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A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who structures queries more like natural langu

by enlyth 4y ago

A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want, but they are optimizing for the more common user who structures queries more like natural language (e.g. "How can I tie my shoelaces so they don't get untied easily") instead of what me or you would query ("secure shoelace knots") I'm surprised there hasn't been a separation of some sort of more technical search engine for developers and the classic Google experience where some neural network tries to make sense of your poorly written human language phrased question

rtkwe 4y ago
We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.
- grugagag 4y ago
  If we only had a downvote or don’t show me results from this source this problem would be solved. Google didn’t want to give us that feature because of … different incentives, no other reason comes to mind. I’ve witnessed google search become worse and worse and now it’s barely useful
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    That would cut down on some of the concentrated SEO spam centers but I think you'd still be fighting an endless battle with more distributed SEO spam sites that are more focused on one point.
  - tag2103 4y ago
    I know they would not do this but you aren't the only one that thinks in those veins. I'm so tired of all of the pinterest spam I pretty much gave up on google for anything other than code searches which funny enough can be done better and more naturally through a GPT type AI.
lamontcg 4y ago
> A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want not really. the problem is that is way too easy to game. i want that when you really get down to highly specific technical details, but not for the average everyday internet search where i'm not searching for something that thousands of people haven't searched for in the past week.
Too 4y ago
They are optimizing for ads. Asking how to tie your shoelaces usually start with three sponsored links where you can buy shoelaces.

by enlyth 4y ago

rtkwe 4y ago

We used to have just Internet grep but it was awful because sites just slammed tons of keywords into invisible text to get fake traffic. That's what spawned the original innovation at Google of PageRank and thus the SEO wars started. Going back to that wouldn't solve the issue with modern search.

grugagag 4y ago
If we only had a downvote or don’t show me results from this source this problem would be solved. Google didn’t want to give us that feature because of … different incentives, no other reason comes to mind. I’ve witnessed google search become worse and worse and now it’s barely useful
- rtkwe 4y ago
  That would cut down on some of the concentrated SEO spam centers but I think you'd still be fighting an endless battle with more distributed SEO spam sites that are more focused on one point.
- tag2103 4y ago
  I know they would not do this but you aren't the only one that thinks in those veins. I'm so tired of all of the pinterest spam I pretty much gave up on google for anything other than code searches which funny enough can be done better and more naturally through a GPT type AI.

lamontcg 4y ago

> A grep for the internet is what most of us technical users want not really. the problem is that is way too easy to game. i want that when you really get down to highly specific technical details, but not for the average everyday internet search where i'm not searching for something that thousands of people haven't searched for in the past week.

Too 4y ago

They are optimizing for ads. Asking how to tie your shoelaces usually start with three sponsored links where you can buy shoelaces.