Comment by someguy5281
2 years ago
> Its efficacy is also strongly dependent on understanding that it's a keyword search engine with no semantic understanding.
Good. I love keyword search.
"Semantic understanding" can be so biased and ... just shady sometimes.
It's tricky though. I think a lot of people think they want raw keyword search, but what they really want is a search experience that makes intuitive sense.
If you lean too much into embeddings and so on, it's easy to get errors that don't make sense to a human being. It's extremely frustrating when you experience "I typed X, why am I getting results about Y?!"
That said, I think there's a sweet spot with some magic, where it genuinely just makes search better. But it's like perfume, if it's immediately obvious that it's there, it's probably a fair bit too much.
Keyword search leads to things like every website would put meaningless words in the meta section of their website so it would be picked by Altavista
No, if it's done right. Source: I made my own search engine