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Comment by rodion_89 | Hacker News Reader

How are 'relevant' and 'accurate' different in this case? (serious question)

For example if I search for "python books" I get results about books teaching the programming language. I'm a programmer and this makes sense in that it is both 'relevant' and 'accurate'.

If my girlfriend does the same search she gets books about snakes. She is a biologist so it is again both 'accurate' and 'relevant'.

The problem arrises if she gets results about programming because she does not know or care about it. It is technically 'accurate' but now the product is useless to her.

Look at the Wikipedia article for "python". There are too many uses for the word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python

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Google is great for the general population. You type a bunch of words, and Google will guess what you mean, and will usually return useful results.

I don't want that. I don't mind having to work a bit harder to get results, so long as those results are excellent. So, for your example, I want to have to type an extra word (either programming or snakes or herpatology or whatever) to provide the context that Google would otherwise get from wherever. I understand that most people don't want what I want, which I why I try and avoid the many Google-bashing posts. (I'm not part of that crowd; I don't think Google is evil. Just less useful for me in lots of situations.)

I prefer consistency and repeatability over slowly changing weirdness.

Have you tried verbatim search? In the left column of the search results page, click "more search tools", then "verbatim".

I'm all anti-Google, but this makes no sense to me.

You want to type an extra word?

"I don't want to be tracked and sold to advertisers", or "I don't want to be second-guessed" makes much more sense.

This is a subset of "I don't want to be second guessed". I'd happily give up Google's guess of what I want, and I realise that sometimes I'm going to need to type an extra word.

I type slowly, about 60 words a minute. That extra word is an extra second of typing, but it makes the results a lot more useful to me.

There's other advantages. (Maybe these aren't as obvious or real to other people.) Thinking about the words I use forces me to think about the problem, and forces me to think around what I'm doing and why.

And when you want to learn more about snakes or her more about programming, it will be that much harder to get good results because google's bias will be working against you.

It also increases the effect of grouping people into only social groups of the same philosophy and reducing exposure to other points of view. Not good for society. So even if I could fix it for myself, it is bad in general.

Then you would just need to clarify it further... It's not as if when you type "python language" or "python programming" that Google will respond with "No, sorry, you're only interested in snakes." I believe it's simply meant to help clarify unambiguous queries, and increase the ranking of the results that I'm normally interested in. At the bottom of almost every search you make, it says "Did you mean" - I would like them to make it easier to find, and I'd imagine they will.

I'm often looking up stuff related to code - I would love Google to know what languages I use, and present me with results specific to them. If I'm looking up something different, I'm sure Google will present me with their best guess of what I might mean...

...three weeks before your birthday, your girlfriend - frantically searching for a Python book to surprise you with, wades through hundreds of results pertaining to snakes, eventually gives up in exasperation and decides to head to the nearest Borders and... Oh wait.

I see your point in the post above but disagree. People should control their search results based on what they are searching for, relevance is objective to ones personality, not subject to it.

And during her frantic searching, his girlfriend won't try something as simple as "python programming book"? I find that hard to believe, especially if her default association for "python" is the snake.

I'm almost certain she would use a more sensible search term. In fact: she'd most likely have the title already, having picked the brains of a friend or colleague. You seem to have missed the point of my (admittedly flimsy) example though.

What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at all.

Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'

...anything else, in my opinion, skates dangerously close to what most people railed against in the great Net Neutrality debate of 09.

> What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at all.

> Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'

And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question. Google takes in a lot of signals (links, country and language, past behavior with respect to previous queries, sites you've asked to be blocked, ...) and now social signals. Where do you draw the line and why? And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?

>And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question.

I'd agree with that. In fact, I'd say that's a lot to do with my point... I believe that search results should be literal. A search for 'python', in my opinion, ought to return links to information about the animal, the language, the character from The Jungle Book, etc.

>And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?

This is interesting. I guess what I'd like to see is something along these lines. Turning it over in my head earlier: the thought of making two distinct types of searches did cross my mind, ie: searching from your G+ homepage returns focused results from the web at large with social results intermingling whereas searching from www.google.com returns literal results with no fiddling. The user is enabled to select which one is used by default from the search bar in their browser.

I'd draw the line somewhere in the past, before all that stuff you mention.

Links in Hebrew (I'm in Israel) are unreadable and not helping.

I constantly end up with German results polluting my search (maybe because I signed up when I lived in Germany? No idea, it's out of my control). It is a hassle to fight them.

It got never better. I gradually noticed a trend of decreasing usefulness of Google search, without any visible sign of getting better. Only more dumbed down. And now 'social'?

/ncr == no country redirect might be helpful.

http://www.google.com/ncr

I hope you aren't alluding to anything as ridiculous as "search neutrality". There is no such thing. There are certainly less optimal results, in several dimensions with a poorly defined fitness landscape, but that complexity is exactly why its so ridiculous to talk about any search results "reflecting what is on the Internet".

You have provided no metric for that statement, so how could it even be measured?

There is too much on the internet for you to read it all. Finding what you want at some particular time is going to require a curator, and they are going to be biased.

(besides, the overfitting you describe isn't exactly the hardest problem to figure out and fix (just mix in some other python results and that related results thing that's already there). The hard part is quickly identifying that you actually are affecting users negatively and not just the guy that thinks everyone should have to look at nextag results)

>...but that complexity is exactly why its so ridiculous to talk about any search results "reflecting what is on the Internet".

>You have provided no metric for that statement, so how could it even be measured?

That's fair. My comment is massively vague.

Maybe I could reframe that comment as a question: are you of the opinion that moving results that herd users into Google's own products and content above results that are perhaps less biased, more objective and do not serve to enrich Google directly is better for users than the way that Google search has worked up until this point?

I know that the subject of search is hugely complex and that Googles algorithms already define what is returned to the user but I am questioning what I perceive to be a change in motivation and a change in quality as result.

To be fair to Google, only 1 in 600 searches used the + operator correctly.

Luckily she got me an Arduino for my birthday.

But you are correct in that these disambiguations are necessary to a certain extent. I think most users wouldn't react well to it being so prominent (as is with DDG). Perhaps a small sidebar would do well for this, but that would eat into their advertising real-estate.

>Luckily she got me an Arduino for my birthday.

She's a keeper!

I think we are agreed that one way or another - the coming changes are not 100% great for users across the board.

Good for Google perhaps (and that is important) but not good for all users.

Looking at the other responses to my comments and other comments on the thread in general the realisation is dawning that maybe my days of searching the web via Google are soon to be over. That is not a comment on the quality of their service or integrity or anything along those lines, it is an assessment of my position relative to their new direction.

Exactly. I am not much of a Google user, but I understand where they are coming from because I am not part of their target market.

Sometimes it's difficult for us in the technology community to get that most products aren't made for us.

That's not exactly SPYW though.

SPYW is where you type in "python books" and the top half of the screen consists of your programmer friends talking about Python.

Or when your girlfriend types in "python books" and the top of the screen consists of her biologist friends talking about snakes.

That's what I'm seeing with my search results. I have no qualms with Google trying to "understand" me and offer more relevant links.

What about showing the disambiguation options ? based on wikipedia's disambiguation page ? THAT would be useful

I agree, I prefer those types of results. DuckDuckGo is very good at providing that. A search for "python" returns both a disambiguation section and regular listed results.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=python

Yes, I've been switching back and forth from DuckDuckGo and Google many times over the past three years. At the beginning I liked some of the features that DuckDuckGo had (bangs, disambiguation) but Google would always win on overall web coverage and speed. Lately, I find myself using DuckDuckGo for longer and longer periods of time before stumbling on a query that gives me a better answer in Google. But speed is still an issue (Google has spoiled us on that front).

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