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Comment by nludd | Hacker News Reader

>If I search for "takeaway pizza", I'm going to be pretty annoyed if the results are generated using PageRank alone, with no weighting for local relevance.

Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".

>If an American searches for "cricket", they almost certainly mean the cellular provider or the insect rather than the sport

Google "cricket provider" or "cricket insect".

>if a British person makes the same search, the odds are reversed.

Google "cricket sport".

"We will track your every query, movement, voice command, and whatever other behavioural data we can get our hands on, put it in a gargantuan centralized database, store it for as long as we can (practically forever) and have trillion-dollar artificial intelligence munch on it so you can avoid using accurate search queries" is a ridiculous value proposition.

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Your queries would work, but Google wants to be like the secretary in the office. If you ask your secretary "I want some pizza", he would not say "Well this pizza place is the most popular in the world, it's located in Rome.", he would tell you options close to your area.

They could have two services - Google Search and Google Secretary.

They could. Or they could just do Google Secretary (because they think it's better) and let competitors try Google Search under a different brand.

Pretty much what's happened really. Turns out not that many people want Google Search when they have the choice of Google Secretary instead.

> Pretty much what's happened really. Turns out not that many people want Google Search when they have the choice of Google Secretary instead.

How do you know? Popularity of Google Search is an indication, but its not like people decide which search engine they use when they install Google Chrome. Do you think ordinary people are even aware there's an alternative to Google Search such as Duck Duck Go?

:) Google Secretary = Google. Google Search = Duck Duck Go / StartPage / etc.

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".

If I search "takeaway pizza [place of residence]" on a non-localised search engine, I get nothing. If I search "takeaway pizza [nearest large town]" I get a bunch of places that don't deliver to me. Google gives me what I want, which is a list of the dozen or so pizza places in the patchwork of villages and towns in the surrounding area.

Google could give me that sort of result without any personalisation, but it would need to do another contentious thing - fuzzy matching. It needs to understand that when I search for [place of residence], I actually mean [place of residence plus everywhere within a certain radius], but only in some contexts. It needs to search the index not for the exact words in my search term, but for what it predicts will give me the most useful results.

Again, this stuff is literally Google's job. I don't want to do the mental work of figuring out all the towns and villages within a five mile radius, I don't want to perform a bunch of different searches, I just want to see where I can get a decent pizza. Google shows me all the local places on a map, complete with reviews and opening hours. If I search on mobile, I can choose a place and call them or get directions with one tap. If I ask for directions, it'll warn me if there's traffic and offer me an alternative route.

If you can't see how 2017 Google gives far better results for this query than 2007 Google, then I can only assume that you're being wilfully ignorant.

>Google "takeaway pizza [place of residence]".

This isn't nearly as straightforward as it sounds. It may be the pizza places in all the bordering towns deliver to your location but the pizza places that are located in your town are all on the other side and don't deliver to your location. And you don't even know the names of the border towns. There are places where the pizza place address doesn't match up with the town name because that town doesn't have a post office.

It's usually just not straightforward.

If you're interested in cartographic information that can't be readily put into words, maybe a text-based search engine isn't the best way to find it. A map makes more sense. Query a map (like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap) for "pizza [exact location]".

We've been so conditioned to use Google Search as our one stop oracle that we fail to stop and think whether a text-based query is actually appropriate.

"takeaway pizza near me" Google knows where I am right now after all, I used waze on the drive here, and have an android phone. but even using the employers PC in front of me it knows where it is.

Note: I have hast a few instances where "near me" didn't work as expected.

Where else would I be trying to find takeaway pizza? Are you suggesting that if I just search for takeaway pizza Google should point me to the best takeaway pizza place in the world and only if I specify "near me" should it provide me with information that might actually be useful?

Was addressing the suggestion that "takeaway pizza <city name>" would provide less than optimal results under certain circumstances described in other comments in this part of the thread. For example If I lived in Omaha Nebraska on the north side of Harrison street which also is the dividing line between Omaha and Papillion a search on "takeaway pizza Omaha" might fail to include the pizza place I can see across the street in Papillion.

Personally, I would do the search on maps and not include either the city name or "near me", but the discussion was about the regular text search and I was suggesting an alternate phrasing.

Web search is literally the wrong place to try to find something that geographic databases were designed for. When you don't know where you are or what's around, you go to a map.

And, of course, Google Maps will be quite happy to serve you a litany of personalized advertisements for the restaurants in your area, but is devoid of any real route-planning tools, or information about places not worth advertising to you.

So, you call the pizza place and say "Do you deliver to X? No? Oh, but your other location does! Thanks!" Or, go to the company's website and figure it out.

People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

Are you kidding? Of course I'd rather have the service tell me directly what pizza places deliver to me. I'd need to call each one and ask individually? How on Earth is that a better service?

It's useful, therefore people use it. You're asking for people to accept a clear decrease in the utility of a service. Because ????

Say you are on the west end of Springfield near the east end of Shelbyville. You don't know that area or what the surrounding towns are.

You Google "pizza Springfield." For a very literal ("stupid computer") search your results are all the pizza places on the east end of Springfield. There's no pizza in the west end of Springfield.

You waste your time calling all the pizza places on Springfield just to find out none deliver to your location.

Your results do not include all the pizza places on the east end of Shelbyville that do deliver to the west end of Springfield.

You go hungry.

This isn't an uncommon situation if you're outside of the downtown. In your example you're going to assume that every pizza restaurant near your location is a national chain that has locations in every town. Completely and totally unrealistic unless you are in a very densely packed suburbia - there is only one chain pizza restaurant within ~20 miles of my house but there's independent ones everywhere.

>People seem to expect Google to hold your hand at every single step along the way.

Google provides a useful service. So I shouldn't use it because...? Because why? it's more "manly" not to? Because search should be hard because that's the way nature intended? or... ?

What kind of logic is that? Following that logic nobody should use the web at all because it makes things easier. Or you shouldn't get delivery at all because it's convenient, you should just drive around aimlessly until you find pizza.

As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well?

I search for some error message. Now I get answers in English. What if the person is actually German? Is everyone now going to be stuck with English websites?

What's the point of a search engine if you have to be super precise? Part of Google's magic is that it can figure you out even in imprecision.

>As someone doing a lot of language switching in my Google searches: should I preface every search with the language as well?

What part of the parent's argument is invalidated by the need of some outlier doing "lots of language switching" to add the language?

I'm Dutch, so I have to switch languages often as well. I don't think I get what you're trying to explain. Could you provide some examples?

If I search for an English error message, I.. search for that message. If I search for a Dutch person, I look him up on the Dutch Wikipedia if he's well-known enough.

You're learning Django, and the error messages are in English.

There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top.

Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.

You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.

>There might be a Dutch programming blog talking about this error message, but they'll never be able to be discovered because any English source will end up on top.

Add "lang:nl".

>Another example: you are traveling in a foreign country, and don't really know the local language. You Google for information about a restaurant, hoping to land on something Trip Advisor-y. You end up on the local website, that you're completely unfamiliar with.

Look up the restaurant on https://www.tripadvisor.com/. Why would you use a general purpose search engine if you already know where to find the right information? Or you could add "lang:en" to your query.

>You want to offer a blog for English-speaking expats in Paris. Your exposure in Google is really low because of the niche audience, and the fact that French sources about places you're talking about will be much more viewed.

Those expats could add "lang:en" to their queries about the places you have blogged about.

I am not denying that there is some value in Google filling in these blanks for you, but 99% of examples about the indispensability of personalized search are rendered moot with very simple additions to the search query.

My first language is Portuguese. Google failing to give me English results for software related queries was the one main reason I switched my browser search to DDG.

Yeah I have this issue too, DDG's explicitness on this is nice.

the trick with Google, when its "language detection" isn't play well, is to add `hl=en` as a query param to the URL. This works on basically all Google properties as ewll.

No. If I search for "takeaway pizza" then it's probably because I'm going to be somewhere else later. Why would I ever want to search for takeaway pizza when I'm at home. I already know where to get pizza there.

Searching for my current location is probably the worst possible default

You must be misinterpreting me. I mean "takeaway pizza [location in or near which you want to get your pizza]".

Or more likely I am already somewhere other than home and am trying to get pizza there. Who plans out where they are going to get takeaway pizza in preparation for going on a trip?

"Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users.

Also, a system that adapts to its users is generally more successful than a system that requires users to adapt to it.

Moreover, proper education across the whole population requires, well, a country with proper education across the whole population. So you might have luck in some Scandinavian countries, but not at global scale.

> "Educating" users is not as profitable as serving users.

Manipulating "uneducated" users is much more profitable.

This is a true statement, but how is this relevant?

What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?

For one, they depend on schmucks willing to give Google their personal data and allow for it to keep their location, preferences etc, in order to give them those "precious" localized/personalized info that would be perfectly possible with no personal info kept and just an additional search word or two.

> What do localized search results have to do with manipulating uneducated users?

Technology shouldn't be magic. People should understand, at least at a basic level, how the internet and search engines work, among many other things. Knowing to search for "cricket sport" shouldn't be arcane knowledge. People willing to allow companies to collect personal data and feed them data without understanding how it works end up living in bubbles such as the ones that got Donald Trump elected for instance.

If everything comes cheap and easy to access (like fake news) and people are sufficiently uneducated to accept them as truths, manipulation becomes much easier. Personally tailored search results are just a small part of the issue. It makes people trustful and dependent on services that might end up betraying them in the end.

Syms: "An educated consumer is our best customer."

Google: "An uneducated consumer is our best product."

For you. Maybe not for the median user though.

Maybe we, as technologists that are well positioned to think about the effects our technologies have on their users, should consider whether those effects are of net benefit to them or not.

The short-term consequence of using cocaine is euphoria, but we do not encourage cocaine use because for most users the long-term negative consequences vastly outweigh the short term benefits.

Likewise, we may want to consider what the long-term consequences of relieving our users of certain cognitive labors are. If we will guess for them what information they want, if we tell them what to read, if we tell them what news is fake, if we decide for them what they might like, are we empowering them to make their own choices, or are we increasingly (whether intentionally or unintentionally) directing their lives?

exactly. un-teaching mankind how to fish.

This. My mother used to teach classes in primary school how to use the computer and the internet, but appears to have forgotten most of this when browser user interfaces started prioritizing Google search. Now it's hard to get her to navigate to a URL and (even using Google) she struggles to find the information she needs because she's not used to accurate queries anymore.

I get the value proposition of Google Search, just like I get the value proposition of Velcro shoes and microwave dinners. The problem is not with the face value of these technologies, but with their assumptions and implications. In spite of Silicon Valley rhetoric, these technologies do not empower and liberate their users but make them dependent on them. The more you outsource your thinking to algorithms, the more vulnerable you are to being controlled by them.

>> Now it's hard to get her to navigate to a URL and (even using Google) she struggles to find the information she needs because she's not used to accurate queries anymore.

Haha, if my mother needs to navigate to a URL, she opens Google, types the URL there, then clicks the topmost result (not kidding ;-)

I completely agree that we are on a slippery slope when it comes to technology that tries to be so smart that we don't have to think for ourselves anymore. I sincerely fear for the future of society if I see how easily people are already influenced and cognitively limited by their dependence on technology. We are turning into a society where expending effort to learn and understand things has to come from purely intrinsic motivation, which means a very significant cross-section of society will never acquire basic skills and intelligence we've taken for granted for ages. Imagine the day there will be no Google to help them out, for whatever reason...

Edit: One analogy that comes to mind, which is sort of a pet peeve of mine and is (IMO) side-ways related to the perils of making things 'too convenient' for people, is giving people 'too many options' to choose. I see a parallel between giving people 'choice and options', and 'making things convenient' by removing the need to think for yourself. Everybody agrees that choice is good, and everybody likes convenience. But if you treat these almost as religion, you get 1001 kinds of toilet paper which are probably all shitty (pun intended), instead of three choices that are actually different. The same goes for convenience. Too much convenience will have unintended side-effects.

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