

Ask HN: So, is "search" really that hard? - sebkomianos

I've been thinking about this for quite some time but what triggered the thought this time was this Hacker News submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812555): Isn't it a tad disturbing how such an open world as the web is limited to pretty much just one searching tool (Google)?<p>I am not asking from the "Is Google evil?" perspective, I am only asking to find out why.
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27182818284
Since Google's early days, Google has been my homepage and search engine
exclusively. Recently, I challenged myself to use Duck Duck Go for a month.

I have not found a significant reason to go back to Google. Search might be
"hard" but my experience with DDG has told me that it is not so hard that it
can't be solved by people other than Google.

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glimcat
Doing search is fairly easy.

Doing search well is extraordinarily hard, arbitrarily so depending on what
approximation of "well" you're willing to accept. There are many factors which
scale in computation very rapidly. The entire concept of meaning and relevance
is also hard to reduce to a computational algorithm despite many valiant
attempts to do so to a useful level.

That aside, if DDG doesn't work, changing search engines is unlikely to help
much vs. trying a different query or consulting other humans. The world is not
limited to Google. Google is just very large and entrenched to the point that
it's hard to take on directly.

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krishna2
By Anna Patterson, "Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard":
<http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407>

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trafficlight
Do you remember how useless search engines were before Google?

