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I personally think a big problem with search is major search engines try to be all things to all people and hence suffer as a result. For example: a beginner d

I personally think a big problem with search is major search engines try to be all things to all people and hence suffer as a result. For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post; an experienced developer would prefer results weighted towards the official docs, the project’s bug tracker and mailing list, etc. But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. One positive about AI: if an AI is doing the search, it likely wants the more advanced material not the more beginner-focused one. It can take more advanced material and simplify it for the benefit of less experienced users. It is (I suspect) less likely to make mistakes if you ask it to simplify the more advanced material than if you just gave it more beginner-oriented material instead. So if AI starts to replace humans as the main clients of search, that may reverse some of the pressure to “dumb it down”.

photonthug 2y ago
> But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. I mostly agree with your interesting comment, and I think your analysis basically jives with my sibling comment. But one thing I take issue with is the idea that this type of thing is a good faith effort, because it’s more like a convenient excuse. Explaining substring search or even include/exclude ops to children and grandparents is actually easy. Setting preferences for tutorials vs API docs would also be easy. But companies don’t really want user-directed behavior as much as they want to herd users to preferred content with algorithms, then convince the user it was their idea or at least the result of relatively static ranking processes. The push towards more fuzzy semantic search and “related content” everywhere is not to cater to novice users but to blur the line between paid advertisement and organic user-directed discovery. No need to give megacorp the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, or make the underlying problems seem harder than they are. All platforms land in this place by convergent evolution wherein the driving forces are money and influence, not insurmountable technical difficulties or good intentions for usability.
consp 2y ago
> For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post Good luck finding those, you end op with SEO spam and clone page spam. These days you have to look for unobvious hidden meanings which only relate to your exact problem to find what you are looking for. I have the strong feeling search these days is back to the Altavista era. You'd have to use trickery to find what you were looking for back then as well. Too bad + no longer works in google due to their stupid naming of a dead product (no, literal is not the same and no replacement).
- tru3_power 2y ago
  Yeah but this is just the name of the game. How can you even stop SEO style gamification at this point? I’m sure even LLMs are vulnerable/have been trained on SEO bs. End of the day it takes an informed user. Remember back in the day? Don’t trust the internet? I think that mindset will become the main school of thought once again. Which tbh, I think maybe a good thing.

photonthug 2y ago

> But since less technical and non-technical people vastly outnumber highly technical people, Google and Bing end up focusing on the needs of the former, at the cost of making search worse for the later. I mostly agree with your interesting comment, and I think your analysis basically jives with my sibling comment. But one thing I take issue with is the idea that this type of thing is a good faith effort, because it’s more like a convenient excuse. Explaining substring search or even include/exclude ops to children and grandparents is actually easy. Setting preferences for tutorials vs API docs would also be easy. But companies don’t really want user-directed behavior as much as they want to herd users to preferred content with algorithms, then convince the user it was their idea or at least the result of relatively static ranking processes. The push towards more fuzzy semantic search and “related content” everywhere is not to cater to novice users but to blur the line between paid advertisement and organic user-directed discovery. No need to give megacorp the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this, or make the underlying problems seem harder than they are. All platforms land in this place by convergent evolution wherein the driving forces are money and influence, not insurmountable technical difficulties or good intentions for usability.

consp 2y ago

> For example: a beginner developer is possibly better served by some SEO-heavy tutorial blog post Good luck finding those, you end op with SEO spam and clone page spam. These days you have to look for unobvious hidden meanings which only relate to your exact problem to find what you are looking for. I have the strong feeling search these days is back to the Altavista era. You'd have to use trickery to find what you were looking for back then as well. Too bad + no longer works in google due to their stupid naming of a dead product (no, literal is not the same and no replacement).

tru3_power 2y ago
Yeah but this is just the name of the game. How can you even stop SEO style gamification at this point? I’m sure even LLMs are vulnerable/have been trained on SEO bs. End of the day it takes an informed user. Remember back in the day? Don’t trust the internet? I think that mindset will become the main school of thought once again. Which tbh, I think maybe a good thing.