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Comment by lightbendover | Hacker News Reader

The last thing anyone should ever want from a search engine is different results from the next person over.

That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in reality. When people search for something online, they want the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language. When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking to learn about the animal.

You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!

Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

> Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

Kagi seems to be that.

https://kagi.com

What about a child who used to be interested in reptiles but is now interested in programming? I get frustrated when Google starts acting "smart" and changing queries or hiding results. I've started to use Bing image search because I'd like more than 20 results, the way Google used to be. If they start acting like that even more, I'll use them even less!

Google's model is the only viable one long term. With growing amount of information, the only way to find you something useful without making you enter a growing amount of terms is to maintain a context of what you are interested in.

No child will be confused if they look up a programming language that they already know have the exact same name as reptile and get reptile first.

People are different, I get it, but I don't want a search engine that tries to second guess me all the time. If I'm a programmer and I'm interested in the actual animal, I don't want to have to fight against the product. I'd much rather use my knowledge to craft my queries intelligently so that I get exactly what I want.

But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a control freak.

What you mean is that you don't want a search engine that guesses wrong.

If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly giving you the right result every time because it happens to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a problem with that.

I would have a problem with that, because for a search engine to know me well enough to know what I actually want despite what I typed in it would have to know a lot of information about me I wouldn't trust the company behind it with.

I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.

I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.

Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, I'd be even happier.

"I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them."

It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively buying products due to ads is a personal failing.

Have you ever told someone to "just Google it?" Well, repeatable results are the underlying expectation broken by over-personalization.

Results are already different based on your location, so unless you're very near each other, you already don't have that. You mightn't notice it too much because it's only noticeable on queries where it might matter. Could be similar for personalization.

Here's another example taken from my experience a few years ago. I once googled "pro tour results" and was, as expected, presented with an info box about the results of the recent Pro Tour in Magic: The Gathering.

Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave me something about golf which I couldn't care less about. But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the practicality of the implied context being aligned with my interests.

I can type at 100 words per minute. Typing "programming language" after every search will cost me maybe two seconds per search. The savings are trivial. The costs, however, are not trivial. I have on several occasions spent half an hour trying to make a search engine handle a query that I know worked in the past. And that's when I find what I'm looking for at all. They have optimized the happy path but made failures worse and more frequent.

What really bothers me is that no one asked what I want. These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have seen literal fistfights between machinists over people messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software behind my back is like "upgrading" my eyes while I sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our world is completely out of our control?

Totally agree. I want to be surprised by a new UX in a software tool about as much as I want to be surprised by a new UX on my chainsaw. Nobody would put up with this in the physical world, I hate that it has become accepted in the software world.

A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:

1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence work is famously under-rewarded at many companies, incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for users.

2. People get browbeaten about security concerns. Actually useful security updates often get bundled with UX changes.

I'm actually not entirely sure about that. For example, if I know a lot about a particular topic and the search engine knows that I know a lot about that particular topic, then when I search for something, it should give me a condensed result and not introductory-level material. Or if I have certain preferences for the format of material I'm given. For example, if I prefer college-level outline material versus eighth-grade reading level text, for example.

So it seems entirely reasonable to me that you would get different results.

If I had a personal assistant that was performing the search for me, I would expect customized results from them. I don't know why I should not expect the same from a machine.

I strongly disagree. I would love for a search engine to, intelligently, cater the results based on my previous search history and patterns.

I would love for that ability to be easily determined visually, and easily toggled on/off. A big "personalized" and "generic" toggle switch at the top would be useful.

I don't think the ability to serve up specialized content is the concern here. It is the fragmentation that results when we no longer have a shared reality or a consistent set of results in the population. Results specific to any one person is terrifying in some of its implications.

That's how you create bubbles.

Not all bubbles are harmful. I’m in a regional bubble when I search for “restaurant”. I’m in a programming language bubble when I search for coding issues.

Tune it to be less bubbly with controversial topics, perhaps.

"Everyone should get the same search results." is really just rightspeak for "Everyone should be in my bubble."

part of the issue with 'bubbles', as I see it, is that you don't know you're in a bubble. a big huge honking option of "keep me in the bubble" and "show results outside my bubble" would make it a lot more obvious (and manageable) to many people who are oblivious to the notion that they live in an information bubble. won't stop people who only use one source of news, but in a search aspect, it would be useful.

Any time I use a Google product, I know I'm in a bubble.

Interestingly, Google themselves seem to be at least somewhat aware of this - though it may just be an accidental side effect of trying to drive user engagement on YouTube.

I’ve been noticing an occasional “Show me something new to me” prompt showing up in my YT feed. It has literally never provided anything I was interested in watching, but I appreciate that they’re trying to burst bubbles.

Youtube sometimes recommends that, but if you scroll the topics bar all the way to the right, you can access it at any time.

The next person over cares about sports and boobies. By which I mean spectator sports and, uhm, spectator boobies.

Is the last thing I'd want really results different from my neighbour?

For the same query?

Depends on the query. Fact based queries should have the same answer.

If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.

> If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.

Which is different from what most people would expect. You see the problem.

Yes. I like that Google seems to surface programming results in the language I use. In the case of “boobies”, if I’m a bird expert it might give me info on blue footed boobies first.

Or if you're a programmer and are looking for that paper written by Professor Firstname Lastname, you might prefer results about the CS professor, not about the eponymous person who undresses for a living. Or plays baseball for a living.

I like arthouse films. ∀ arthouse ∃ approximately eponymous porn film. I can't say I dislike porn, but if the search engines were to treat me like my neighbour I'd never get any arthouse results. Too niche.

Query results are more diverse than you might expect. I once worked in a startup whose name we thought was unique, but in actual fact there were nine other similarly-named companies in the same city, not to mention names of non-local companies, organisations, products, objects…

Not "anyone": only mature searchers that worry about privacy, filter bubbles and artificially buried/censored good results.

Advertisement buyers, on the other hand, benefit greatly from carefully controlling who sees their ads. For example, child care related products for female teenagers that are one year too old for their school class, or lawyers for young adult males from bad neighborhoods; I'm sure everyone can think of something more creepy and offensive.

For the unsuspecting computer nerd, a search for latex back at the dawn of search technology was briefly something that could truly open the unprepared mind to unsuspected vistas.

Boy did that one get fixed fast.

But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how they felt about being exposed to interminable details about an obscure word processing system.

That’s not true. If I, a software developer, search for “pandas,” Google should probably show me the Python data library near or at the top. If my friend who’s not an engineer searches for “pandas,” they’re probably looking for the bear.

It really depends. If I want to search coding related stuff, I want this to be personalized as much as possible, with always having the option to extend the search for non-traditional topics.

Or when searching for places to go, it would be nice to get recommendations which consider that I love to ride bicycle.

Then there's DuckDuckGo on Firefox for legacy search if you're paranoid.

What do you think an American tourist overseas wants when they ask for [football scores]?

Do you think an ergonomics engineer logged in from the office and a musician in their studio might want different things when they search for [keyboard reviews]?

How about a 16-year-old male native Texan versus a 62-year-old female immigrant with a degree in fine arts who search for [nearby movies]?

this is might be a great example of the difference between what people think they want being completely at odds with how they actually behave

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