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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

At some point, AI and NLP and raw processing power will have progressed so much that "search" is not a problem anymore, and I think we're getting there. Google can up their game but it won't matter much. The only thing they have left is brand recognition.

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IMO search has had its goalpost moved. It used to be about scale, technical challenges, bandwidth, storage, etc. It is still about that, but a significantly harder challenge to solve has come up: searching in a malicious environment. SEO crap nowadays completely dominates search, Google has lost the war.

Simply put, I believe that Google sucks at search, in the modern context. It is great at indexing, it has solved phenomenal technical challenges, but search it has not solved. Why do I have to write site:stackoverflow.com or site:reddit.com to skip the crap and go to actual content? Why can my brain detect blogspam garbage in 0.5 seconds of looking but billion dollar company Google will happily recommend it as the most relevant result above a legitimate website?

I feel this 12 year old XKCD is still relevant: https://xkcd.com/810/ .

> but billion dollar company Google will happily recommend it as the most relevant result above a legitimate website?

Because the site most likely is laden with Google Ads, it's in their interest to show you that garbage and not what you're actually looking for.

You can just append “Reddit” or “stackoverflow”, you don’t need to write “site:Reddit.com”

No, I've seen SEO spam sites starting to take advantage of this trend by mentioning "reddit" on their pages.

Google has necessarily arbitrary criteria by which pages are ranked. Because Google is the game in town, anyone with a primary goal of driving traffic will pursue those metrics (i.e. SEO). To the extent that those criteria deviate even slightly from actual good results, large parts of the internet will dilute their content to pursue them, which both lowers their quality and further drives down the gems of the internet.

The ranking would have to vary over an infinite spread of purposes for webpages, and it would have to converge almost perfectly to what is actually most helpful. Among all the technical problems, Google will not optimize correctly against ads for the same reason that websites trying to drum up affiliate purchases and ad revenue won't put content quality above SEO.

When recipes return to having the recipe and ingredients first, followed by an optional life story,I'll revisit my assessment.

Google Research is also one of the top (NLR|IR) R&D gigs in town - they discovered BERT, a model that has re-defined how NLP is down and the respective paper describing it already collected 800 citations by the time it was published based on a pre-print spreading like a wildfire.

This technology is now part of Google search.

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