Google search is an enigma to me. I oscillate from being blown away by its intelligence and accuracy to being gobsmacked by its stupidity and inefficiency. For all tech related related search terms I usually have no issues with Google, but that is in large part thanks to stackoverflow. As soon as I venture out of anything having to do with tech I find myself lost in a wilderness of content farms a million miles wide and only an inch deep. I'm pretty internet savvy so I can eventually navigate my way to half-way decent answers, but I can only imagine how frustratingly useless google must seem to people who can't recognize the tell-tale signs of junk content.
I find the most effective way to search is to already know where the most knowledgeable people gather around a specific topic and use google to search those sites specifically. I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search but it's a kludge at best and not something less tech savvy people are going to know how to do. And if I'm completely new to a topic it's often a chore just to even find the place where the experts actually hang out.
I think the approach that Stackexchange is taking is going to be far more valuable in terms of search over the long run than Google. Time should be spent on figuring out how to reward domain knowledge experts and making sure they stay untainted and motivated to share their knowledge rather than tweaking a search algorithm in an endless cat-and-mouse game played with content farms.
Google search was an amazing improvement when I found it in 2000, but sometimes I wonder if the post-2005 improvements of search results is nothing but a reflection of human progress digitizing data. There is more data online, and better organized than before. That improves google's results regardless of algorithmic strength.
For any search where the first result is Wikipeida, the following results don't have to be any good, and there are plenty of terms where the next 20 results are just domains with lots of in-links hosting glossary and dictionary definitions.
Tech was the first area to conduct large amounts of our work online and in the public's eye. As a result, almost all our meaningful literature, documentation, q&a (was mailing list archives, now is just stackoverflow) and "here's how I solved X" blog posts are available for google to scoop up.
I agree, Google seems to return things that I already know but cannot remember (i.e. address to my favorite restaurant), but when Im trying to research stuff I know nothing about the results that come back are less than useful.
> The search engine is working on being able to provide direct answers to questions rather than just a list of results
I dont want what they think the answer is to my question. They don't know my thought process or how I like to research information. I want raw data returned so I can sort and process it how I see fit, not them.
I agree. Why can't google just ban the content farms or let users specify it. I can list 5-10 sites that if omitted from all searches would vastly improve my results.
There must be a massive feedback loop at play. A site that is popular on Google becomes more popular because it is well placed on Google and will then be placed highly on Google as a result. Can a search engine really work when the search engine itself is the greatest decider of quality? This must cause unintended consequences.
But Google is more efficient than the specific StackExchange (et al) search if you restrict the query to that site. I am repeating myself but I think one way to compete with Google is making local search engines work better than Google itself restricted by that domain. The rant continue on Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1].
Google is a good search engine so such the question that you query has been asked on Stackoverflow. Otherwise you will go nowhere...
And the way they evaluate the "quality" of a site by a simple mathematical formula is a joke. We have the same feeling that Larry about the search engine!!!
But you still want Google to deliver useful results.
Let's say I'm in a strange town on a business trip. I've got to eat dinner. I ask Google for a good restaurant in my area. It can just give me a list of all the restaurants nearby, and that's quite useful. But it's tedious sorting through all the ones that I would never consider eating at.
Or, Google could know something about my eating habits, and start off with the restaurants that might actually interest me. That's a more useful result. But to get there, Google had to know some things about me.
Now, may want to be able to choose that tradeoff; certainly Google could do better at giving you controls for this. But the point remains: If you want results that are more useful to you, Google needs to know some things about you.
I think you're being slightly overdramatic. I too wish that Google was more transparent with how they farm our data. But you do have a choice to stop using their products you know
I don't think people realize how much better Google search has gotten over the years. We tend to remember the annoyances or failures, and not remember all of the successes that are second nature to us.
Consider vague long tail queries. Google knocks these out of the park compared to Bing, DDG or others. Let's say there's some old movie you vaguely remember details about:
"movie where evil is in microwave" => Google "Time Bandits". Bing: Nada. DDG: Nada
"dystopian movie with a motorcycle named einstein" => Google "Warrior of the Lost World" Bing: wrong, DDG: wrong
"song about cocaine in california" => Google: Hotel California, Bing, DDG: bottom of page
"star trek episode where spock is possessed" => Google: Return to Tomorrow, Bing/DDG: Spock's Brain (wrong), but nice try"
"previous name of java language" => Google: link to Oak as second item, Bing/DDG: worse result (must click through links to find answer)
"cartoon about plants and a kid with a ring" => Google: Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Bing/DDG: Nope
"tv show with scientist named blackwood" => This one is EASY, Google: War of the Worlds, Bing/DDG: Nope
"guy who tried to bomb parliament" => Google: Direct Answer, Others: links
"tv show with alien who has necklace powered by sun" => Google: 1st result, The Phoenix, Others: 3rd or lower
"cartoon car that has auto jacks" => Google: Speed Racer 2nd result, Others: nope
"flying characters similar to thundercats" => Google: Silverhawks, Others: nope
"movie with guy who owns last car" => Google: The Last Race, Others: nope
"commodore 64 game where alien knocks on window" => Google: Rescue on Fractalus, Others: nope
"toy where you program trailer to dump" => Google: Big Trak, Others: nope
You can play this game all day, trying to come up with the vaguest possible query about old things you remember bits and pieces of from decades ago, and I'm often amazed at how vague and obtuse I can get. Google does these queries much better than others. Yes, it fails a lot too, but the instances where it fails, and others succeed are much more rare than the instances where it succeeds and others fail.
But Google isn't an AI yet. And what Larry is speaking about is achieving Star Trek: a computer that can read the meaning of words, understand, rather than just index characters.
Yeah, OK...but they increasingly fail on the stuff I actually search for more than once every few months. Even relatively mundane stuff -- like plant care, for example -- has been completely destroyed by SEO gamers.
That one just comes to mind because it seems like once a month I search for something related to houseplants, and I almost never get good information without having to extensively refine the search, even though the internet is loaded with high-quality sites about plant care, botany, etc.
We changed the url from [1], which just copies bits of the original. We also changed the title from the linkbaity (and ambiguous) [2].
Submitters: please do your due diligence and read what you post. An article of cherry-picked excerpts from a more original source is rarely a good HN submission. You should submit the original source instead.
I'm nostalgic for the days I could click on my Google bookmark and start typing my search without the page missing my few first keystrokes because of slow loading.
As a search/deep learning engineer I am amazed at google, I think that the more you know about the subject, the more appreciative one becomes. Take, for example, their iOS search app. You just say "ok google" then often before I have even finished my question the results are shown, in that time it did continuous speech recognition, query parsing, intent detection, search, result generation and render on the device. That requires some very serious smarts. All so I can show "show me pictures of c[ats]", results in at "c"...
100% agreed. It was a very clever play by a search engine company.
What intrigues me about the Android-equation and the way it entered Googles' playbook is that, indeed, the game is not over. Any other young upstart can arise, almost immediately, and challenge the hegemony .. all you have to do is be willing to commit to a real platform strategy.
I believe the Android vs. iOS challenge for the mainstream is a very vibrant industrial action; echoes of this gameplay can be definitely observed, elsewhere in the F/OSS eco-system. A fundamental difference between iOS/Android: one is closed, the other is open. A new, open challenge to Android could indeed eat its lunch, if the open challenge were won in such a way that it would attract the hunger-economy of the giants.
I personally would like to just have a phone that is 100% open source. I've had both Android/iOS in my life, equally, since inception, and ultimately I find the industrial-baggage load to be pretty high. In the new NSA era, what the hell is the point of trying to hide anything any more .. the new cool is completely open.
I bet it would solve the immense-cruft problem we can easily witness in heft with iOS/Android, as both platforms NIH/NIMBY their way across the 'developer mind-control' table.
Imagine this: someone builds a challenger OS, for free, that runs on everyones' phone, regardless of manufacturer-lockout/lockin. Methinks there are ways to do this under the radar right now ..
Only if you think most of them are Samsung Galaxies or Moto X's. Most of them are just replacements for the low end Nokia's that used to be predominant. A billion cheap phones is not a new statistic.
The perfect search engine is fundamentally devastating to Google's business model.
The perfect search engine would always take you to exactly what you were looking for immediately.
Which means, no amount of advertising would ever be useful, since you wouldn't need to be advertised to - you'd type what you wanted and it would show you exactly that.
This is sort of like saying the perfect phone is fundamentally devastating to Apple's business model since it would never break and you'd never need another one. Both situations might some day arise, but until then both Google and Apple have great incentive to improve their core products.
It annoys me that it doesn't search users blogs and things that well. I'm often searching for what real people have to say, not content farms etc I know spam blogs are the cause, but the results are still frustrating.
[+] [-] marknutter|12 years ago|reply
I find the most effective way to search is to already know where the most knowledgeable people gather around a specific topic and use google to search those sites specifically. I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search but it's a kludge at best and not something less tech savvy people are going to know how to do. And if I'm completely new to a topic it's often a chore just to even find the place where the experts actually hang out.
I think the approach that Stackexchange is taking is going to be far more valuable in terms of search over the long run than Google. Time should be spent on figuring out how to reward domain knowledge experts and making sure they stay untainted and motivated to share their knowledge rather than tweaking a search algorithm in an endless cat-and-mouse game played with content farms.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|12 years ago|reply
For any search where the first result is Wikipeida, the following results don't have to be any good, and there are plenty of terms where the next 20 results are just domains with lots of in-links hosting glossary and dictionary definitions.
Tech was the first area to conduct large amounts of our work online and in the public's eye. As a result, almost all our meaningful literature, documentation, q&a (was mailing list archives, now is just stackoverflow) and "here's how I solved X" blog posts are available for google to scoop up.
[+] [-] ProAm|12 years ago|reply
> The search engine is working on being able to provide direct answers to questions rather than just a list of results
I dont want what they think the answer is to my question. They don't know my thought process or how I like to research information. I want raw data returned so I can sort and process it how I see fit, not them.
[+] [-] mrfusion|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewvolpe|12 years ago|reply
It's really basic, but I end up starting most of my searches there, and fallback to Google with a DDG-style !g if I need to.
[+] [-] 7952|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|12 years ago|reply
- [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
[+] [-] scriptproof|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueskin_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|12 years ago|reply
Let's say I'm in a strange town on a business trip. I've got to eat dinner. I ask Google for a good restaurant in my area. It can just give me a list of all the restaurants nearby, and that's quite useful. But it's tedious sorting through all the ones that I would never consider eating at.
Or, Google could know something about my eating habits, and start off with the restaurants that might actually interest me. That's a more useful result. But to get there, Google had to know some things about me.
Now, may want to be able to choose that tradeoff; certainly Google could do better at giving you controls for this. But the point remains: If you want results that are more useful to you, Google needs to know some things about you.
[+] [-] JTon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromwellian|12 years ago|reply
Consider vague long tail queries. Google knocks these out of the park compared to Bing, DDG or others. Let's say there's some old movie you vaguely remember details about:
"movie where evil is in microwave" => Google "Time Bandits". Bing: Nada. DDG: Nada
"dystopian movie with a motorcycle named einstein" => Google "Warrior of the Lost World" Bing: wrong, DDG: wrong
"song about cocaine in california" => Google: Hotel California, Bing, DDG: bottom of page
"star trek episode where spock is possessed" => Google: Return to Tomorrow, Bing/DDG: Spock's Brain (wrong), but nice try"
"previous name of java language" => Google: link to Oak as second item, Bing/DDG: worse result (must click through links to find answer)
"cartoon about plants and a kid with a ring" => Google: Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Bing/DDG: Nope
"tv show with scientist named blackwood" => This one is EASY, Google: War of the Worlds, Bing/DDG: Nope
"guy who tried to bomb parliament" => Google: Direct Answer, Others: links
"tv show with alien who has necklace powered by sun" => Google: 1st result, The Phoenix, Others: 3rd or lower
"cartoon car that has auto jacks" => Google: Speed Racer 2nd result, Others: nope
"flying characters similar to thundercats" => Google: Silverhawks, Others: nope
"movie with guy who owns last car" => Google: The Last Race, Others: nope
"commodore 64 game where alien knocks on window" => Google: Rescue on Fractalus, Others: nope
"toy where you program trailer to dump" => Google: Big Trak, Others: nope
You can play this game all day, trying to come up with the vaguest possible query about old things you remember bits and pieces of from decades ago, and I'm often amazed at how vague and obtuse I can get. Google does these queries much better than others. Yes, it fails a lot too, but the instances where it fails, and others succeed are much more rare than the instances where it succeeds and others fail.
But Google isn't an AI yet. And what Larry is speaking about is achieving Star Trek: a computer that can read the meaning of words, understand, rather than just index characters.
[+] [-] timr|12 years ago|reply
That one just comes to mind because it seems like once a month I search for something related to houseplants, and I almost never get good information without having to extensively refine the search, even though the internet is loaded with high-quality sites about plant care, botany, etc.
[+] [-] massappeal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|12 years ago|reply
Submitters: please do your due diligence and read what you post. An article of cherry-picked excerpts from a more original source is rarely a good HN submission. You should submit the original source instead.
1. http://www.zdnet.com/google-a-million-miles-away-from-creati...
2. ‘Google "a million miles away from creating the search engine of my dreams"’
[+] [-] conradfr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cholmon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncletaco|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnriot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksim905|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibisum|12 years ago|reply
What intrigues me about the Android-equation and the way it entered Googles' playbook is that, indeed, the game is not over. Any other young upstart can arise, almost immediately, and challenge the hegemony .. all you have to do is be willing to commit to a real platform strategy.
I believe the Android vs. iOS challenge for the mainstream is a very vibrant industrial action; echoes of this gameplay can be definitely observed, elsewhere in the F/OSS eco-system. A fundamental difference between iOS/Android: one is closed, the other is open. A new, open challenge to Android could indeed eat its lunch, if the open challenge were won in such a way that it would attract the hunger-economy of the giants.
I personally would like to just have a phone that is 100% open source. I've had both Android/iOS in my life, equally, since inception, and ultimately I find the industrial-baggage load to be pretty high. In the new NSA era, what the hell is the point of trying to hide anything any more .. the new cool is completely open.
I bet it would solve the immense-cruft problem we can easily witness in heft with iOS/Android, as both platforms NIH/NIMBY their way across the 'developer mind-control' table.
Imagine this: someone builds a challenger OS, for free, that runs on everyones' phone, regardless of manufacturer-lockout/lockin. Methinks there are ways to do this under the radar right now ..
[+] [-] gress|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|12 years ago|reply
The perfect search engine would always take you to exactly what you were looking for immediately.
Which means, no amount of advertising would ever be useful, since you wouldn't need to be advertised to - you'd type what you wanted and it would show you exactly that.
[+] [-] ender7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merrua|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pauletienney|12 years ago|reply