6 ms·

Why I hate search

97 points by philk10 15y ago

jacabado 15y ago
Wow I feel trolled by the author. Come on Google shaped the web as we know today with PageRank and AdWords, isn't it totally unfair to put things in that way? Also the author confuses search with discovery just to prove his point. I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people. Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.
tatsuke95 15y ago
>"Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we" Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there. Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.
- axefrog 15y ago
  Agreed. I think the author is focussing too much on semantics as opposed to intent, which is to filter. His over-emphasis of the word "lost" misleads us into thinking that the fact that we're searching suggests that we lost something to begin with. Perhaps an alternate view is that we didn't lose anything, but we had too much to begin with. Eliminating noise is the real problem. Doing so exposes that which we wanted, which was in fact always in front of us to begin with.
- wladimir 15y ago
  I don't understand his jump from "search is unpleasant and implies loss" to "search is dead". Cleaning bathrooms is also unpleasant, but to say companies specializing in it are dead? I don't think we ever globally solved the lost car keys and lost pets issues, either. It's a fact of life. The world is a complex mess. Thinking you can "just organize it" is hopelessly idealistic. Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Yes, I only really "search" google etc when I am looking for new information (which is quite often). For frequently visited sites there are bookmarks etc. I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,
  - Seth_Kriticos 15y ago
    Adding to that, "just organizing it" has one substantial problem: people generally disagree in how to organize the world and what they see as priorities (stuff they want to find), so any one way to do this would be the wrong one for the big majority.
- username3 15y ago
  The alternative is a directory organized and categorized better. You would then need search to find categories faster than clicking through each level. Google killed their directory. Google Directory is no longer available. We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web. If you prefer to browse a directory of the web, visit the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org
revelation 15y ago
Its pretty obvious by this point that Google's aim is not annoying the maximum number of people to maximize ad revenue. Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?
axefrog 15y ago
The problem is that if you try to delegate responsibility for avoiding the scenario where the information is "lost" to begin with, you have to make sure that the process performing the searching and organizing knows what to look for at least as well as, or better than, the person for who the finding is being performed. I'll be very impressed if you can create an algorithm that knows what I want, up to the second, better than I do.
CharlieA 15y ago
I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others. I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.
drhowarddrfine 15y ago
Microsoft loses a half billion dollars every quarter on Bing. Google makes billions. I think he's just depressed he left Google for Bing.
mgkimsal 15y ago
He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads). Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result. Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc. None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.
- sreyaNotfilc 15y ago
  I actually have an idea for an alternative that I'm building for my website (artjutsu.com). I've been using it for about 3 months now and I still have a ways to go to make it more useful. I believe it may be something that you're interested in. I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me. Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.
forrestblount 15y ago
Great article. What really strikes me about this is that we just saw Google's new glass video - a device in which search is primarily implied. Google knows search is dumb and wants to fix it, primarily through external devices (android) that are context aware and have access to incredible amounts of personally relative data. They can't kill their money cow, not directly, and haven't shown us how they'll monetize products without relying on ads, so they'll have to leave search alone, at least for now.
Tichy 15y ago
He only says that search is crap, but not really how to make it better. Except for Siri. He claims we could do better, but how?
wooptoo 15y ago
Search is dead. Long live the semantic web.
- davegauer 15y ago
  I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely disappointed! There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc. Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current. Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns. Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.
rbehrends 15y ago
This seems to be a semantics issue. "To search" has multiple meanings, and only one of them implies loss. In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy. Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline). This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them. Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...
Sembiance 15y ago
He will fit right in at Microsoft then. They call bing lots of things like "decision engine" and "doing engine", but never a "search engine". Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"
- goostavos 15y ago
  Haha! I thought that was going to be dropped in at some point as well. "We need less search, and more decision." These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution? I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices.. Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?
peeln 15y ago
Is anyone else not surprised that the doc is working for microsoft? Perhaps instead of associating himself as a former googler, former professor, and former startup founder, he should assert himself as an individual and an authority on whatever new and exciting product he's working on at mcsft. I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.
DamagedProperty 15y ago
To me this just feels reaching. Sure, he does a good job of highlighting a problem but doesn't really offer any vision for a solution. But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21
- cooldeal 15y ago
  > But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21 Share prices are not directly comparable. Market cap is, where MSFT is beating GOOG.
danso 15y ago
The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable. The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
huggyface 15y ago
Microsoft failed, miserably, at search. So search doesn't matter. Right? It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy. What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon." Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions. Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that. It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works. EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.
benjash 15y ago
Seems a bit idealistic to me. There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised. Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it? Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it. And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.
bashzor 15y ago
Wow, did someone just reinvent browsing history?
mistermann 15y ago
I don't agree entirely with OP, but there is truth in what he says. > The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from sites within that catalog. This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and greatly improve search productivity, there are many others. That google hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.
- danso 15y ago
  Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? By registering your +1's for sites and users, Google gets a good fix of where you like your information from. However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up hurting the "open" web.
  - mistermann 15y ago
    > Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? Maybe, I have no idea. It lacks the manual grouping though. >Users do not like manually curating lists No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search. >your solution requires that users know what they don't know No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site) A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".
glfomfn 15y ago
"When the fox cannot reach the grapes he says they are not ripe" A Greek proverb which matches perfect this guys post.
AznHisoka 15y ago
Perhaps we'd be better off with different products for different types of searches. If I need a specific tool or utility, I search the App Store. If I need a review, Yelp. If I need to compare prices, ShopZilla. What I'd love to see if a search engine that only returns authority websites, sort of what Blekko was doing.
chrisveto 15y ago
I for one would vote for common sense, which would get rid of, say 1/3 of the entire planet's search queries. That amount of course is taken completely off the ceiling, but it get's my point across. That being said, if no one were searching, then no one would be finding. Searching is the thing that makes us learn, I mean, in a school library you also search for a book, right? No books are going to run into your lap by themselves. So, unless some of you geniuses have a way to fix that and make human race even more lazier, do let me know.
Porter_423 15y ago
"Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for." One word: competition. Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is very difficult to get them back.
radarsat1 15y ago
This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads. To me this makes his assertion, > There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon. fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed. Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.
- danso 15y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex" http://goo.gl/5YPtb http://goo.gl/5YPtb "Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” " I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image. --- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html
  - lambda 15y ago
    I'm not so sure you should be giving him the benefit of the doubt. He worked for Microsoft for a few years http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229, then moved to Google, and then moved back to Microsoft, writing a scathing article http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... about Google in the process. It feels to me like he was using his time at Google to get a promotion at Microsoft.
cromwellian 15y ago
You know, if I ever quit Google and joined Microsoft, I still wouldn't write crap like this, even if my boss tried to force me. Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :) Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google? So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials? And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber? And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google. Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?
j_baker 15y ago
This seems incredibly out of touch with reality. I can buy that there's a better model out there than search, but what is that model? Until the author can give me something better, search is still the best model for this, even if we accept the author's problems with search.
cromwellian 15y ago
As a friend reminded me, if Google is lying about trying to minimize searches, then 1) Why Google Instant and 2) Why "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google, there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.
iamgopal 15y ago
where is the f dislike button ?
badgergravling 15y ago
Really bizarre. I totally get that searching needs improvement in various areas, but Siri etc are just search via audio. The other option is to give up all your privacy to allow tracking, but as you see on a daily basis, we're a long way from contextual understanding that really works. SO without search you'd be relying on asking Hackernews/Twitter etc for every single enquiry you have... Including the embarrassing ones...
Lagged2Death 15y ago
We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are found. Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to. Speaking broadly, "search" has been, as he points out, a major paradigm in human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches or to distill the results of searches. The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss... I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the freedom to lose things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find them again when we decide we need them. Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their minds to think about other things in the interim. But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.
DominikR 15y ago
What started as a nice thought that could have been transformed or applied by the author into something useful (In the sense that it could have helped someone to create something great) launched into another "I hate Google and you should too" ad by some Microsoft employee. I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is obviously targeting developers) Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email etc.) And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results, again with no evidence whatsoever. This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10 test queries to prove his point. But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so i read it from start to end. Well done.
lopatin 15y ago
What does he suggest, though? If having a "decision" engine is what he thinks is best, I'd say that usually the top 3 organic results in Google for just about any search are much more relevant that the technology Microsoft has to provide a decision. Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the Bing first page results for the same query. Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber, you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results, and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing currently has.
languagehacker 15y ago
Good god. Bothered me so much I had to blog about it. http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/ http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/
frankus 15y ago
I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of what I believe is going to replace (or more accurately, make irrelevant) current search engines. Most of the pieces are already in place. Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my favorite donut place is open (as if, but bear with me). If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that donut place close?" They might answer that "they're open for another hour." There are two important differences between this and search: First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for years now. Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated. If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it is, and subtract that from the appropriate number. I also don't have much information about how current their information is, even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated around noon on April 2nd. One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic information is a fool's errand. What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true, and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like "Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be "5:00PM PDT". Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.
Jonovono 15y ago
I think search can be done better. But I don't see a replacement for search. Even when we think, we perform a search in our mind to return the answer. It is far quicker to type into Google "who is the main character in 1984", than to go to a database(dmoz) and click books, then click 'numbers' then find 1984 then click it. I don't know if there can be something quicker than search (of course if you had an answer immediately when you thought of a question, but that still requires a search). But I agree search can be done differently and in a way that is more organized and "semantic".
taa 15y ago
I've worked at Google and they take search quality very seriously. In fact, the search quality guys are not allowed to talk to the ads guys to avoid exactly this type of influence. Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue. So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search quality in favour of ad revenue?

97 points by philk10 15y ago

Wow I feel trolled by the author. Come on Google shaped the web as we know today with PageRank and AdWords, isn't it totally unfair to put things in that way? Also the author confuses search with discovery just to prove his point. I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people. Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.

tatsuke95 15y ago

>"Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we" Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there. Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.

axefrog 15y ago
Agreed. I think the author is focussing too much on semantics as opposed to intent, which is to filter. His over-emphasis of the word "lost" misleads us into thinking that the fact that we're searching suggests that we lost something to begin with. Perhaps an alternate view is that we didn't lose anything, but we had too much to begin with. Eliminating noise is the real problem. Doing so exposes that which we wanted, which was in fact always in front of us to begin with.
wladimir 15y ago
I don't understand his jump from "search is unpleasant and implies loss" to "search is dead". Cleaning bathrooms is also unpleasant, but to say companies specializing in it are dead? I don't think we ever globally solved the lost car keys and lost pets issues, either. It's a fact of life. The world is a complex mess. Thinking you can "just organize it" is hopelessly idealistic. Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  Yes, I only really "search" google etc when I am looking for new information (which is quite often). For frequently visited sites there are bookmarks etc. I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,
- Seth_Kriticos 15y ago
  Adding to that, "just organizing it" has one substantial problem: people generally disagree in how to organize the world and what they see as priorities (stuff they want to find), so any one way to do this would be the wrong one for the big majority.
username3 15y ago
The alternative is a directory organized and categorized better. You would then need search to find categories faster than clicking through each level. Google killed their directory. Google Directory is no longer available. We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web. If you prefer to browse a directory of the web, visit the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org

revelation 15y ago

Its pretty obvious by this point that Google's aim is not annoying the maximum number of people to maximize ad revenue. Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?

axefrog 15y ago

The problem is that if you try to delegate responsibility for avoiding the scenario where the information is "lost" to begin with, you have to make sure that the process performing the searching and organizing knows what to look for at least as well as, or better than, the person for who the finding is being performed. I'll be very impressed if you can create an algorithm that knows what I want, up to the second, better than I do.

CharlieA 15y ago

I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others. I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.

drhowarddrfine 15y ago

Microsoft loses a half billion dollars every quarter on Bing. Google makes billions. I think he's just depressed he left Google for Bing.

mgkimsal 15y ago

He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it. Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better. I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads). Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result. Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc. None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.

sreyaNotfilc 15y ago
I actually have an idea for an alternative that I'm building for my website (artjutsu.com). I've been using it for about 3 months now and I still have a ways to go to make it more useful. I believe it may be something that you're interested in. I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me. Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.

forrestblount 15y ago

Great article. What really strikes me about this is that we just saw Google's new glass video - a device in which search is primarily implied. Google knows search is dumb and wants to fix it, primarily through external devices (android) that are context aware and have access to incredible amounts of personally relative data. They can't kill their money cow, not directly, and haven't shown us how they'll monetize products without relying on ads, so they'll have to leave search alone, at least for now.

Tichy 15y ago

He only says that search is crap, but not really how to make it better. Except for Siri. He claims we could do better, but how?

wooptoo 15y ago

Search is dead. Long live the semantic web.

davegauer 15y ago
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely disappointed! There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc. Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current. Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns. Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.

rbehrends 15y ago

This seems to be a semantics issue. "To search" has multiple meanings, and only one of them implies loss. In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy. Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline). This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them. Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

Sembiance 15y ago

He will fit right in at Microsoft then. They call bing lots of things like "decision engine" and "doing engine", but never a "search engine". Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"

goostavos 15y ago
Haha! I thought that was going to be dropped in at some point as well. "We need less search, and more decision." These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution? I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices.. Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?

peeln 15y ago

Is anyone else not surprised that the doc is working for microsoft? Perhaps instead of associating himself as a former googler, former professor, and former startup founder, he should assert himself as an individual and an authority on whatever new and exciting product he's working on at mcsft. I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.

DamagedProperty 15y ago

To me this just feels reaching. Sure, he does a good job of highlighting a problem but doesn't really offer any vision for a solution. But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21

cooldeal 15y ago
> But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21 Share prices are not directly comparable. Market cap is, where MSFT is beating GOOG.

danso 15y ago

The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable. The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

huggyface 15y ago

Microsoft failed, miserably, at search. So search doesn't matter. Right? It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy. What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon." Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions. Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that. It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works. EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.

benjash 15y ago

Seems a bit idealistic to me. There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised. Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it? Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it. And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.

bashzor 15y ago

Wow, did someone just reinvent browsing history?

mistermann 15y ago

I don't agree entirely with OP, but there is truth in what he says. > The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well? One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from sites within that catalog. This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and greatly improve search productivity, there are many others. That google hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.

danso 15y ago
Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? By registering your +1's for sites and users, Google gets a good fix of where you like your information from. However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up hurting the "open" web.
- mistermann 15y ago
  > Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? Maybe, I have no idea. It lacks the manual grouping though. >Users do not like manually curating lists No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search. >your solution requires that users know what they don't know No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site) A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".

glfomfn 15y ago

"When the fox cannot reach the grapes he says they are not ripe" A Greek proverb which matches perfect this guys post.

AznHisoka 15y ago

Perhaps we'd be better off with different products for different types of searches. If I need a specific tool or utility, I search the App Store. If I need a review, Yelp. If I need to compare prices, ShopZilla. What I'd love to see if a search engine that only returns authority websites, sort of what Blekko was doing.

chrisveto 15y ago

I for one would vote for common sense, which would get rid of, say 1/3 of the entire planet's search queries. That amount of course is taken completely off the ceiling, but it get's my point across. That being said, if no one were searching, then no one would be finding. Searching is the thing that makes us learn, I mean, in a school library you also search for a book, right? No books are going to run into your lap by themselves. So, unless some of you geniuses have a way to fix that and make human race even more lazier, do let me know.

Porter_423 15y ago

"Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for." One word: competition. Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is very difficult to get them back.

radarsat1 15y ago

This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads. To me this makes his assertion, > There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon. fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed. Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.

danso 15y ago
My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex" http://goo.gl/5YPtb http://goo.gl/5YPtb "Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” " I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image. --- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html
- lambda 15y ago
  I'm not so sure you should be giving him the benefit of the doubt. He worked for Microsoft for a few years http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229, then moved to Google, and then moved back to Microsoft, writing a scathing article http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... about Google in the process. It feels to me like he was using his time at Google to get a promotion at Microsoft.

cromwellian 15y ago

You know, if I ever quit Google and joined Microsoft, I still wouldn't write crap like this, even if my boss tried to force me. Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :) Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google? So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials? And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber? And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google. Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?

j_baker 15y ago

This seems incredibly out of touch with reality. I can buy that there's a better model out there than search, but what is that model? Until the author can give me something better, search is still the best model for this, even if we accept the author's problems with search.

cromwellian 15y ago

As a friend reminded me, if Google is lying about trying to minimize searches, then 1) Why Google Instant and 2) Why "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google, there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.

iamgopal 15y ago

where is the f dislike button ?

badgergravling 15y ago

Really bizarre. I totally get that searching needs improvement in various areas, but Siri etc are just search via audio. The other option is to give up all your privacy to allow tracking, but as you see on a daily basis, we're a long way from contextual understanding that really works. SO without search you'd be relying on asking Hackernews/Twitter etc for every single enquiry you have... Including the embarrassing ones...

Lagged2Death 15y ago

We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are found. Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to. Speaking broadly, "search" has been, as he points out, a major paradigm in human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches or to distill the results of searches. The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss... I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the freedom to lose things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find them again when we decide we need them. Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their minds to think about other things in the interim. But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.

DominikR 15y ago

What started as a nice thought that could have been transformed or applied by the author into something useful (In the sense that it could have helped someone to create something great) launched into another "I hate Google and you should too" ad by some Microsoft employee. I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is obviously targeting developers) Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email etc.) And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results, again with no evidence whatsoever. This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10 test queries to prove his point. But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so i read it from start to end. Well done.

lopatin 15y ago

What does he suggest, though? If having a "decision" engine is what he thinks is best, I'd say that usually the top 3 organic results in Google for just about any search are much more relevant that the technology Microsoft has to provide a decision. Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the Bing first page results for the same query. Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber, you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results, and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing currently has.

languagehacker 15y ago

Good god. Bothered me so much I had to blog about it. http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/ http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/

frankus 15y ago

I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of what I believe is going to replace (or more accurately, make irrelevant) current search engines. Most of the pieces are already in place. Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my favorite donut place is open (as if, but bear with me). If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that donut place close?" They might answer that "they're open for another hour." There are two important differences between this and search: First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for years now. Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated. If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it is, and subtract that from the appropriate number. I also don't have much information about how current their information is, even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated around noon on April 2nd. One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic information is a fool's errand. What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true, and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like "Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be "5:00PM PDT". Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.

Jonovono 15y ago

I think search can be done better. But I don't see a replacement for search. Even when we think, we perform a search in our mind to return the answer. It is far quicker to type into Google "who is the main character in 1984", than to go to a database(dmoz) and click books, then click 'numbers' then find 1984 then click it. I don't know if there can be something quicker than search (of course if you had an answer immediately when you thought of a question, but that still requires a search). But I agree search can be done differently and in a way that is more organized and "semantic".

taa 15y ago

I've worked at Google and they take search quality very seriously. In fact, the search quality guys are not allowed to talk to the ads guys to avoid exactly this type of influence. Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue. So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search quality in favour of ad revenue?