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Comment by nonameisfinetoo | Hacker News Reader

I know you guys usually get all hot and bothered over anything labelled innovative, but wasn't search good enough by 2002? Seriously, when is the last time you struggled to find something using google search?

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My Google searches actually fail very often. Outside of a few topics (programming and music, mainly), and excluding queries that lead me directly to Wikipedia, I'd say the success rate for "exploratory questions" (not "facebook home page") is around 50%. But since other search engines generally do worse, I can't say if the information doesn't exist, or if Google fails to find it.

Search felt good enough at some point. It no longer does, at least for me. I don't know if my expectations have become too high, or if search engines have become worse, though.

What sort of queries are failing for you? My e-mail address is in my profile - I'm doing some research (for Google) that's along the lines of "exploratory questions", and additional use cases obviously helps.

I think a lot of it is that most topics outside of programming/tech have information locked up in books or other non-free things. For instance, I can't find a decent, in-depth article on how to make my own leather from deer hides. There are lots of general howtos, but many of them hint that the difficult and special knowledge is available in these books.

Maybe it's just that other knowledge areas don't just put every little thing on the web to be indexed and easily searched, or maybe I just grock programming well enough to read between the lines and follow implications, I don't know.

Just today there were two things I couldn't find with Google:

Finding how/why the lighting switch on a gas stove could cause a (mild) electric shock. I read the first 3/4 pages of results, got one or two very low quality forum postings and that is all. Somebody in the world must have written about this problem, e.g. in a manual for gas repair engineers. Google didn't find it.

Where wild ducklings sleep at night. I found lots of articles about how to look after pet ducklings, which aren't relevant. I found one article about how wild adult ducks sleep at night, although it was in my view of dubious provenance. Nothing about wild ducklings. I spent only a few minutes searching as I was using my mobile phone (in a park), so had higher needs for finding the answer in the first few results than the above.

I suspect that people get different experiences of google according to: a) what kinds of knowledge they tend to search for, b) their skill at using it.

I increasingly find myself using Quora, and asking new questions on it, for the kinds of queries above.

It keeps you on Google's site, and thus provides more exposure to their ads. Let's take the example Google give, a search for 'Matt Groening'. Without this, you'll need to click through the first result (a Wikipedia entry) to find out his date of birth. But with the Knowledge Graph that's right on the results page. You don't need to leave Google at all.

Sorry, but how does a single search for Matt Groening keep you on Google more than a search for Matt Groening followed by a click on Wikipedia?

Also, I think these types of queries (people, places, things) rarely trigger ads. Based on the example queries from the post (Taj Mahal, Marie Curie, Matt Groening) there are no ads at all.

Have you used google lately? Thanks to SEO, the answer to your second question is "about 5 minutes ago."

Please don't associate SEO with spam.

It's too late for that.

Fortunately, white-hat SEO is very easy to describe without mentioning search engines at all: copy editing, fact checking, designing for accessibility, and so on are valuable skills regardless of what algorithms search engines happen to use for ranking today. Write content for your users and you don't have to worry about optimizing for search engines.

SEO is like spam in that the world would be a better place if there were less of it.

If you have the query handy, I'd love to check it out to debug.

How can Google answer that question now?:

Find all blogs of motorcycle journies 50 km nearby my current position.

I get poor search results daily, and half of them get "incorrected". "Did you mean UIView?" No, Google, I am working on OSX. I actually did mean NSView, that's an actual thing.

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