3 ms·

The one I just tried was "urbit key rollover" Upon closer inspection, I think there's something disconcerting about using this engine in that—I don't know the

by tern 3y ago

The one I just tried was "urbit key rollover" Upon closer inspection, I think there's something disconcerting about using this engine in that—I don't know the right words for this but—it filters 100% by all the keywords. So, "rollover" is kind of a strange word, and because you don't have any results with these three words, I see nothing. I'd prefer to instead see results for "urbit key," given the circumstances. I imagine the algorithms to do this well are complicated though. Another query that had no results: "multi-band compression maselec" A query that has surprisingly few results: "qmmf-4." It shows a single forum post from a forum that has probably hundreds of posts matching this query. Why just one?

bornfreddy 3y ago
Wow, thank you for the write-up! For me this is an endorsement of Marginalia, it seems to work exactly like it should... Like Google before it got "smart", or like AltaVista. Love it!
082349872349872 3y ago
> it filters 100% by all the keywords. IOW how queries ought to work. I am perfectly capable of changing the precision of my query to affect recall; I prefer that no "algorithm" ruins that ability.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Interesting. I searched for "what is jit oauth" and got no results. I did end up getting results with "jit oauth" (quotes not in search), but not great ones. To be fair, google didn't give me great results for either of those queries either edit: What I was looking for was related to JWTs, not necessarily oauth, and the actual claim in spec is "JTI" (but I believe a service whose traffic I was inspecting used "jit" instead)
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    Back when people-facing computer stuff worked more like computer-facing computer stuff, queries were simple: keywords to match. If you get too many results, add more keywords; if you get too few, remove* keywords (or change existing keywords to be more specific/more general respectively). If you're not searching for literal occurrences of "what" and "is", why should they even be in a query? * this is an instance of an adjunction, which is an important concept in informatics, but I understand that to actually admit the fact would probably be the kiss of death for anything claiming to be a "user" interface. Lagniappe: marginalia, upon being queried with "precision" and "recall", came up inter alia with http://comonad.com/reader/2009/remodeling-precision/ http://comonad.com/reader/2009/remodeling-precision/ , which I count as a win for it.
- tern 3y ago
  What's annoying about this design, when there's such a small corpus, is that I need to search for many permutations of a query in order to find good results. Without a feature like this, I want to have another feature that allows me to search for multiple queries at the same time and interleave the results. But I also understand the advantages. C'est la vie.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  It's a balancing act. I think Marginalia is a bit too literal with the search terms right now, and Google is way too far off in the other end of the spectrum. Query understanding is one of the things I'm hoping to address this year. It's very crude right now with some pretty obvious low hanging fruit in the scientific literature that's ripe for implementation.

by tern 3y ago

bornfreddy 3y ago

Wow, thank you for the write-up! For me this is an endorsement of Marginalia, it seems to work exactly like it should... Like Google before it got "smart", or like AltaVista. Love it!

082349872349872 3y ago

> it filters 100% by all the keywords. IOW how queries ought to work. I am perfectly capable of changing the precision of my query to affect recall; I prefer that no "algorithm" ruins that ability.

pcthrowaway 3y ago
Interesting. I searched for "what is jit oauth" and got no results. I did end up getting results with "jit oauth" (quotes not in search), but not great ones. To be fair, google didn't give me great results for either of those queries either edit: What I was looking for was related to JWTs, not necessarily oauth, and the actual claim in spec is "JTI" (but I believe a service whose traffic I was inspecting used "jit" instead)
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Back when people-facing computer stuff worked more like computer-facing computer stuff, queries were simple: keywords to match. If you get too many results, add more keywords; if you get too few, remove* keywords (or change existing keywords to be more specific/more general respectively). If you're not searching for literal occurrences of "what" and "is", why should they even be in a query? * this is an instance of an adjunction, which is an important concept in informatics, but I understand that to actually admit the fact would probably be the kiss of death for anything claiming to be a "user" interface. Lagniappe: marginalia, upon being queried with "precision" and "recall", came up inter alia with http://comonad.com/reader/2009/remodeling-precision/ http://comonad.com/reader/2009/remodeling-precision/ , which I count as a win for it.
tern 3y ago
What's annoying about this design, when there's such a small corpus, is that I need to search for many permutations of a query in order to find good results. Without a feature like this, I want to have another feature that allows me to search for multiple queries at the same time and interleave the results. But I also understand the advantages. C'est la vie.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
It's a balancing act. I think Marginalia is a bit too literal with the search terms right now, and Google is way too far off in the other end of the spectrum. Query understanding is one of the things I'm hoping to address this year. It's very crude right now with some pretty obvious low hanging fruit in the scientific literature that's ripe for implementation.