Comment by 0xbadcafebee
2 days ago
You can't go back to the way things were. The world moves forward and changes, and we have to adapt to it.
Web search has always been an extremely messy solution to many problems. Think about the premise: type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind, intuit who you are and what you really wanted, find the exact thing amid the morass of the whole web, and then give it to you?
That's impossible. So it uses tricks to make it seem like it worked. It uses information about you to refine results. It uses curated, human-edited search and result heuristics for the most common or difficult search queries. It uses a giant corups of data, and shows you things that are like what you wanted.
You don't notice that it isn't giving you the best result, because there are so many mediocre-but-acceptable results to look at. And it doesn't have to work perfectly every time, because we can "sift through" results and "refine" our search. Often we are flooded with results that are targeted at us, rather than what we want, because, remember: Google is an advertising company, and the entire Web is now a shopping mall, where either you're being sold-to, or you're just being sold.
You will get results, and they will sort-of seem like what you wanted, so you will just sort of sigh and accept it. Because what other option is there?
There are more intelligent, more accurate, more safe, ways to solve the problems people have, that are not "a search engine". It's time we start implementing them.
> You don't notice that it isn't giving you the best result
That's fine. It's always been fine. I don't need Google to read my mind and fulfill my dreams.
The problem isn't that they're not divinely perfect. The problem is that they used to be good enough, and now they're not.
> There are more intelligent, more accurate, more safe, ways to solve the problems people have, that are not "a search engine". It's time we start implementing them.
What solutions are there that fulfill all the use cases of a search engine, while definitively not being a search engine? An AI chatbot that gives me synopses of the same websites that I was searching for does not count.
> You can't go back to the way things were.
> type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind
I think we can go back to the way things were, which had nothing to do with mind reading. In the past, you could type in word, and google would offer 10 million results, and you could page through each of them. That was very powerful, and google does not do that today.
I don't think you know what you are asking. Do you really want 10 million pages of results, of which 99.999...% are SEO spam for Viagra et al, and on average you will need to browser ~9 million pages of results to find something that's actually "relevant"?
I was in high school 15 years ago and Google absolutely read minds to conclude Briney Spears was not a search for pickles but rather a pop artist. This was significant enough for them to come to go talk about it.
>Think about the premise: type in anything, and somehow it will read your mind, intuit who you are and what you really wanted, find the exact thing amid the morass of the whole web, and then give it to you?
I never once asked for anything remotely like this. Maybe you could just show me results for the fucking thing I typed? When I go to the library, the Dewey decimal system doesn't rearrange itself based on all the metadata the library has on me and people fitting my demographic criteria, it just shows me what I fucking searched for.
This is exactly how I talk to my ChatGPT assistant.
Web search has never been about this, where are you getting this fable from? It was about finding pages that include certain words, why would you overmistify this.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is a pointed analysis of why crawl-based search is insufficient for an Internet of our current scale. There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.
Google is remarkably effective at handling the scale. It doesn't seem up for handling the sheer army dedicated to misleading it. Especially now that they've been given tools for automating crap generation.
Ironically, Google itself was a key developer of that tech.
If there is any solution it would seem to involve removing the incentive to merely look at your page. That problem seems remarkably stubborn.
It "doesn't seem up for handling" it because it profits from showing you those ad laden sites. It's intentional, not incompetence.
1 reply →
>There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.
I think this is the root cause of the problem. Google can easily put a big dent in this problem by allowing users to create their own importable/exportable filters and support the dissemination of something like "EasyList for search results." But that kills their golden goose of advertising influence.
> "EasyList for search results"
Who will be in charge of curating that list? We know that crowd-sourced stuff is easily abused (see Amazon reviews, see YouTube comments).
1 reply →
In before your comment ends up in QuickBooks search results for the rest of time :-)