

Ask HN: What do you Wish Google Search Could Find Faster for You? - gusgordon

If there was one category/subject/thing you could have Google give instant answers on, what would it be?<p>Your answers will help me out a lot, and the more the better. Thanks!
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anigbrowl
Time. It's surprisingly difficult to order search results temporally, and
according to Googlers on the search team with whom I've discussed this, a
major part of the problem is the divergence between creation time, recorded
creation time, and Google's discovery time. This would be particularly
valuable for news, where Google has fallen behind an inexplicably fails to
leverage its machine learning advantage to extract semantically rich
information rather than doing relatively dumb string matching.

Yeah, that's sort of abstract. I like the hard problems :-) On a more
conventional note, and in descending order of difficulty:

\- search for musical data by musical sequence, eg searching for 'G-G-G-E'
would suggest Beethoven's 5th symphony, but searching for 'C-C-C-A' would also
suggest it as a transposed result. This isn't as difficult as it sounds, as
there are MIDI files for most classical and historically popular pieces, MIDI
and/or ringtones for popular contemporary ones, and polyphonic pitch
extraction is a relatively well understood signal processing task. Easy win
for someone with the interest and infrastructure: using the audio recording
features in HTML 5 for tune identification, as already present in some mobile
apps for both content discovery and contextual identification.

\- Software error codes and the like. I find troubleshooting a miserable
experience, especially when so many results turn out to be community-based
forum support which fails to resolve problems.

\- Hurf durf semantic web grumble grumble.

~~~
whichdan
@Software errors: I second that. If the result isn't officially documented or
on StackOverflow, it's a total tossup whether it'll be easy to find or not.

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byoung2
My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've
foolishly tried to Google the following:

"restaurants open right now" or "restaurants that deliver here"

As a software engineer, I know these queries won't work, but I keep hoping
that one day Google will surprise me. It should be hard to parse "right now"
to be the current local time, and limit the search to my current location. The
same is true of the other query. Google has local restaurants along with
attributes like "delivery" so it should be possible.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's only quite recently that Maps seems to have developed a (basic)
understanding of 'home'. When I'm looking up directions and type home without
any other qualifiers, it shouldn't be asking me if I mean 'Home Depot'.
Especially not since I give permissions to Google Latitude and my phone and
computer are in fact being operated from my designated 'home' location.

For that matter, my contacts in Android and google+ let me classify people as
friends, work contacts etc., but I've found no way to explain to it that Mrs.
Anigbrowl is my wife as distinct from any other family member.

BTW please upvote threads like this when you reply to them. Many interesting
discussions fall off the new page unnoticed despite having promising replies.

~~~
nostrademons
Friend of mine was telling me how she has a friend who was doing an investment
banking internship this summer, and Google Now inferred "home" to be her
office (presumably because she was always there at 1:30 in the morning). I
can't tell whether this is an embarrassing mistake or an embarrassing success.

