Hacker News Reader

Comment by desolate_muffin | Hacker News Reader

> that's all that I want to find when I search

That ship has long since sailed for every search product. Companies have long-since learned that intent-based results are much more profitable (why show an empty result page when you can show something for people to buy or click on?), but it is also often genuinely useful when your search is not perfect or what you want doesn't actually exist. I agree that it is annoying when you really truly do only want something very specific and the ranking prioritizes the wrong things (e.g., sponsored results, more profitable items, etc.) over exact matches, but can you honestly and truly say you've never found any value from intent search algorithms?

View on HN

I very often truly only want something very specific. I'm not apologetic about that at all.

When I want oolong tea bags and I search for "oolong tea bags," then I definitely don't want to be shown bulk green tea instead.

If I want to find any kind of tea instead of specifically oolong -- if, perchance, I wish to peruse the broader market of available tea -- then I'm very capable of removing "oolong" and/or "bags" from my search prompt.

---

I can look around and observe that the ship has sailed, but that doesn't mean I'll ever be happy with the outcome or accepting of any notion that the situation is anything other than hostile.

Can you recognize that it gets between me and my willingness to spend money?

You mean if they falsify the search for both sides they make more money, as ironically spelt out in Google's original paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

“the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model...”

https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...

Note: they even explain why advertising funded search makes things worse for customers and for advertisers. Worse search finds more ads and thus more dollars, resulting in both worsening search results over time AND less value for ad money over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com