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- Hacker News
- When was the last time you saw an ads-esque box and be like I am so glad you shoved it into my face! I guess Never at least if you are reading this.
More often than not you know exactly what you are looking for, you're not browsing to see what's out there. The systems should optimize for that instead of whatever this is.
by wseqyrku - While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical operators, etc. which are mentioned as generally rotting capabilities.by Zambyte
- This problem is at least 26 years old. At the end of the last century there was an application called "Copernic" that executed searches in the search engines of that time, Go, Netscape, Yahoo, etc., downloaded the results and executed the search in them, deleted those that did not match and then showed the valid results in an order pre-selected by the searcher. The required result was almost always in the first item on the list. Unfortunately Google was the end of "Copernic".by alexpc201
- > what if we just show people the results we think they want
Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?
* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.
- It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.by syntaxing
- Google search still has that feature where the little preview blurb will bolden where it matches parts of your query so you can see what context the pattern appeared in. Always very useful but now it gives you a pretty good look at what google replaced your actual query with. Since I started paying attention to this, I've realized that most of the cases where I need to add a bunch of excluded keywords, I'm actually just gradually twisting googles arm into searching what I wanted to search. It takes a lot of excluded keywords sometimes until it finally runs out of ideas for stuff to replace my entire query with.by pooploop64
- I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.
Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.
So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
by gtowey - I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct.
They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.
Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you are too restrictive. Hell, even the autotrader sites are going the facebook way now. It's maddening.
by superxpro12