Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

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>Right now I'm in Los Angeles and looking to buy a roll of film. When I search for "where to buy film in los angeles":

I remember I was in school they'd teach you how to formulate search queries. You wouldn't ask questions like "how to bake a cookie", you'd use keywords like "cookie recipe". Search engines have progressed much since those days, such that you can ask questions and it would mostly know what you were looking for, but obviously a less sophisticated search engine can't do that?

I’d encourage all those who believe this is just a keyword issue to try to find a search on Yep that produces film stores in LA. I just tried like 10 incantations to no avail

“Film store in los angeles” gives me DVD stores on yellowpages.com as the 3rd result…

To be honest I'm not even quite sure what you mean when you say "film stores". It could mean stores that sell photographic film, or stores that sell movies. Presumably you mean the former, but I certainly wouldn't call stores that sell film as "film stores". They'd most likely be photography stores or maybe at big box/department/pharmacies. In that respect, asking for "film stores" is like asking for "bacon stores".

Man I admire how you want yep.com to be successful. I want it too.

At this point anyone who will even try to build a search engine will have my backing because God this world deserves another search engine.

> stores that sell photographic film, or stores that sell movies

You'll be happy to hear that Yep selects neither for top positions: https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all get this perfectly right.

Other searches are much worse.

"los angeles, where to purchase roll of film" top 3 results: https://i.imgur.com/UxEXD0N.png

1. The movie Battle: Los Angeles on Vudu

2. A fake viagra spam with "la" in the domain

3. The LA muncipality definition of an "Unincorporated Area"

I am not from the USA but I was going to respond to say I don't know if "film stores" have existed for decades, so searching for "photography store" or "camera store" would be far more appropriate... but sadly Yep fails at "photography store in los angeles" and for "camera store in los angeles" only gave one good result :(

I can't wait for the upcoming FilmStores.app that needs to use your microphone, gps, and camera.

Even if you don't understand the intent, google does. That is what makes it so good. So do a few others. After you compare, yep has a ways to go :)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://yep.com/web?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://neeva.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://search.brave.com/search?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Film+store+in+los+angeles

Similarly, I searched for the name of my product (Streamie) and just got porn results.

I mean..

"Camera store Los Angeles"

and

"Photography store Los Angeles"

Both pulled up full pages of results wkth just websites of stores that sell film.

Your search-fu is atrophied, if it ever was any good.

Non-ML heavy search engines search for identical text on the page. So if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question or request to a mystical search AI.

That's searching for specific types of shops, which is different from looking for film. (Your second search is also meh, including truly only 1 relevant result)

> if you want a store that sells film, you need a keyword combination that would appear on their website; not a vague question

Do you suspect "camera stores" in Los Angeles include neither the words "film" nor "Los Angeles" on their sites?

All my keywords are found in every first page Google result (" Top 10 Best Film Camera Store in Los Angeles").

My First Try

https://yep.com/web?q=Camera+store+in+Los+Angeles

Pick the first result.

It's https://www.camphotobur.com/

Which is, admittedly, in Burbank.

1. You're right people should do that

2. It doesn't matter, because not everybody will and it's easier to make a better product than educate and change the habits of the world.

(Especially when it's now okay to do both on some search engines, but only one option on others, with no instruction manual on which is which)

First the SEO industry owned google for these question searches, and then Google realized that just making them work was easier than trying to change human behavior.

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