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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

It actively makes the product worse. E.g. from yesterday, if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.

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In fairness, reading your search term, I had no idea what you were talking about so it's not entirely surprising the organic content producers don't match those terms well. Looks like the SEO folks do though.

Google is supposed to be able to understand this given how much data they collect on individuals and the web.

Perhaps there are multiple groups searching with the same terms, but expecting completely different results. Google takes its best guess at which group you're in. To get better at that they have to gather more info about you personally. I'd prefer to change my search query than give lots of extra personal data to Google.

Works fine in DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22high+tc%22+record

Edit: and also Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22high%20tc%22%20record

What are we looking for here? The results seem equally as confusing as the query

The other commenter was obviously interested in the record for high-temperature superconductors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

Or perhaps more generally for materials with a high Curie temperature, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this field.

Then again, Tc means different things in different fields. E.g. critical temperatures for all kinds of critical phase transitions. Note that the google search you posted above gives results for various phase transitions many of which are not superconducting phase transitions. I also was lost when I saw the original query.

Tc is the high temperature for superconductivity. I noticed this about google a long time ago - they started "dumbing" down their search results. Don't blame them because that's where the money is, but it is annoying when you're searching for something and the results are full of celebrities because someone famous happened to say something like your search term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

> Looks like the SEO folks do though.

Pretty sure at least 80% (probably 95%+) of low-quality SEO content is generated by computers, or at least by very low-skill outsourced labor in a machine-assisted way.

It then makes sense that the mature Internet can probably match any search query in a manner that leads to a site that sells something vaguely matching the query, through sheer quantity of available content.

In other words - there is enough SEO content generated and indexed that most queries will be able to be monetized by a search engine like Google.

if I search for "high tc record," I'm not looking for the set of bedsheets with the greatest number of threads.

FWIW, I would also have no idea what that search is supposed to return.

But you don't have a 20-year dossier of almost every web site he's visited; a list of 90% of his credit card purchases; an AI scrutinizing every photo he's ever been in that's been in, or in the background of, on the internet; a list of his previous searches; and a list of the places he's brought his cell phone.

To improve user experience.

Ken Liu's "The Perfect Match" is a sci-fi short story about this topic.

https://gizmodo.com/lightspeed-presents-the-perfect-match-by...

Google says it spends about 0.3Wh per search, of which roughly one third is for scraping and two thirds for the search. I think you may be overestimating how much processing they could do with that budget (assuming they want to do that significant user-based tweaking, which is IMO not a given).

> high tc record

I don't know what you are trying to search for. A record for total compensation? Something related to Tesla coils? Turing Complete? Thread Count is a totally valid interpretation.

My next single, High TC, doesn't come out for another month. You'll be able to search for it then.

I have no idea what you are expecting from "high tc record"

I'm getting links about the highest temperature on earth and it is listing it in Fahrenheit so if the "tc" means "temperature celsius" it is failing for me.

All the other links are about high temperature superconductors.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature

These are the top 2 links I get

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...

"High-temperature superconductors (abbreviated high-Tc"

Seems like google search is working quite well if the second link is what the person wanted.

You know you spend/have spent too much time on Blind when you immediately think "TC" means "total compensation."

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