features." Google: "It is open source!"

drexlspivey 4y ago

I asked GPT-3 "What is a place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta?" and the answer was "A place in Croatia similar to Koh Lanta is Hvar."

kccqzy 4y ago

And HN just destroyed this search. When I tried the same search, HN is on the front page now.

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binarysneaker 4y ago

Part of the problem is the way that data is presented. Google indexes HTML, but wouldn't it be better if sites provided a standard interface to their [shareable] data, so that data quality, and searches could get better?

lupire 4y ago
"Semantic web". Tried and failed. How would that prevent spam?
fomine3 4y ago
They tried JSON-LD

romwell 4y ago

>This is a near impossible query for human beings As is every query that we need computers for (e.g., a SELECT query that goes over millions of records). On the other hand, expecting a search engine to find pages which at least mention both Croatia and Koh Lanta is a very, very, very low bar. And it's going to be better than what Google is giving today.

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