Tell HN: Google Search is Getting Stupid

6 points·O_H_E··7 comments

Yes, in the grand scheme of things this is not really that big of a deal, but I am getting unreasonably frustrated with not being able to find stuff that I know exists.

https://www.google.com/search?q=repo+to+docker

https://www.google.com/search?q=repo+2+docker

And to save you time, no the desired results doesn't exist anywhere in the first 4+ pages. For fucks sake even "repo two docker" doesn't work.

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Amazingly, duckduckgo got the correct project (repo2docker) at 12th place.

Screenshots https://imgur.com/a/JOu520Z

For reference what is the desired result?

A repo called repo2docker with a thousand stars on github

https://github.com/jupyter/repo2docker

For the 'repo 2 docker' URL I get that as first result. Searching for 'repo two docker' as third result. Who knows how many factors play into that.

I get that as the first result for https://www.google.com/search?q=repo+2+docker incognito or not.

shrug

Well I didn't remember that the name had a 2, so I searched with a "to" and was lost for 5 minutes until I found it through GitHub.

"repotodocker" finds what you want the first result. "repo to docker jupyter" has your result as the first hit as well.

It's not surprising "repo to docker" doesn't find what you want, since there's a lot of sentences that have "repo to docker". Neither Bing nor DDG find what you want with that query either.

So, you have jumped to the conclusion - the particular query is difficult, because your query doesn't give enough context to distinguish whether the query is against an entity or a partial phrase.

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