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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

What kind of training are the users providing that makes G better? I thought their secret was that they have better infrastructure to crawl and organize information?

I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.

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One very simple metric to improve search results is testing how long a user visits a site. When users search for something, click a link and return to google seconds later you can assume that the result did not match what the user was searching for.

Then why aren’t Google results any better (arguably worse) than search engines that don’t do this?

They are better IME - I use DDG but still need to switch to Google for many searches to find what I'm looking for.

They are better. Maybe not to you but there's a reason Google is as big as it is. DDG, Bing, etc. are just awful.

Because they're so dominant they can make changes to the system that make it worse. Haven't you noticed the decline in quality of Google search results over these past few years?

What makes you think Google's results are worse?

i find google is useless at this. They throw out irrelevant results that the Wise Men of Google think you want to see, or that they'd like you to see. DDG pay more attention to your wording. The drawback is they have fewer indexed pages.

You find Google is useless at what?

showing the results i'm looking for

I'd also wager this is probably the most useful or close to the most useful metrics you can use. With this metric, plus the user's persona (male or female, teen or elderly, and so forth), you have a fairly accurate user driven ranking system.

Why can't search engine just ask the user if this site was relevant instead of using tracking to do it?

because the underlying assumption is that what they'll tell you is the truth, and that's not necessarily the case. Think of a Firefox plugin in, AdNauseam style, that always says NO.

But there's nothing stopping the same people from gaming existing logic that tracks user behavior except security through obscurity. But you also get dirty data via tracking where it's indistinguishable from backend if user found what they want or just gave up on trying for example.

Because then SEOs would write bots to keep clicking that their site is relevant to everything.

But you can get SEOs to fake metrics, too.

It's a good point. I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but assuming that it's just a matter of infrastructure, then Bing wouldn't suck so much. Microsoft has the means, the engineering power and the incentive to crush a direct competitor. And yet, it sucks.

So in practice, the more data you have, the better the engine is. I don't have a theoretical reason for why that is the case, but thing is I don't actually need it.

Every time you click a result link, and every time you bounce back from that link, probably also scroll position and hovering, you are providing potentially useful training data.

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