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I tried a query I searched for yesterday at work: "opengl python glclipplane". Google gives me the documentation page, two example pages (which are near duplicates), and then some relevant Stackoverflow questions. Private.sh gives me the website homepage for OpenGL, some totally irrelevant links into the PyOpenGL documentation (other modules, etc., not the one I searched for), and the Wikipedia page for OpenGL.

It's cool that it's private, but I could pipe my searches to /dev/null and that'd be pretty private too. If I can't get a useable result, who cares?




gigablast coder here. i noticed if you search for 'pyopengl glclipplane' it gets it. ('python' does not occur anywhere on the page!) i think this is a synonym issue. 'opengl python' should be synonymous with 'pyopengl'. i think google gets this because they have billions of queries from which to derive synonyms. i'll be adding more synonyms to gigablast over time and hope to close this synonym gap.

that being said, i think 90% of the bad search results come from the index being too small (straight up lacking the best web page), or not having good enough synonyms.


While that's a reasonable explanation, the top result from private.sh (the opengl.org homepage) also does not include "python" anywhere on the page. I would expect the top result to at least be something relevant to glclipplane. I think this is both an issue of retrieval but also of ranking - the opengl homepage is a very generic result which is unlikely to have much salience to a query with other specific search terms.




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