Why I hate search

Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better.

I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).

Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result.

Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc.

None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.

To me this makes his assertion,

> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed.

Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.

In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.

Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).

This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them.

Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there.

Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.

I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.

I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.

Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)

Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google?

So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials?

And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber?

And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google.

Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?

Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"

Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?

Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my favorite donut place is open (as if, but bear with me).

If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that donut place close?"

They might answer that "they're open for another hour."

There are two important differences between this and search:

First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for years now.

Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated.

If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it is, and subtract that from the appropriate number.

I also don't have much information about how current their information is, even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated around noon on April 2nd.

One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic information is a fool's errand.

What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true, and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like "Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be "5:00PM PDT".

Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.

I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people.

Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.

Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to.

Speaking broadly, "search" has been, as he points out, a major paradigm in human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches or to distill the results of searches.

The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss...

I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the freedom to lose things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find them again when we decide we need them.

Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their minds to think about other things in the interim.

But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.

Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the Bing first page results for the same query.

Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber, you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results, and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing currently has.

He claims we could do better, but how?

There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.

Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?

Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.

And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.

Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue.

So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search quality in favour of ad revenue?

http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/

SO without search you'd be relying on asking Hackernews/Twitter etc for every single enquiry you have...

Including the embarrassing ones...

> The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well?

One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from sites within that catalog.

This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and greatly improve search productivity, there are many others. That google hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.

If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google, there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.

It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy.

What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon."

Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions.

Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that.

It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works.

EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.

I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is obviously targeting developers)

Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email etc.)

And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results, again with no evidence whatsoever.

This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10 test queries to prove his point.

But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so i read it from start to end. Well done.