I Just Want to Search
0xsid.com
0xsid.com
They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.
Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you are too restrictive. Hell, even the autotrader sites are going the facebook way now. It's maddening.
You try to peer through the noisy results to see if any of them are actually a match, you try again with different terms, you give up and engage with a result outside your parameters, or (best of all) you give up and engage with an ad or get distracted by some other Facebook feature.
As far as they're concerned, engagement is the key factor and satisfaction is only a tiny little bonus when things work out. Engagement is what earns them money and makes them make bigger claims in investment statements and is what keeps eyeballs away from their competitors.
Everything is working perfectly for them... just not for you, and they don't really care. That was the big business insight of the 2010's and there's still very little reason for anyone in online media to stop aiming for it.
Yesterday I searched for "3/8 inch handles", and got several ball-shaped ones, plus some things that included (but were not) handles.
I added the term - "3/8 inch ball handles" - and only the not-actually-handles remained.
Give me search like McMaster-Carr. Everything is an instance of a category class with madatory properties. If your product doesn't fit in any existing category, tough shit. Go convince someone at McBezos-Carr that whatever premade-landfill product you're selling is a category, along with providing dimensions/materials/properties that category varies by, and maybe they'll consider adding it.
If FB marketplace is showing me a thing I can't buy because it's too far away to pick up, doesn't fit in the space I'm specifying, and over my stated price range, I'm just going to assume there were no results and look elsewhere. I guess FB gets paid for an impression, but an advertiser that sees impressions going up and conversions not changing is a pretty unhappy advertiser.
Yeah, I'm sure the newsfeed is an example where ignoring settings/search params like this works, because there's no real hard-lines to what posts someone will be somehow able to read other than maybe the language it's in, and even that's flexible. You can just blast users with whatever slop pays FB the most. But some sponsored decor tchotchke being 500 miles away might as well be on the moon.
"Hey FB I live in a major city and don't want to match with anyone further than 25 miles away" okay here are a bunch of matches from cities 200 miles away
"Hey FB I don't want to match 'as friends' because what even is that" okay cool we'll make sure to ignore that
Pretty sure this was written by an intern for their summer project. At least it's free.
And I guess I'm still on there, so maybe FB knows what they're doing
Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.
So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preempt a litany of more granular searches.
This might be an area where a traditional, respectful search engine style crawler backed by a small cheap LLM paired with human curation would work well. The crawler+LLM finds sites, attempts to compute some quality score, figures out where they'd fit in the directory's hierarchy, and then submits them for human review and approval. If a poor quality link makes its way through, users can flag it for review and if curation agrees it gets booted.
We have to remember that they decided to side with the SEOmongers rather than crush them, because it was better for Google's bottom line.
Where did you get this idea from? They actively promote it.
This is why I keep landing on moderation-before-inclusion as the standard. Review systems that flag bad content means that bad content still gets seen, and often still has enough of an effect to make it worthwhile for bad actors to churn out. IMO that's part of explanation of why there's 100 years of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. Even videos that get taken down get some exposure; increasing the volume of crap is a solution for their short life span. It seems like a self-reinforcing problem there, even if there were an honest attempt at moderation.
The old content doesn't go away, but YouTube is incredibly bad at making it effectively searchable. They don't want you to find the highest quality videos on a topic, they want you to plug in to the endless new stream of slop which just recapitulates things which were done better before.
This isn't really an "old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn" take that everything older is better. Instead I'm saying that the Wikipedia approach to help users find and collaborate on good content to make it even better or more comprehensive is preferable to the approach that the only way to be seen is to endlessly publish new content, which is meant to obscure what came before it on a topic. It's like if you walked into a library, but the only thing visible was a "new releases" shelf and searching the stacks was nearly impossible. That would make it basically a matter of luck if you found anything relevant, and makes deep research impossible.
Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?
* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.
More often than not you know exactly what you are looking for, you're not browsing to see what's out there. The systems should optimize for that instead of whatever this is.
Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?
I think the solution here eventually will be a search engine that lives on your personal computer (it's also what I'm building currently). Ingest content from the web -> sort/filter/view it locally as you choose.
Agitation multiplied when I finally found the answer, which was reaching blindly under a plastic trim panel for a hidden downward-facing button to open the panel, lift the top up, and then balance the top midway between open and closed while I finesse the plastic tonneau cover panel back down under the rear part of the top. Garbage UX on both the part of Chevrolet and Google. I wish to become a hermit in the woods.
Vote with every query or keep on begging.
If you pay them well. At least more than your competitors.
Big companies have processes for deciding what gets done and which features are prioritized, and if the people in that loop aren't power users of those features, and they don't have the kind of metrics or analysis framework that would indicate that those features are important, they won't be prioritized.
I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy to make search worse... I think it's just that nobody cares enough, and with time the features break as everything else around them is changed
Google ruins all its search interface. I never understood why I would need "people also watched". That made never any sense - neither on youtube, but even less so on google search. Of what interest to me is it when Charly Joker searches for hentai cyborgs? Even IF I were interested in that, I could search for this ON MY OWN. I don't need mental handholding, so this ALWAYS wasted space I could use otherwise. Thanks to ublock origin I block such UI downgrades anyway, but this is not the only example. Google abuses people here. Google wants you to use a privated web that Google controls. This madness has to stop. Google will not budge, so Google has to be ended by mankind.
That being said... the first wave of web search engines weren't built by the companies hosting the content. Search engines as tools became popular because, even in 1998, browsing and navigating sites (esp. corporate sites) to surface content, was already becoming an increasingly adversarial experience.
Search engines were built by companies spidering other sites' content. This was content that was often — if you were navigating along these sites' happy paths — found five to ten links deep through a confusing warren of subtle and unintuitive click targets. This content was the original "deep web." And search engines made it shallow... often against the spidered sites' consent.
Companies at the time much preferred "directory" sites that would only ever link to their landing pages. To companies of that era, sites linking directly to specific URLs of your site would be like if the Yellow Pages listed specific directory-extensions of your company's phone number! But this first battle in the "war against deep-linking" was a losing one from the moment it began, since early websites were almost inherently bot-accessible.
The second battle, in the early 2000s, where sites were built as [non-deep-linkable] Flash apps, took longer to determine, only finally resolving (again in favor of an open web, and thus third-party search) when laws and regulatory compliances both started to force companies back toward UA accessibility.
But for going on a decade now, we've been embroiled in a seemingly-indefinite third battle in the "war against deep-linking" — this time with companies tucking every possible type of user-generated content behind a login wall of some walled-garden everything [web]apps. Permalink URLs for individual content-items still exist in these webapps; but you get redirected to a login interstitial if you visit them.
Where's the adversarial spirit of the first search-engine companies today? Where are the companies trying to index the modern "deep web" of login-walled content? Why can't any company give me a search box that searches "into" YouTube video transcripts, "into" Facebook Marketplace, "into" public Slack and Discord and Telegram communities (probably requiring archiving, ala how Deja News/Google Groups surfaced Usenet), etc?
Sure, this sort of thing is intensely adversarial (but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn — while it might be against a site's ToS, but it's not against the law.) And sure, this sort of thing requires per-service connectors (but any thought of this business model therefore being "unscalable" comes from a pre-coding-agent era.)
But isn't it also, very clearly, "what people want"?