4 ms·
There is a bias in who defines "relevancy". If the search engine implicitly sets the indexing and ranking algorithms, filters, etc., the results are biased. If
by pickledoyster 2y ago
There is a bias in who defines "relevancy". If the search engine implicitly sets the indexing and ranking algorithms, filters, etc., the results are biased.
If the user can control the filters, set their ranking algorithm, then the relevancy (bias) is in the user's control. I can tell the search engine what it needs to show.
There are billions of pages with the word "cars"? Alright, I want to see 20 pages that were indexed most recently, excluding sites that are flagged as spam/malware/SEO scams by a blocklist of my choice. I'd also add a contextual filter/category to exclude the animated movie and mechanical means of transport, as my intent is news about the band. No semantic engine, no synonyms this time, I only need exact matches, thanks.
Let me do all this with a GUI or at least with search operators that are always respected. And allow me to save these settings as bookmarklets.
Instead, there's way too much effort going into these black boxes of manure, which results in groupthink and uncritical repetition of claims such as "you want to create a useful ranking, your first few results need to have identified the correct intent but also be sensitive to timeliness and location"
Here's the real bias: the company behind the search engine and its product managers are defining what is "useful", that it needs to "identify the correct intent" without giving the user any way to clearly state the intent, and that it needs to be "sensitive to timeliness and location" (what if it doesn't?). This is what Google does and SEOs keep parroting, while we look at the decrepit state of Google Search without wondering whether there might be a better way to build a search engine.
Sure, a search engine like that would not be a mass market product, but it would not give its users results that fit the lowest common denominator of a population with a median reading comprehension level of an 8th grader.