Ask HN: What do you Wish Google Search Could Find Faster for You? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you Wish Google Search Could Find Faster for You?

6 pointsgusgordon8 comments

If there was one category/subject/thing you could have Google give instant answers on, what would it be?

Your answers will help me out a lot, and the more the better. Thanks!

Time. It's surprisingly difficult to order search results temporally, and according to Googlers on the search team with whom I've discussed this, a major part of the problem is the divergence between creation time, recorded creation time, and Google's discovery time. This would be particularly valuable for news, where Google has fallen behind an inexplicably fails to leverage its machine learning advantage to extract semantically rich information rather than doing relatively dumb string matching.

Yeah, that's sort of abstract. I like the hard problems :-) On a more conventional note, and in descending order of difficulty:

- search for musical data by musical sequence, eg searching for 'G-G-G-E' would suggest Beethoven's 5th symphony, but searching for 'C-C-C-A' would also suggest it as a transposed result. This isn't as difficult as it sounds, as there are MIDI files for most classical and historically popular pieces, MIDI and/or ringtones for popular contemporary ones, and polyphonic pitch extraction is a relatively well understood signal processing task. Easy win for someone with the interest and infrastructure: using the audio recording features in HTML 5 for tune identification, as already present in some mobile apps for both content discovery and contextual identification.

- Software error codes and the like. I find troubleshooting a miserable experience, especially when so many results turn out to be community-based forum support which fails to resolve problems.

- Hurf durf semantic web grumble grumble.

@Software errors: I second that. If the result isn't officially documented or on StackOverflow, it's a total tossup whether it'll be easy to find or not.

My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've foolishly tried to Google the following:

"restaurants open right now" or "restaurants that deliver here"

As a software engineer, I know these queries won't work, but I keep hoping that one day Google will surprise me. It should be hard to parse "right now" to be the current local time, and limit the search to my current location. The same is true of the other query. Google has local restaurants along with attributes like "delivery" so it should be possible.

It's only quite recently that Maps seems to have developed a (basic) understanding of 'home'. When I'm looking up directions and type home without any other qualifiers, it shouldn't be asking me if I mean 'Home Depot'. Especially not since I give permissions to Google Latitude and my phone and computer are in fact being operated from my designated 'home' location.

For that matter, my contacts in Android and google+ let me classify people as friends, work contacts etc., but I've found no way to explain to it that Mrs. Anigbrowl is my wife as distinct from any other family member.

BTW please upvote threads like this when you reply to them. Many interesting discussions fall off the new page unnoticed despite having promising replies.

Friend of mine was telling me how she has a friend who was doing an investment banking internship this summer, and Google Now inferred "home" to be her office (presumably because she was always there at 1:30 in the morning). I can't tell whether this is an embarrassing mistake or an embarrassing success.

Do services like GrubHub or Foodler cover your area?

OOC, why do you say "as a software engineer, I know these queries won't work"? What is it about those queries that leads the engineer in you to believe they are hard (not to say that they aren't, it just seems to me that Google provides remarkable results for many objectively tougher queries).

I think I can answer this question. In order for Google to actually understand these, the people at Google must manually code for this sort of query, unlike other queries where results are automatically generated. And even then, Google doesn't really "understand" them, it just knows what to spit out when the query is a match. Google has some stuff manually coded in like this, but it's almost impossible to include everything, especially when people can say "places to eat that are open now near my house" vs. "restaurants open near here" vs. hundreds of other possibilities. That's the first layer of difficulty. More difficulty comes with finding the search user's location, determining what stores are actually restaurants (is a lunch deli a restaurant at 8pm?), etc. Then for example, determining which restaurants can deliver that are open now is another difficulty.

That said, I'd bet that Google will be able to handle these queries well in 1-3 years.

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