Try searching for
site:reddit.com best headphones
And click "Tools" and set the date filter to be "Past week" for example.
Click the first result. You will notice it's from a year ago. Click the second result, it's from 2 years ago and so on. Not a single result matches the date filter. Similar issues with the other filters.
It's 100% broken and been this way for at least a year now as far as I remember.
Or alternatively, improve their algorithm for detecting page changes.
Somehow it should be improved, as it’s a useful feature.
Unless the redesign of Reddit broke this somehow? But as far as I know, this has broken for other sites too. And Reddit redesign is over 2 years old now.
And then this. An unsolved problem that they could have solved 20 years ago - recognising that pages are not necessarily one atomic unit and that different parts can be updated at different times. Or more generally that different types of websites require slightly different approaches to search.
It's not a trivial problem if you think about it. But for a search company to get this completely wrong even for a global top 100 discussion forum requires a severe lack of incentives.
And that's where I get the sinking feeling that I shouldn't be encouraged by Google's failure at all, because those incentives are difficult to fix for anyone. I'm pessimistic about Ramaswamy's approach. Putting a paid ad blocker on Bing isn't going to fix this.
While smaller companies seems to have a hard time implementing A/B-testing Google seems to be running tens or hundreds of tests continously.
Here's a nice trick: If you report any issue on a search results page it seems to opt you out of the experimental group and you get normal results for some hours/days/weeks. Still not great like in 2009 but not as crazy as whatever bugs you now. At least it has worked for me on a couple of occasions.
Googlers: If you are relying on people giving feedback to know if a change is annoying users, be aware that your feedback process actively discourages people from submitting feedback. Even I have to be reaaalllly motivated to send feedback.
How quaint.
A common human fallacy is to pick a medium size number and think it is big. People have trouble grasping large scale (perhaps due to how our senses instinctively use a logarithmic scale)