Ask HN: What could the search engine of the future look like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What could the search engine of the future look like?

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Hi,

I feel like the UI and UX for search engines has been pretty stagnant and I'd like to hear your crazy ideas for features that would be included in the search engine of the future.

I'll restrict the question a bit further. I know when picturing your ideal engine of the future, some of you will think of one that'd be privacy preserving, with no ads or with clearly-marked ads that don't detract from the experience, good natural language understanding, and a minimal UI like a single text field. That's certainly good but we already had that 20 years ago, so I think it'd be interesting not to rehash these particular aspects.

As an example here as some past features that I feel were interesting:

- bang commands

- boolean operators

- image similarity search

- "I'm feeling lucky" button

An example of a feature that I think would be interesting in the future would be to show the user an interactive scatter-plot of queries similar to theirs. They could identify the different clusters for a single query (for example when querying 'pandas' they could see clusters for zoologists, users of the Python library, and cute animal video enthusiasts) and select the search-bubble they want to belong to.

So what other features would you like to see in the search engine of the future?

Filter and drill down by page categories. You search for something and get 1000 blogs, 10000 commercial pages, 20 manual pages, 250 forums, 200 news websites, etc, and you can narrow down only to forums, and then drill further based on some other category. I'd love to be able to filter out listicles or content farm stuff entirely from my searches for example, and I think they're easy enough to identify to do that.

Other things could be date, length, number of ads. A consumer focused search engine could even let you filter out pages that use javascript, maybe specific libraries, cookies, etc.

It would be like one of those Tableau demos, but looking for websites.

Oh wow that's really good! The current default search workflow is really primitive now that I think about it, having to throw away all results and start over if your query doesn't give you the right results on the first page.

A search engine of the future would need to coincide to the ux of the future. AR will be a thing so it’s conceivable to connect a query to something your looking at or your location. Augmented searches will largely be more and more ai driven. Expect a greater emphasis on authenticity. Novel methods will be introduced to authenticate a search and possibly be combined with cryptographic ledger like ability.

I want the search engine of the past, with little/no NLP. I never had UX problems with early search engines.

Your example with pandas is cool, but I never found something like that necessary because I could add another word, e.g. "pandas python" or "panda zoo".

WolframAlpha - https://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/

The ability to search in the context of a collection of documents that is built up through repeated searches.

I don't know is this is a feature or total revamp but what about decentralize search engin

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