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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Underspecified queries ("generic search terms") is actually one of the tricky problems in search. The way Marginalia Search deals with them caters to a particular type of audience and set of usecases. I don't think that's wrong. Seems silly to try to cater to everyone. In that scenario you're more likely to not cater to anyone.

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> particular type of audience and set of usecases

For signed in accounts (which is pretty much is ~3bn Android and/or Chrome users), Google can predict what the user might prefer and yet...

I disagree with this feature, besides the predictable privacy argument, having a search engine transparently serve results according to your tastes makes it really difficult to find things that are new and outside of your existing preferences. It drains the web of serendipity, makes every website feel the same.

Yep. Curating search for an individual makes results worse for a certain class of queries. Opposite of what GP was advocating for, without realising Google already does this.

Ah, this helped clarify my doubts. Thanks.

Your "domain" filters seems like a good solution to this?

Yeah. Some of them are a bit rough still, but that's the general idea. Instead of trying to guess what sort of content the user wants, it seems like it makes sense to just give them the option to express that.

The recipe filter is approaching something I'd want to explore further, to be able to provide contextual information outside of the search query.

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=cookie+recipe

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