How Google Search Dealt With Mobile | Hacker News Reader

How Google Search Dealt With Mobile

medium.com

30 pointssteven5 comments

This is all interesting and fantastic for users, but I can't help feeling that some day, maybe years from now, we will look at search and realize we don't have any good way to find information on the Web. Google is transitioning to an "answer engine" but a lot of things are getting buried that might have appeared on page 3. I can't count the times when I search for something specific and find no results only to change a word and see a whole new group of pages.

Absolutely agree with this. Over the years Google has gone from being a raw and powerful tool like awk to a curated 'experience' where what you're searching for is distilled to the lowest common denominator.

I miss the good old days when Google search used AND rather than OR. Now it uses some kind of heuristic that frequently overwhelms my own instincts about how to narrow my search. I just tried an arbitrary search for the first thing that came to mind and everything was going great until I added a word whose occurrence evidently dwarfed my original search space:

pistachio (18,400,000 results)

pistachio cookies (2,570,000 results)

pistachio cookies milk (1,220,000 results)

pistachio cookies milk chocolate (1,210,000 results)

pistachio cookies milk chocolate round (3,640,000 results)

Maybe this was detecting the semantics of my search, for example “pistachio cookies” and “chocolate milk” as two separate concepts and OR’ing the set. But I don’t understand why it didn’t detect “round pistachio cookies”, but instead treated “round” as a completely different result set.

This combined with the fact that quotes and plusses don’t always seem to make a keyword mandatory has really hindered usability for me. I sometimes find better results by typing keywords into domain-specific searches (sites like Stack Overflow). I wish there was a way to display Google’s interpretation of the keywords as something like SQL, the way that wolframalpha.com works, so that I could learn how to format my queries.

Google recruits subjects who agree to report their information needs to Google on demand. Eight times a day Google randomly pings them, and they instantly respond with the questions they want answered at that moment.

It's pretty amazing how hard Google works at improving. I can't imagine any other search engine running a program like this for years, just to find questions that they aren't even asking a search engine for (yet).

I guess it comes down to economy of scale. Only a company at Google's scale can afford to budget AND monetize such a project which would make little sense at a smaller enterprise.

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