

Why Search Is Hard - slig
http://diegobasch.com/why-search-is-hard

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vannevar
Search is in fact so hard that even with all the improvements mentioned in the
article, searching Google today is only marginally better than searching Alta
Vista in 1997. I still type into the same user interface I did nearly 20 years
ago: a search box. I still get results in the same form I got them then: a
paged list of ranked items. And even on the first page, the list is still full
of irrelevant results, though nowadays they are more likely to be intentional
content spam than an accidental result of the search algorithm itself. I'd peg
the overall improvement at no better than 20 or 30%, which is astonishingly
little given all the research dollars at the disposal of companies like Google
and Microsoft. Search must be very, very hard indeed.

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marssaxman
Most of the things he says are hard are things I would rather not have done
for me in the first place. I don't want the search engine to know who I am and
I don't want it to bias its results based on what it thinks I want.

I don't want the search engine to do math, find flights, or look up bus
schedules; I want it to find me a calculator site, find a site where I can
look up flights, or find the page with the bus schedules on it. I don't care
what the search engine's opinion about those things might be; I care where the
authoritative sources live.

Fuzzy spelling-correction search can be useful.

~~~
diego
You are unusual. Most people actually don't want extra steps like going to a
calculator site to perform calculations. Those things are especially annoying
when on mobile.

It's true however that most people do not want the search engine to know much
about them. Interestingly, most user do notice (and complain) if a search
engine stops using personalization and localization. When given the choice
between more privacy or better results, the vast majority opt for better
results.

~~~
marssaxman
Maybe I am unusual, but I find half-clever systems intensely irritating. Give
me simple stupid software that actually works over someone's overly
complicated algorithm that guesses wrong half the time and thereby gets in the
way of whatever I was actually trying to do.

I have no idea what personalized results look like, to be honest. I switched
to Google in part because they didn't pester me to log in like many of the
other search engines at the time; now that Google has succumbed to login
disease I've moved on to duckduckgo.

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eidorianu
What about DDG? DDG supposedly doesn't know about the user searching.

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slig
For those who doesn't recognize OP's name: he founded IndexTank which was sold
to LinkedIn in 2011.

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beat
Everything looks easy, until you try to do it yourself.

