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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

These people really mis-understand how people like me use search. I don't want "an experience," I want a list of documents that match the search specifier.

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I agree, I agree, I search in Google, but Gemini is quite good and most of the times the answer is correct or close enough to save a lot of my time.

> I search in Google

What I understand you to mean is: you ask Google to give you the most-advertised product and hope that it's what's best for you.

I skip the "sponsored" links at the top. For programming questions it used to link to the most relevant Stack Overflow question and the exact doc of that language (that many times are difficult to navigate). It autocorrected typos and used synonyms like "pause" -> "sleep".

It isn't like the sponsored links are the only paid-for high listing in your results, SEO is a thing that exists and has nothing to do with quality. Just money and time.

Author here, well specifically I'm using "experiences" to mean basically ranking / finding relevant results.

Wouldn't the "dumb API search" be already enough for users? I'm not sure my decades experience as Google search user has improved once they leaned heavy on the ranking and adding "relevant" things...

> once they leaned heavy on the ranking

Not sure what you mean here. Google started with PageRank which is a decent, albeit gamable, ranking algorithm. They’ve never not been leaning heavy on ranking.

Mid 2010s, Google began supporting conversational (non keyword) searches. This is because a good number of queries are difficult to reduce to keywords. But it is an inherently harder problem. And at the same time, the open web enahittified itself, filling up with SEOed blogspam. And a lot of user generated content moved into walled gardens.

> Wouldn't the "dumb API search" be already enough for users?

This has been deprecated a long time ago (10 years ?). It hurts (ad) sells.

Well, at least you didn't use 'engagement'.

Edit: oops, you used it in another comment on here.

You mean hiding relevant results. Not only that today's search engine gives you mostly crap, they also insert "results" which have no relation whatsoever with your search term.

Most of those people substituted their intelligence with AI.

Absolutely. We need separate interfaces for work and play.

You might be onto something here. What we've lost I notice mostly when working. When I search for "Bizarre undocumented compile error B7102343. Rebooting Universe." I really want to see ONLY those pages that have these keywords. But when I'm trying to find a list of DMV offices near me, I want the "search" engine to interpret my question "where are DMV offices near me?"

Maybe it is two different products: index search and fuzzy search?

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