Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem.

"Sambisa" would have found it.

"Sambisa Reserve" would have found it.

"Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it.

But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserve called Sambisa, which covers an area within a forest landscape.

Yeah, that's pedantic and Google could do a better job when it attempts to contextualise like that (especially if it's topical), by just doing a second search internally for exact matches and doing a join/merge on the results.

But still... you're going to have the same problem with Open Street Map for the same reason:

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

You are comparing to Nominatim. Even a particular instance of Nominatim (the operator can feed other data sources into the index).

I don't think it does much of any contextualization. It might recognize 'forest' as a specific type of feature, but I believe it would only use that to prioritize results, not exclude them (but I haven't taken the time to figure out how to check this).

Photon is another search system that uses OSM data:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Photon

I guess Komoot uses it:

https://www.komoot.de/plan

It succeeds with "Sambisa Forest".

This is exactly the problem I have. It does not search what I ask it to search, sometimes even after using Verbatim.

And if no results are found, Google, please tell me "no results found" rather than giving me junk to scan to figure why did Google return me all this when it does not even have the keywords I asked for. I do not like to type a + before every keyword.

I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google.

FYI, the + prefix operator was deprecated a few years ago. There was always an equivalent way to express it, by putting "each" "word" "in" "quotes". I know that's more keypresses than the + sign, but when maintaining a system as gigantic and complex as the Google search engine, everything is tradeoffs, and that's one that we decided to make.

or it could, I don't know, maybe search on closest matches to locations containing the words "Sambisa" and "forest" with priority to those areas containing the words in the correct order - like maybe "Sambisa Forest Reserve".

Oooh maybe they can take out a patent on that idea first...

(Sorry OP, not having a go at you - just getting incredibly frustrated with companies I used to love and respect - like Google and Amazon.)

Amazing they hadn't thought of that, or believed it caused too many false positives. You should go in for Director of Search to straighten them out.

That sounds way too obvious for them not to have tried on a large corpus of (search string, correct result) pairs. If it actually gave better results, do you really think they wouldn't do it? I understand wanting to vent about the magic not being magical enough, but just how stupid do you think they are?

Google has a bad habit of trying to be too clever. For a very long time, searching for "yore" (an English word) on the Google Play store only gave me results for "your", without even bothering to tell me what it was doing.

Google is very concerned about giving users what it thinks they want, rather then what they actually asked for. Sometimes that's great (I love basic stemming), sometimes it fills my results with irrelevant garbage.

Ironically, Apple Maps finds it.

I just tried it, watching the auto-complete. The word "Sambisa" resulted in two choices, both in Nigeria, the second one being the Forest Reserve.

"Sambisa Forest" works just fine for me... http://imgur.com/MQF5s8D

No, you've only entered "Sambisa Fo" which presumably doesn't trigger special category handling for the word "forest".

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