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> Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debuggin
by eitland 2y ago
> Morgan: Literally Danny said he sat with an engineer team with examples of people in the room and said why aren’t they showing up and they did their “debugging process” and couldn’t figure it out.
Meanwhile a single Swede with a single desktop class machine in his living room created a search engine so good that I would often switch to it when Google failed.
These days I use Kagi, which has prioritization and block lists (which I don't use because the results are good out of the box).
Wanna know what is really interesting about the Kagi story?
While Kagi is building its own index, for a long time they were kind of reselling a wrapped version of Google + Bing results, but still were extremely much better IMO.
I have two theories:
- either Kagi has some seriously smart systems that read in the first tens of results and reshuffle them
- or more likely in my opinion the reason why results have been so good is because kagi has api access which bypass the "query expander and stupidifier"[1] on the way in to Google and the personalization thing on the way out. That way they just interact with the core of Google search which somehow still works.
[1]: "stupidifier" the thing in the Google pipeline that rewrites
- "obscure-js-lib" (think one that a previous dev used, that I now need to debug
- to "well-knowm-js-lib-with-kind-of-similar-name".
Or decide that when I search for Angular "mat-table" I probably want some tables with mats on even if they don't have anything to do with Angular.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThe stupidifier also rewrites searches for SmartOS, Illumos et al as Solaris just to make sure you get nothing but irrelevant results.
- kstrauser 2y agoUgh, that thing. Me: “exactly-this-thing.py” Google: You misspelled “sorta-related.js”. Here you go. Me: Did I stutter?!
- araes 2y agoHave one of those I actually thought was kind of funny, and bit like having a conversation with an AI. Tried searching for quotes from the Matrix because of all these AI issues and asked: "Quote of Agent Smith to Mr. Neo 'How will you speak with no mouth?'" and got back: "You're wrong. Agent Smith never refers to Neo as anything other than Mr. Anderson." Completely did not even try to answer the question. Course, these days it's more Harlan Ellison "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" [1]. Kind of went beyond the Matrix to total thought control and constant machine torture. "How will you search if all results are false?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
- hgomersall 2y agoI had Google AI unambiguously assert that a passive LC network could never have an output voltage higher than the input voltage because that would need an active device. It's just dangerous.
- hulitu 2y agoHow do you think it will raise the voltage if it just seats there, being _passive_ ? You need an _active_ network to raise the voltage. /s 20 years ago in the "AI" class, the proffesor said, that the biggest problem with (machine) learning, is that sometines, it will learn wrong, and you have to teach it again.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoAnd nowadays it sometimes just silently drops a huge range of matching verbatim results without even informing the user. It’s especially serious when searching for UN related documents, which have a special document symbol structure. e.g. 99.9%+ of the documents under the classification A/C.1/… simply don’t show up with a “A/C.1/“ search, except for a handful. And it’s not like irrelevant results are clogging it up either, as Google only returns 40ish results for the whole internet. When there’s thousands of publicly accessible UN documents in that category…
- jayd16 2y agoIf you get to scrape competitor results then all you need to do to improve them is strip out the ads. It's not exactly rocket science if that's allowed.
- sabbaticaldev 2y agotrue. But scrapping results is what google does so what’s the problem here?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y agoI suspect running a small search engine creates a built-in advantage, because the SEO experts won't be trying to manipulate your results.
- eitland 2y agoLate, but SEO gaming does not explain these observations from sibling comments: - Not showing loads of valid results when looking for UN documents and instead just return 40 or so out of thousands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288776 - Returning something we absolutely did not ask for in a verbatim query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42278753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42278753
- Novosell 2y agoWhat is this swedish search engine you're talking about?
- kassner 2y agomarginalia.nu
- int_19h 2y agoAccording to the Kagi FAQ, "our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide", so I don't think they are relying entirely on their own index.