Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by addicted | Hacker News Reader

I think most people haven’t internalized that Google is no longer a search engine but an answering engine.

A search engine tries to find all sorts of relevant information related to your query. The more the merrier (it’s searching after all) and then sorted in a way that puts the relevant results first. An answering engine, in the other hand, tries to minimize the number of results. In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want.

One example of this change is the fact that it’s no longer useful to go beyond the first page or so of Your results. Because anything down that low is irrelevant as an answer and is probably discarded by google anyways, which wasn’t the case when it was a search engine.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, I suspect the majority of time the majority of people want an answer, and not a multitude of results. But I think this is what leads to google search changing in a way that does not meet many people’s expectations here.

It means google emphasizes stuff that gets people answers quickly. They parse text and reveal the answers on their page itself. And they are not very useful for exploring anymore.

...and the answers it gives are often not even right (or wrong).

In an ideal world, it would only return one thing, which tells you exactly what you want.

In Google's ideal world, it would also only return one thing, which tells you exactly what they want to tell you.

I think this is true of any “answering engine” in an ideal world. In an ideal world, it would act as a function and return a single output for any input, because any particular question should ideally only have a single correct answer.

How would it decide which source to get this answer from?

Because let's face it, one of the biggest challenges with that idea isn't that there are tons of different valid answers to a question (though that could be the case for many political queries or ones related to art/media quality), but that hundreds or thousands of pages and sites contain the requested info, and search engines have to rank them in some sort of order.

>I’m not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, I suspect the majority of time the majority of people want an answer, and not a multitude of results.

True ! To give a concrete example... LONG FORM RECIPE PAGES - Should be on SERP 100+. It's gotten a little bit better, but still see sometimes a 2000 word article when I google something like "apple pie recipe" or "apple pie oven temperature"

s/an answering engine/an advertising engine/

FTFY

Both, actually. They figure that if you can get all your answers from Google itself, they get all of the ad dollars and don't have to share. That's why they try to get the implied question answered with pages served from them if possible.

This meme is tired. We get it, Google makes money from advertising.

Your comment is same as "NYTimes is a advertising company hurr durr because they make money from advertising"

Well that's a very rude comment. You are also using false equivalence to halt any discourse on the matter. Doesn't seem very safe.

Yeah I think the Google trolls came through last night.

No, I don't think you do get it. Originally, Google's experiment, the reason they came into existence, was to organize the world's knowledge and sell advertising to people who were seeking it, on the idea that you must be interested in something if you're searching for it. That's like the New York Times.

Now, Google seems to be trying to learn the details of all the people, and they're selling access to that. Their mission seems to have flipped.

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