Your answer reminded me of the Ford quote: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, I just strongly believe that in 20 years we'll look back at our Googling years and wonder how we managed to find anything at all. Who know what the next pattern of information retrieval will be, but I personally think it'll be an even bigger jump than the jump from reference desks and encyclopedias to Google.
I don’t think Ford ever said that, and I don’t think that quote is a good argument for not listening to users. Cars existed pre-Henry-Ford. They were just expensive. Many people could have correctly identified the need for a more affordable car. Ford’s innovation was actually doing it.
Also the Ford company’s dogged resistance to listening to customer wants (“Any colour you want so long as it is black”) hurt Ford as soon as they had to compete on anything but price, with GM finding success with “a car for every purse and purpose”. From 1921 to 1927 Ford went from controlling 65% of the American car market to just 15%.
All that to say: “innovator vision that flies contrary to common sentiment about what people want” is often overrated and can be a trap. That’s not to say that the customer is always right… but they’re not always wrong either.
Exactly. Give me relevant links to my term, with no SEO spam. Don't correct my term, especially when I'm searching verbatim (which I almost always want). It'd also be nice to be able to downvote certain results.
Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal.
You'll still get spam if that's all that matches your query, but now all it takes is for someone to make a page matching the query without the aforementioned items to outrank the spam results. You wouldn't need to append "site:reddit.com" to your queries because the (mostly) non-commercial Reddit results would automatically outrank all the blogspam and listicles.
If ads were downranked it would make a lot of spam/clickbait/listicles unprofitable overnight as they'd rank low enough that the costs of creating & maintaining the spam site/content would outgrow the returns from ad impressions.
> Making spam unprofitable would be a good first step. Rather than trying to detect whether something is spam or not, just target how spam sites are funded: ads, analytics, affiliate links, etc and use those as a negative ranking signal.
This would be a really interesting experiment: A search engine that ranks websites by the amount of Ads and other spam that they contain.
The problem is that for every $1 someone is willing to spend to not have spammy results, a spammer is willing to pay $10 for you to see it anyway. And the more "trustworthy" a platform grows, then the going price for manipulating it will keep rising until they hire the right MBA who decides to squander the company's reputation for a quick buck. Seems to be a recurring theme at least.
This is one of the reasons I love working for You.com.
SEO is killing Google and it needs to be addressed before it kills the internet. Having the opportunity to build an app that solves a search, instead of perpetuating a spam system, has been really rewarding... and we're just getting started.
It's crazy how quickly I got quality results for "java ed25519 bouncy castle" on both You and Kagi. I literally spent all day on Monday using Goog and DDG trying to find implementation examples of Ed25519 and AES-256-GCM in Java, trying every variation of keyword, verbatim quotes, and site scope I could think of, and ended up using GH gist search instead to find what I was looking for. The results on Goog/DDG were literally all SEO spam sites copying content from SO or the Bouncy Castle docs that I had already read.
I've been trying out Kagi as my default search engine, but will give You a try next.
I think it would probably be worthless. SEO means money spent to the search engine company, and why improve UX when you could buy your seventh super yacht?
>It'd also be nice to be able to downvote certain results.
When I'm researching stuff, I go thru a whole page of google result, and 'open in new tab'...90% of the time it's crap, and I really wish I could signal google 'this was useless'.
You want the information that you'll eventually get from visiting links, not the links themselves.
In fact often you don't even want the information, you just want to solve a problem. I don't know about you, but I don't like learning all about air conditioners and spending time finding the product available in my area with the highest quality/price ratio that fits into my budget. I just want the best air conditioner for me.
Never mind the creators of those sites. Do they really want the Reader's Digest version of their pages scraped and presented to a user without getting the click?
To go a step further - you probably don't even care about having the best air conditioner. You probably just want to reliably feel cool when it's hot at a reasonable cost.
I would prefer it returned "knowledge" instead of links but I hear you. Still, I think the fundamental flaw of all of this including Google is everyone looks for info in documents, while what you really need is a queryable knowledge graph where documents are linked to. Google made a half assed attempt at it but never took off, I'm looking forward to what that space could look like in the future.
An input box that spits out links is _exactly_ what I want.