Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist."
An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything. The most notorious example of this is
What really grinds my gears is that search engines simply do not show you the thing you are looking for.
Even when you put explicit captions and quotes around your search topic it will just ignore them and show you other stuff.
This issue is not limited to google. Start page, ecosia search, Bing, (God forbid you use that) all of them simply choose to ignore your explicit groupings of words.
I am also running a locally hosted searx server, and it’s not much better because the results that it gets come from other search engines.
Do we need to build a federated search system to replace Google and everything else?
Yeah I hate it when it does that. It guesses based on your keywords what you are looking for and just shows the results for that. And they always seem to mix in some “popular” links for no apparent reason.
This weekend I was looking up more info on something specific that happened in Formula One. But the inclusion of the word “One” meant that my search would be ignored and it would just show shit about Liam Payne from One Direction. Like wtf. And it happened in Bing (DDG) as well as Google.
I get why it’s the case, but I hate that search engines don’t search using literal terms any more. Recently I was looking for something I had looked up before but forgot. I know one old forum post where I had found the exact answer and I knew one exact phrase because it was worded a bit weird. No matter what I did I could not find it. I figured I misremembered the phrase. Until I eventually found the post with the exact literal phrase I searched for. Utterly useless.
What really grinds my gears is that search engines simply do not show you the thing you are looking for.
Even when you put explicit captions and quotes around your search topic it will just ignore them and show you other stuff.
This issue is not limited to google. Start page, ecosia search, Bing, (God forbid you use that) all of them simply choose to ignore your explicit groupings of words.
I am also running a locally hosted searx server, and it’s not much better because the results that it gets come from other search engines.
Do we need to build a federated search system to replace Google and everything else?
I think the answer is yes.
Yeah I hate it when it does that. It guesses based on your keywords what you are looking for and just shows the results for that. And they always seem to mix in some “popular” links for no apparent reason.
This weekend I was looking up more info on something specific that happened in Formula One. But the inclusion of the word “One” meant that my search would be ignored and it would just show shit about Liam Payne from One Direction. Like wtf. And it happened in Bing (DDG) as well as Google.
I get why it’s the case, but I hate that search engines don’t search using literal terms any more. Recently I was looking for something I had looked up before but forgot. I know one old forum post where I had found the exact answer and I knew one exact phrase because it was worded a bit weird. No matter what I did I could not find it. I figured I misremembered the phrase. Until I eventually found the post with the exact literal phrase I searched for. Utterly useless.