
On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results - pzoellner
https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-uselessness-of-google-search-results/
======
rsync
Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for _years_
with examples just like this.

There is not _a single day_ that goes by that I am not searching for something
specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search
results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results
useless.

The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier does
not always appear, and you click through to a page that is useless without
knowing it.

My habit has become to immediately ctrl-f on the resulting page and look for
my terms so I don't waste my time.

Further problems:

\- "allinsite:" is just a toss-up whether it is respected or not. Who knows
why, but it does not fix this problem.

\- "quoted strings", such as for programming or naming conventions, are
completely ignored and are useless.

\- there is no "not" operator, which is desperately needed.[1]

The only function that actually works as advertised is the site: prefix which
limits searches to that particular website. I won't be surprised when they
break this too, because it's not producing enough search-result-revenue.

I am not a teenaged kid searching for Justin Bieber and perfectly happy with
whatever "relevant" or "related" results pop up. I am a professional. I am an
engineer. I need tools that work, and google is shit as a search engine.

[1]
[https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en)

~~~
zeven7
I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me
(symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not
a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you
mean by that. From the article you linked:

When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info
from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, like
Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. Examples: jaguar speed -car or
pandas -site:wikipedia.org

~~~
rsync
"Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped..."

That is the definition of not working. The _point of the quotes_ is to allow
searching for literal strings.

You have elucidated _the entire problem_. Unless, of course, you're just
searching for movie star names, in which case the rubbery nature of the search
results really doesn't matter.

It appears that -negative searching _does_ work, which is amazing - that's
nice to know. But it immediately reminds me of a terrible, glaring problem:
searching for command line switches. You cannot effectively search for things
like:

rsync --ignore-existing

... since they are interpreted as -negative keywords, even if you quote them.

~~~
m4x
Use quotes and search for rsync "\--ignore-existing" or "rsync --ignore-
existing". They are two different searches but both work fine and return
useful results.

You can also remove the double dash and search for rsync ignore-existing

I appreciate the point of the posted article, but for the most part I don't
actually have any trouble using Google as a programmer. You just need to
format your searches correctly.

------
stephaniepier
This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you
mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can
be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the
company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually
putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want
to search for and Google keeps assuming I want something else.

~~~
soared
Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people
mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what
you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone."

I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem,
don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.

~~~
CaptSpify
For me, the frustration is that quotes usually fix it, but definitely not
always. Also, they don't always tell you that they are auto-correcting. I
agree that it's niche and, as he's the outlier, he should have to work around
the system, but that's only true if the system is, for lack of a better term,
"honest", which it isn't always.

~~~
stephaniepier
Agreed. I should have emphasized that _usually_ quotes fix it. They don't seem
to every time for some reason.

------
romaniv
_Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google._

And there will not be any time soon. Writing an _efficient_ crawler for what
we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company
can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people
specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer
to the field will have to replicate tons of technologies Google had years to
perfect (in addition to solving problems like storage, search logic and
bandwidth management).

~~~
ErikAugust
You are perpetuating a myth for the sake of a monopoly.

A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no
one dares.

~~~
webmasterraj
Maybe. Search is a resource-intensive algorithmic problem. So you need one of
two things to beat Google: more resources or a much better algorithm.

You're not going to get the first unless you're Facebook or Amazon or God, but
__maybe __you can build a smarter algorithm. You are up against an army of
some of the smartest computer scientists and mathematicians ever assembled --
but what you have going for you is a complete lack of inertia or legacy. You
could try crazy things that Google might not, because they won 't think it'll
work. If you get lucky, one of those blows up. But you have to get very lucky
(this is the Innovator's Dilemma in a nutshell).

Anyone want to give it a shot?

~~~
jib
You can also niche your space. Hoogle would be an example of that. If you know
the searcher cares about Haskell functions only I imagine you can beat Google
in that space. That solution probably expands to other interest spheres.

------
Lagged2Death
_Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google._

Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not
quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set
up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're
all just a keystroke away anyhow.

And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a
borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb
aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.

~~~
solveforall
In terms of results from crawling, I would consider Bing a "serious"
competitor, although still a distant second. They are well-funded, used in
~30% of searches in the US, and don't look like they're going away anytime
soon. It would be sad if they did because Google would then be a total
monopoly.

Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they
mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's
more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.

Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been
working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and
start with a ?, like "?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as
it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would
love to get any feedback.

Link to the Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174127)

------
isleyaardvark
I don't understand this article, particularly this footnote:

>OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one
that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s
lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it!

That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result
should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant
to what he's looking for. What am I missing? He's saying the first results are
worse, but they are better results. They return the actual app he's looking
for, where he could presumably find info on retina support, not some
completely different app's lack of retina. _All_ of the links in the second
screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm the original author of the blog post; if you'll allow me to clarify. I
apologize for the misleading footnote - I believe it gives the impression that
this isn't the correct search result when it is.

"The" post that I wanted to be first place had the perfect summary in Google,
discussed deluge on OS X, talked about the lack of retina for a few different
apps, and explicitly mentioned a few without retina support but did not
outright include deluge in that list of apps without retina support. It was
the most-relevant result in that it actually discussed the topics being
searched for. It was, for all intents and purposes, the correct result that
should have been returned - only pedantically it did not provide a point-blank
answer to whether or not deluge itself was retina-ready.

I agree with you 100%, the results in the first image _which do include all
the search terms_ are more relevant than the results in the second search. But
Google, for some reason, chose to prioritize the results that did _not_ have
all the search terms over those that did. Now from the results in the first
image, the first of the displayed results that _did_ use all the search terms
(i.e. did not say "Missing: deluge") _was_ the most-relevant of all the
results that were obtained from either listing (important pedantic note:
whether it actually answered my original question or not does not detract from
the fact that it was the most relevant. Because the other links neither
answered my original question nor were relevant to it.)

I think a comment by "Robert" from the blog post (if I may re-post it here),
best summarizes my disappointment:

 _Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for
you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates”
is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or
maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to
introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a
random time that I saw fit?_

Regardless of whether or not the suggestion for potential soulmate ends up
working out, the fact remains, you don't say "I have a result for your search
query, but let's look at these definitely irrelevant results first"

If you want to over-analyze this, let's look at the "blurbs" returned by
Google for the search results:

1) Deluge's main download page; blurb: open-source cross-platform torrent
client. Site includes screenshots, FAQ, and community forums. MISSING: RETINA

2) Download - Deluge. Latest release <url here>. Release... <link to
ubuntu.png here> Deluge.app. MISSING: RETINA

3) Installing/Mac OS X: A deluge package is available which works on Mac.
MISSING: RETINA

4) From Linux to OS X: Meet your new apps: OS X Mount Lion ships with an app
similar to AppX and AppY ..... [sic] It has one notable shortcoming: no retina
support .... [sic] There are plenty of great Bittorrent clients on Linux -
Deluge, KTorrent, Transmission, etc.

Of these four results, only one specifically talks about Deluge.app and
Retina. It's the fourth result. Based off these four blurbs, which do you
think is the right page to click on with the highest probability of answering
my question? 1) The product main page which I know, thanks to Google, does not
have the word "retina" anywhere, 2) the product download page, which I know,
thanks to Google despite the completely useless blurb, does not contain the
word "retina" anywhere, 3) instructions for installing on Mac, which thanks to
Google, I know does not contain the word "retina" anywhere, or 4) a page
discussing a variety of apps available on OS X, including explicitly by name,
Deluge, which also talks about the retina support of one or more of the
aforementioned apps?

I clicked on number 4. A page that talks about Deluge and other torrent
clients that are available on OS X and lambasts an (unknown from the blurb)
app for not having retina support would ideally be the page that would contain
specific information on whether or not Deluge has retina support. It didn't
provide the direct answer I was looking for. But it was a hell of a lot more
relevant than the first three results, _and Google knew it_.

Addendum:

Oh, and about deluge.app not being in quotes: that's a lesson learned the hard
way. Mac apps unfortunately do not have "unique" names. Pages. Numbers.
Deluge. etc. People often append ".app" to clarify their meaning for SEO
purposes, _and_ I know that Google indexes "foo.bar" (sans quotes) as "foo
bar" (again, sans quotes). Ironically, the only "word" of the original search
query that could have been logically dropped is "app". But odds are that a
post discussing Mac apps would contain the word "app" or "apps" somewhere.
It's not fair to put "deluge.app" in quotes to provide a counterexample,
because I knowingly and deliberately did not place it in quotes in the first
place, because that's the one term that I _do not_ require to be present
verbatim.

Also, this is just the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back." I run
into this problem many times on a daily basis. This is just the concrete
example that triggered the post in question, and for which I was able to
obtain screenshots of the different variations so that the situation could be
properly documented.

~~~
nostrademons
"Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for
you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates”
is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or
maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to
introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a
random time that I saw fit?"

Doesn't that basically describe dating? I found my wife because the pool of
"perfect soulmates" for me was basically zero, so I figured I'd take a risk
and expand my definition of "perfect", and then discovered that I liked what I
found.

Back to the topic at hand - it's a bit strange that a page that gives you the
_wrong_ answer is the _right_ page because it answered you. It'd be like if
you asked "What city is the capital of Kansas?" and I answered "Kansas City"
because it had both the words "Kansas" and "City" and both of them are
Capitalized, even though the answer is actually Topeka. I'd think a better
answer would be "I don't know, but here's a list of state capitals" even
though it's missing the words "Kansas" and "City".

------
robbrown451
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I
noticed today:

[https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat](https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat)

Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition.
Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really
wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old
daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not about how to arrange my
junk in a particular way.

~~~
dheera
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about
goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that
word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used
it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then
clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up.

However, there's a particularly interesting case:

[https://www.google.com/#q=tsla](https://www.google.com/#q=tsla)

I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the
first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google
promoting Yahoo over their own product?

~~~
vonklaus
> I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn
> about goats" might actually be in the minority.

This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results _I need_ ,
so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what
google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model
for the exact reason you gave as a defense.

edit: If disagreement could be verbalized it would be super helpful to me. I
have been thinking about this issue a lot, and often I see people say the same
thing as me:

* single website controls almost 100% of english language results

* limiting of images/video from results

* incorrect/wrong results

* limited respect for boolean and quotation operators

* high ranking sites are not authoritative, e.g. w3schools, wordpress automated blogs.

* no way to filter at all

But then down vote my conclusion:

> searches could be filtered and parameters set by user.

Really would be useful to understand my logic error, or if I have missed
something.

~~~
dheera
Search being a democracy is really just a crude way of creating a better
ranking system than just looking at, say, keyword occurrence count. Humans are
great at filtering out spammy and useless websites, and the democracy system
picks up on that.

As a next step, privacy issues aside, what if they "profiled" you by the types
of things you search, and tried to guess what _you need_ based on other people
who "think like you"?

For example, I'm a programmer, and if I search "python", I'm probably
searching for something different than a biologist who is researching
reptiles. This would be fairly obvious to decide based on the other types of
things I typically Google for.

I'm sure Google is probably already researching how to do this, though. It
sounds difficult to me though because of the sheer number of models you'd have
to train and store, and then figure out how to run a distributed index on. It
might be more feasible to create some small set (e.g. ~1000ish) profiles of
"types of people" and then match you into one of those types. This could also
mildly alleviate the privacy issue as the profiling could be done offline on
the client.

~~~
vonklaus
I made this point below about inability to provide context. In the other
thread link, I think I provided why,. although I am no machine learning
specialist but I think because:

Google can never necessarily know what you want and can never truly know you
achieved your goal, so you could not train it properly.

Not only would you need to discover what profession I am in, assuming you had
fully updated linked profile, etc. you would need to build a comparable
universe of like minded people and calibrate.

Then, you would have to assume what inputs are similar in that they have
same/similar parameters and expect similar results.

Then you would have to assume which link I clicked was the answer, for every
person who did this same thing.

Then you would have to discount your bias as an engine, because you provide
the top results to me and (for now) people trust the engine so they typically
have a false choice of the first 5-10 things. If those 5-10 things are wrong,
whole model is in error to extent it is wrong.

Any one of these would provide error and the cascade leads to larger
disparity. Google IS SO AMAZINGLY GOOD, it has actually managed to make this
not a problem for a _very_ long time.

~~~
dheera
> Google can never necessarily know what you want and can never truly know you
> achieved your goal, so you could not train it properly.

They do have some amount of confirmation. All of their search results are
redirect links, so they're tracking which links you click on. Based on the
timing of those clicks, they can tell if you clicked on a result, left that
site a few seconds later, and then clicked on another result further down the
page, which probably means the first result didn't give you what you want.
It's not perfect but it's still potential training data.

If that site has Google Ads or a Google '+1' icon, they can get slightly more
information about how you spend your time on that site. I don't know about the
legality of this but it's technically feasible.

------
yardie
I've long given up on Google outside of the anglosphere. I travel a lot.
Location services are enabled on my phone and laptop yet Google still wants to
serve up results from the US. I've had to be very careful with how I use Maps
since the name of a dutch city or street just might share the same name as
some bar in middle America.

I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some
results take me back to a tour company in central Paris even if they have
nothing to do with what I'm looking for.

This has forced me to go back to search aggregators like DDG. I miss the old
Google. DDG can be a little too broad with the results and then I have to load
it with filters where old Google would kind of get it right away.

~~~
LeoPanthera
DDG uses other search engines' indexes but I would not describe them as a
"search aggregator".

~~~
yardie
I know its technical but in laymens terms they are an aggregator unless
another definition exists.

------
zodPod
There are lots of problems that I've noticed anymore too. One that I always
find is the utter uselessness of searching for a phone number anymore. There
are a million pages that simply list random numbers. That's not useful AT ALL.

Another that I've more recently noticed is conversions on mobile. I went from
being able to type any approximation of "ounces" "to/in/-" "pounds" and
getting a number right away to having to click on one of the results to get
the number. It seems like backward from Google's normal MO so I don't really
understand why they'd do it but I definitely have consistently had problems
with that especially more recently.

~~~
soared
You could never find useful results for a phone number, except for businesses.
Searching for a small local business's phone number brought up their page for
me.

------
epistasis
Yeah this bites me nearly every day. I can only assume that they have some
data that this helps 60%-80% of their users in some way, and they are
optimizing for the common case rather than the uncommon case.

Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but
it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as
a company or its policies.

~~~
gherkin0
It could also just be that they [incorrectly] assume their users are dumb,
their algorithms are smart, and have forgotten what made them big in the first
place. IIRC, besides PageRank, one of their original usability improvements
was AND-ing query terms by default instead of OR-ing by default like their
competition.

------
herbst
A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop
suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was
not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but
well google thought and still thinks you want porn.

~~~
superskierpat
Duckduckgo has a safe filter that blocks porn and a few other things from
showing up in the search results that works pretty well, you can decide to
take it off at any time too. They have the same kind of filter for looking for
country specific results.

~~~
saurik
So you are saying that friend should go on a campaign to convince all of that
product's potential users to not use Google and use DuckDuck ago instead?

~~~
herbst
I dont get it ether. Seems like a brutal way to keep his old name.

------
michaelwww
I've developed the habit of just asking Google questions instead of crafting
something to feed how I think the algorithm works. I also don't worry about
ranking, just as long as something is in the top 10.

Does deluge bittorrent support retina display?

The 7th link result for that question has the text "Deluge has updated their
program to support the Retina Display" in it's text summary. That's good
enough for me.

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
I think that some of this reaction is just resistance to 'relearning' how to
search. Whereas before you developed techniques to make your queries more
'computer like', now you can revert to something more like natural language.

It would still be nice to have an 'advanced' search mode that was more strict,
allowed advanced features, and still took advantage of Google's talent and
infrastructure.

------
commentzorro
I have this problem all the time. I type {movie/book/cd name} illegal free
download -price -buy -purchase and click search. Google knows what I want.
Everyone knows what I want. Yet time and again the first hundreds of results
are for non-free stores where I can purchase the item. Stupid Google!

------
nostrademons
Google couldn't find what he was looking for because it doesn't exist on the
web. Take a look at the search with a +retina term:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina](https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina)

Or in verbatim mode:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1](https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1)

His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually
includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually
saying that _Twitter_ 's app has no retina support, and Deluge is mentioned
elsewhere on the page, with nothing about retina support.

~~~
nkurz
I don't think that Google accepts +term any longer. They switched several
years ago to requiring "term" with quotes. Presumably this was because they
wanted to make searches for Google+ names easier. For a while I think they
gave a warning, but it seems like they've stopped doing that now.

Edit: Wait, you work for Google, right? Am I the one that's lost? Did they
switch back to supporting +term?

~~~
nostrademons
Actually, no, I think you're right. I left about 20 months ago, and they
disabled support after I left.

------
deeths
Each similar search Google can avoid re-running saves them compute resources
and therefore money. Google's as-you-type search suggestions encourage some
significant percentage of users performing a query to accept a search
suggestion (or suggestion that aggregates multiple searches) that match
exactly with searches that were already run. Google can just re-return the
results.

The autocorrection and removal of terms accomplishes the same thing.

While I think these measures may be partially to help users, I think they're
actually mostly cost-saving measures on Google's part.

------
AlexTes
I disagree with you. In the query "deluge retina", "deluge" is definitely the
more important bit. After all you're looking for deluge and are hoping to find
it with support for retina. Otherwise you would've written something like
"torrent client retina".

Now this is where a bit of guess work comes in but I'd say Google correctly
deduces there is no such thing. Even the best result for both terms just talks
about some app not supporting retina, and from the looks of it does help with
what other client you might want to use if switching to OSX when you were
previously a deluge user on Linux (possibly when dealing with retina). But
that's not deluge. That's a useless result considering your primary intent was
finding deluge. So Google chooses to give you results that might get you what
you want over results that (correctly) only disappoint explaining there is no
such thing. So in the first three results Google correctly decides that, to
get you a relevant result at all it needs to omit the "retina" to get you
results that might possibly get you what you want - deluge despite not having
retina support - over just giving you the results that are relevant but
definitely won't get you what you want. Your query had no results that would
get you what you wanted so Google tried to alter the query and see if it could
get you something useful anyway.

I think Google trying to give you results that might be hits instead of giving
you disappointment in the first place is very sensible behavior.

------
PaulHoule
One of the worst things is that they are removing Wikipedia from the
"Knowledge Graph" results and generally replacing it with stuff inferior.

~~~
bonniemuffin
Any speculation on why they'd want to do this? It seems clearly better for the
consumer if wikipedia shows up at the top anytime you google a word/phrase
that appears in wikipedia. Do they make money on the results that are showing
up higher?

~~~
PaulHoule
Not necessarily.

One of the reasons why Google has looked so smart is that it has leaned on
Wikipedia. I have a kid in middle school and definitely one thing you learn
there is you can look like an expert on any subject by consulting Wikipedia
(i.e. "what calibre ammunition is used by a tommy gun?") To an extent teachers
encourage it, but it can tend towards plagiarism.

The Wikipedia page is generally a safe bet for relevance but it may or may not
be a quality answer.

I think today they may be like the middle school student who is learning the
tricks to not look like a plagiarist.

Remember that Google search and advertising is actually in big trouble --
there is a reason why they renamed the company to Alphabet. The 90%+ market
share they have in many countries is unsustainable for many cultural reasons
and they have to diversify.

------
EdSharkey
Here's a thought: maybe the shift in the index to display realtime website
updates and factor in social network inputs have ruined their ranking system?
Or at the very least, forced it to approximate results rather than be precise
about it?

Maybe google has become like robocop receiving 100+ prime directives. All
these low quality, noisy inputs are simply driving the engine bonkers?

------
vmp
I find myself using the "verbatim" search option all the time, which is hidden
one menu-layer deep in the "search tools" drop-down, behind the "All Results"
button. It helps but I've noticed this trend of google search working against
the user too.

~~~
nkurz
Alternatively, in many browsers you can create a shortcut that you can use
when entering a URL. I have:

    
    
      https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&tbs=li:1&filter=0
    

aliased to "v" for "verbatim". Here's instructions for adding a custom search
engine to Chrome: [http://www.swestwood.com/blog/view/fast-searching-
chrome](http://www.swestwood.com/blog/view/fast-searching-chrome)

~~~
vmp
Awesome, thanks!

------
Animats
Try Google Search without a Google account or any Google cookies. It may be
more neutral without "search personalization".

~~~
RodericDay
I sorta do this, I think. Via setting DuckDuckGo as my default provider, and
doing google searches via `!g my search sentence`. You can even go straight to
images with `!im`, maps with `!maps`, and whatnot.

------
vonklaus
I will not beleagure this point again, I make it everyday on deaf ears.

* Search can never be decoupled from the browser.

* search is worse and discovery is hard.

* Brave Software needs to focus on building security by design which means a search engine AND browser.

The memex-explorer model is the design of the google killer. Likely why it was
abandoned.

Browser wars began ~6 months ago.

The next larry page & brin, WILL write a search engine.

Edit; It is impossible for google to use human language and (questionably
respected) boolean operators as the only filtering mechanism For hundreds of
billions of pages.

Staggering how well they do with just 1 textbox and image & video tabs, but
new players wont have to follow the same roadmap.

============================

Please Explain Downvotes

============================

I am trying to ascertain how I have been thinking about this incorrectly.
Often, downvoted but no one explains why. How am I thinking about this
incorrectly, what am I missing?

~~~
dsr_
I would like to know your reasoning as to why search cannot be decoupled from
the browser; I would like to know why you think that a browser war began about
six months ago.

~~~
vonklaus
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11134798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11134798)

Trying to find time to continue work on something a bit more polished but it
is not ready. This is my response in another thread, either ctrl+f my un or
"-2" and you will see response to similar query.

Idea is "so obviously crazy", mentioning it publicly for several months and
begging people to consider it and work on it has been met with down votes or
completely ignoring it. Which means, if you realize it now and start working
on it, you will have ~6 (I think less now though) head start as people catch
up with it.

edit: Because I don't think this makes sense as a model for search.
[http://imgur.com/Gz7hXY7](http://imgur.com/Gz7hXY7)

~~~
solveforall
Can you explain the image and what it's trying to show? That the number of
text links should be more than the number of image links to well known sites?
I'm asking because I do something similar on my site, solveforall.com, but to
a much lesser degree of course.

~~~
vonklaus
I am going to hack on this and see how it works, but first glance looks cool.

The image (really confusingly) illustrates the searchflow model:

Broweser ==> Google

Goolge ==> Results

results ===> Hacker news or another aggregator

aggregator ===> your fav. sub community (because gooigle discovery sucks)

subreddit helps you find links you want

in those links you find information

==============================

that is what a manual crawl feels like, and how many people use the web.

~~~
solveforall
Ah, I get it now. Thanks for the explanation. This is the problem with the
"deep web" not being indexable by crawlers. I've started looking at how to
make this easier for users. Basically I'm got some ways to detect which sites
should be searched in response to your queries, based on the category of words
in your query and the site. But then I need to do a real-time search of that
site, that might require JS to run, extract the links, and present them back
to the user. It might be slow, but it's easier for the user to wait for the
cloud to do it than click the links on multiple sites himself.

Thanks for checking out my site. If you have any questions or have any trouble
please let me know at help@solveforall.com. And maybe we can explore
brainstorming/collaborating since you've clearly put a lot of thought into
search.

