
Why I hate search - philk10
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/15/why-i-hate-search.aspx
======
mgkimsal
He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it.

Our browsers are _dumb_ , and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by
making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of
course), but keeping track of that information _in the browser_ sucks. Browser
bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't
much better.

I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me
more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt
my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do
this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant"
ads).

Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on
pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that
page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other
meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc).
Information on what I _did_ with info on that page is often what I'm looking
for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it.
Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you
copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history
result.

Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search
results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when
I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my
local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc.

None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata
associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because
having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2
hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are _dumb_ right now, and there's
quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local
intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.

~~~
gcp
I've found the cases you describe to be one of these areas where Firefox seems
to behave way superior than Chrome. It's not entirely as advanced as you
describe of course, but usually just typing parts of a few key words returns a
list of relevant sites you've ever been to, and the ranking is very good. The
algorithm seems to even take into account whether you originally typed in the
link etc.

In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back
with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.

If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move
into this direction.

~~~
lubutu
This is the one reason I stick with Firefox. In Chrome if you search for the
name of a YouTube video, with a string you know was in the title of the page,
you're very unlikely to get that page as a result. If you're lucky you'll get
another page with a link to the page you want in the suggestions list. In
Firefox it'll almost always be an instant result, right at the top of the
list. It seems strange, but Firefox's search really blows Chrome's out of the
water.

~~~
cromwellian
I just tried this experiment and I get the same results. Firefox uses Google
search on the backend, so I don't see how it could be otherwise.

~~~
ErikD
He means using the auto-complete in your address bar, not actually searching
with it.

~~~
cromwellian
Auto-completing against what, against Google ala Google Suggest, or you mean
auto-completing against your Web History?

~~~
gcp
Your web history, which is what the address bar searches in Firefox.

In Chrome these two aspects (history and Google search) are blurred, but it's
not better for it. I'd say it is a good example of 2 half-assed features not
making up for 1 good one.

~~~
cromwellian
If you want to search your Web History explicitly, just hit Ctrl-H. This is a
case of personal preference. I rarely search my Web History, so I want my
Omnibox real estate to be web search. Some people will prefer history ranked
above search, others will prefer it the other way. Chrome should give you a
preference setting for it.

------
radarsat1
This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually
presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company
to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first
company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads.

To me this makes his assertion,

> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there
> is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-
example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of
search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly
what people wanted and needed.

Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard
users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that
changed the playing field.

~~~
danso
My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex"
<http://goo.gl/5YPtb>

_"Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to
host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he
explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came
from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in
websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive.
“He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the
other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t
know what they’re talking about.” "_

I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what
OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but
whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if
so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was
he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving
him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up
Microsoft's image.

\--- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see
that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations:
<http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html>

~~~
lambda
I'm not so sure you should be giving him the benefit of the doubt. He worked
for Microsoft for a few years <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-
whittaker/13/878/229>, then moved to Google, and then moved back to Microsoft,
writing a scathing article
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-
i-left-google.aspx) about Google in the process. It feels to me like he was
using his time at Google to get a promotion at Microsoft.

~~~
danso
Well, I just didn't want to go too far into making the debate about the OP
personally rather than just evaluating the merits of his claim. It's possible
that Google killed his dog _and_ that his anti-Google argument has merit.

------
rbehrends
This seems to be a semantics issue. "To search" has multiple meanings, and
only one of them implies loss.

In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval
mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs
egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.

Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be
easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties
processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce
the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools
in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).

This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are
generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding
them.

Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I
recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using
search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that
forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their
productivity.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two)

------
tatsuke95
>"Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we"

Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more
efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there.

Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be
anyone or anything and _be found_ , in the vast swamp of the internet.

~~~
wladimir
I don't understand his jump from "search is unpleasant and implies loss" to
"search is dead". Cleaning bathrooms is also unpleasant, but to say companies
specializing in it are dead? I don't think we ever globally solved the lost
car keys and lost pets issues, either. It's a fact of life. The world is a
complex mess. Thinking you can "just organize it" is hopelessly idealistic.

Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the
first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or
things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.

~~~
jiggy2011
Yes, I only really "search" google etc when I am looking for new information
(which is quite often). For frequently visited sites there are bookmarks etc.

I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation
bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,

------
CharlieA
I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths
problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost
it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something
you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving
results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others.

I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a
great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we
have available for discovery of new content and new sites.

------
peeln
Is anyone else not surprised that the doc is working for microsoft? Perhaps
instead of associating himself as a former googler, former professor, and
former startup founder, he should assert himself as an individual and an
authority on whatever new and exciting product he's working on at mcsft.

I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former
employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.

------
cromwellian
You know, if I ever quit Google and joined Microsoft, I still wouldn't write
crap like this, even if my boss tried to force me.

Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit
Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)

Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts
against Google?

So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff
for you in Apple's commercials?

And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the
need for me to search for a plumber?

And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed
searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching
ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been
saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something
Whittaker knows having worked at Google.

Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?

------
Sembiance
He will fit right in at Microsoft then. They call bing lots of things like
"decision engine" and "doing engine", but never a "search engine".

Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"

~~~
goostavos
Haha! I thought that was going to be dropped in at some point as well. "We
need less search, and more decision."

These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out
articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution?

I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices..
Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?

------
revelation
Its pretty obvious by this point that Google's aim is not annoying the maximum
number of people to maximize ad revenue.

Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?

------
danso
_The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable.
The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on
ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the
number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when
being part of the problem pays so damn well?_

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core
philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search?
And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained
that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to
read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?

------
frankus
I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of what I believe is going to replace
(or more accurately, make irrelevant) current search engines. Most of the
pieces are already in place.

Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my
favorite donut place is open ( _as if_ , but bear with me).

If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that
donut place close?"

They might answer that "they're open for another hour."

There are two important differences between this and search:

First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what
specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural
language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a
reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for
years now.

Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I
was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha
does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some
other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated.

If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut
places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket
Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click
the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at
the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it
is, and subtract that from the appropriate number.

I also don't have much information about how current their information is,
even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated
around noon on April 2nd.

One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a
majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic
information is a fool's errand.

What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a
machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index
a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true,
and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like
"Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would
get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like
PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be
"5:00PM PDT".

Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I
believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.

------
DominikR
What started as a nice thought that could have been transformed or applied by
the author into something useful (In the sense that it could have helped
someone to create something great) launched into another "I hate Google and
you should too" ad by some Microsoft employee.

I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is
obviously targeting developers)

Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems
so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email
etc.)

And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results,
again with no evidence whatsoever.

This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10
test queries to prove his point.

But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so
i read it from start to end. Well done.

------
jacabado
Wow I feel trolled by the author. Come on Google shaped the web as we know
today with PageRank and AdWords, isn't it totally unfair to put things in that
way? Also the author confuses search with discovery just to prove his point.

I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of
less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve
what our current solution solves for most of the people.

Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content
discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a
long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current
search engines.

------
axefrog
The problem is that if you try to delegate responsibility for avoiding the
scenario where the information is "lost" to begin with, you have to make sure
that the process performing the searching and organizing knows what to look
for at least as well as, or better than, the person for who the finding is
being performed. I'll be very impressed if you can create an algorithm that
knows what I want, up to the second, better than I do.

------
Lagged2Death
_We know every place possible where the online equivalent of car keys are
found._

Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to.

Speaking broadly, "search" has been, _as he points out_ , a major paradigm in
human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card
catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively
searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing
systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches
or to distill the results of searches.

 _The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss..._

I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very
succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and
instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the _freedom_ to lose
things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find
them again when we decide we need them.

Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you
write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their
minds to think about other things in the interim.

But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.

------
lopatin
What does he suggest, though? If having a "decision" engine is what he thinks
is best, I'd say that usually the top 3 organic results in Google for just
about any search are much more relevant that the technology Microsoft has to
provide a decision.

Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd
result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using
it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the
Bing first page results for the same query.

Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons
of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber,
you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they
do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results,
and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing
currently has.

------
Tichy
He only says that search is crap, but not really how to make it better. Except
for Siri.

He claims we could do better, but how?

------
benjash
Seems a bit idealistic to me.

There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an
advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never
materilised.

Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect
way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts
the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share
holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?

Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You
have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.

And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies
that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for
my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.

------
j_baker
This seems incredibly out of touch with reality. I can buy that there's a
better model out there than search, but what is that model? Until the author
can give me something better, search is still the best model for this, even if
we accept the author's problems with search.

------
Jonovono
I think search can be done better. But I don't see a replacement for search.
Even when we think, we perform a search in our mind to return the answer. It
is far quicker to type into Google "who is the main character in 1984", than
to go to a database(dmoz) and click books, then click 'numbers' then find 1984
then click it. I don't know if there can be something quicker than search (of
course if you had an answer immediately when you thought of a question, but
that still requires a search). But I agree search can be done differently and
in a way that is more organized and "semantic".

------
taa
I've worked at Google and they take search quality very seriously. In fact,
the search quality guys are not allowed to talk to the ads guys to avoid
exactly this type of influence.

Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the
better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search
engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that
demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad
revenue.

So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search
quality in favour of ad revenue?

------
chrisveto
I for one would vote for common sense, which would get rid of, say 1/3 of the
entire planet's search queries. That amount of course is taken completely off
the ceiling, but it get's my point across. That being said, if no one were
searching, then no one would be finding. Searching is the thing that makes us
learn, I mean, in a school library you also search for a book, right? No books
are going to run into your lap by themselves. So, unless some of you geniuses
have a way to fix that and make human race even more lazier, do let me know.

------
forrestblount
Great article. What really strikes me about this is that we just saw Google's
new glass video - a device in which search is primarily implied. Google knows
search is dumb and wants to fix it, primarily through external devices
(android) that are context aware and have access to incredible amounts of
personally relative data. They can't kill their money cow, not directly, and
haven't shown us how they'll monetize products without relying on ads, so
they'll have to leave search alone, at least for now.

------
languagehacker
Good god. Bothered me so much I had to blog about it.

<http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/>

------
badgergravling
Really bizarre. I totally get that searching needs improvement in various
areas, but Siri etc are just search via audio. The other option is to give up
all your privacy to allow tracking, but as you see on a daily basis, we're a
long way from contextual understanding that really works.

SO without search you'd be relying on asking Hackernews/Twitter etc for every
single enquiry you have...

Including the embarrassing ones...

------
AznHisoka
Perhaps we'd be better off with different products for different types of
searches. If I need a specific tool or utility, I search the App Store. If I
need a review, Yelp. If I need to compare prices, ShopZilla. What I'd love to
see if a search engine that only returns authority websites, sort of what
Blekko was doing.

------
glfomfn
"When the fox cannot reach the grapes he says they are not ripe" A Greek
proverb which matches perfect this guys post.

------
mistermann
I don't agree entirely with OP, but there is truth in what he says.

> The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on
> ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles
> the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution
> when being part of the problem pays so damn well?

One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-
configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should
be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know
have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that
topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from
sites within that catalog.

This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and
greatly improve search productivity, there are _many_ others. That google
hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be
beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest
in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.

~~~
danso
Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? By registering your
+1's for sites and users, Google gets a good fix of where you like your
information from.

However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be
considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook
friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users
know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question
at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If
users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for
knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up
hurting the "open" web.

~~~
mistermann
> Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? Maybe, I have no
> idea. It lacks the manual grouping though.

>Users do not like manually curating lists No one is forcing them, I'm not
proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced
search.

>your solution requires that users know what they don't know No, it enables
users who _do_ know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing
"site:" qualifier allows with a _single_ site)

A _very_ small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced
functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".

------
cromwellian
As a friend reminded me, if Google is lying about trying to minimize searches,
then 1) Why Google Instant and 2) Why "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google,
there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.

------
wooptoo
Search is dead. Long live the semantic web.

~~~
davegauer
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that
came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I
thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely
disappointed!

There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated
things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using
inbound links to rank them, etc.

Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a
Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public"
to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory
Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at
the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current.

Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create
a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because
of (extremely valid) privacy concerns.

Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no
new ideas or proposals.

------
iamgopal
where is the f __dislike button ?

------
huggyface
Microsoft failed, miserably, at search. So search doesn't matter. Right?

It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping
venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really
didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy.

What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search
breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be
made by Exxon."

Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that
essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google _themselves_ are
trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic
canonical answers for many questions.

Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom
have to go past the first link, if you even need that.

It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of
the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, _does a web
search_. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios
in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of
the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is
misunderstanding how it works.

EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat
ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google
screed, even when it comes from _Microsoft_ of all places.

------
bashzor
Wow, did someone just reinvent browsing history?

------
DamagedProperty
To me this just feels reaching. Sure, he does a good job of highlighting a
problem but doesn't really offer any vision for a solution. But why go to
Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21

~~~
cooldeal
> But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21

Share prices are not directly comparable. Market cap is, where MSFT is beating
GOOG.

