

Ask HN: Why does this search not work? - ColinWright

This search: [0] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&#38;q=title%3Ashit&#38;sortby=create_ts+desc<p>does not find this item: [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4084603<p>It's over two days old, so surely it's been indexed by now.  It has an unusual word in the title, and I'm specifically searching for that word in the title.<p>Why does it not turn up in the search results?<p>This has wider implications for all web and mobile apps: Trust.  If you provide demonstrably wrong, poor or misleading results, your customers won't trust you, and they'll be reluctant to give you money.
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patio11
HNsearch is about ~8 days behind in updating their index at the moment. Not
sure why. (I have a little widget which keeps an eye on mentions of my name
and the Patio11 bat signal, for giggles. Due to the way HNsearch works, this
also picks up all my own comments. The most recent one indexed is about eight
days old.)

 _If you provide demonstrably wrong, poor or misleading results, your
customers won't trust you, and they'll be reluctant to give you money._

This goes in the file of Things Engineers Wish Were Accurate Descriptions of
Measurable Features Of Reality In Spite Of Overwhelming Evidence To The
Contrary.

~~~
ColinWright
So do you think that poor, misleading, or wrong results do not in fact lead to
a lack of trust? Or do you think that a lack of trust does not prevent people
from giving you money?

I know that people act irrationally, so I'm interested in seeing where the
chain of logic gets broken. Certainly in my day job we find that people
really, really don't give money to people who fail to give accurate and timely
results, so I'd be very interested in hearing your take on this, especially
given your background and experience.

Thanks.

~~~
patio11
People are often demonstrably incapable of deciding whether results are poor,
misleading, or wrong. For example, they routinely delegate that decisionmaking
to trusted advisors who they have picked in a not-strictly-speaking-rational
manner (e.g. most middle class people abominably overpay for investment advice
from people who give them screamingly bad advice. This is the nearly universal
finding of decades of research. Evidence for "If you're paying 2% to a broker
to buy a mutual fund with 2% fees you are making a bad decision" is
substantially more certain than "Cigarettes: not that great for you!" and yet
people make that decision every day. They will make it, in controlled
laboratory settings, for things as frivolous as $250 of airline miles.)

A specific example of this with regards to information search problems: not
only are people incapable of telling whether a SERP is a good SERP or not, you
can create _objectively bad SERPS_ and then sell them as good by, e.g.,
mimicking either a) the design, b) the branding, or c) the design and branding
of, e.g., a Google SERP. There exist studies of what happens when you e.g.
dress up Yahoo results in Google CSS (people will prefer them over Google
results in Yahoo CSS or, for that matter, Google results in Google CSS).

With specific relevance to the giving of money, I have access to anecdotes
from the SEO world that occasionally curl my toes. A fairly common trick is a
review site with the review stars awarded by "sort by affiliate commission,
descending", which obviously bears no relationship to quality results. It
doesn't just work, it works _astoundingly well_. And not only does it work
astoundingly well, it works astoundingly well on people who one would presume
are fairly savvy about quite-involved purchases where the dollar amounts
involved will, frankly, swamp the total lifetime value of all paid-for HN
searches. (e.g. Obscuring particulars a little bit, would you expect that
anyone would make a decision for a seven-figure software deployment at a
$FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION on the basis of a starred review site with a name
spiritually similar to www.best-bank-software.biz? _cough_ Demonstrable
evidence of success.)

------
andres
The HNSearch crawler was behind due to an IP change related to our move to an
AWS VPC. Everything should be up-to-date now:
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=ask+hn%3A+w...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=ask+hn%3A+why+does+this+search+not+work&start=0)

------
canatan01
The people behind HNSearch are upgrading their servers I was told.

------
ColinWright
[0]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Ashi...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Ashit&sortby=create_ts+desc)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4084603>

