Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

European here.

First of all, this is okay. But not good.

I've tried several "slang" searches that google gets just fine. I've tried these because ddg had/has problems with them for a long time.

E.g. If I google for "poe shavs" (a slang term for an item with an abbreviation of the game name), I expect https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Shavronne%27s_Wrappings

from what I've tried this seems to work even without a search history on google. I've tried this across different cookieless browsers and IP's. Google just seems to get it.

This seems to return (almost) the exact same shit as bing on Qwant. So I do not see how this is an improvement over bing/ddg/whatever.

Man I'd love to get rid of google in my personal life, but... for my searches nobody else seems to perform. Google just seems to know what I want to search, even if I don't have a search history on that machine.

Edit: For searches in german it seems to perform similarily shitty to bing. Do they get search results from bing?

The thing is, Google improves its results THANKS to its privacy invasion.

To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection.

To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click.

There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.

If users search for "poe" and can't find anything, some of them will search for "path of exile" next. You'd probably only need to look at request k and request k+1 to figure it out eventually.

Also just seems like "bat cave" (animal) vs "bat cage" (sport). poe + shavs forms its own context.

Google is really good at that. I can't use DDG for programming because DDG thinks I want to learn more about Elm trees.

This privacy invasion is a two edged sword too. Google is getting very good at searching for stuff you use daily, especially if it's gaming or some other media in fashion.

However, it's becoming useless for infrequent searches. Try googling any random error message and notice 90% of the results don't even contain it.

Can you give an example of a random error message where the results do not match?

Try to compile some software, if you get a compile error paste the generic portion into Google and watch it become completely useless.

Thanks, but can you please give a specific example?

One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded).

Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results.

As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.

Dude, you're treating it like a bug. It's not. It's intentional behaviour that started 2-3 years ago. Instead of giving you just the formerly relevant results, they give you all kinds of crap that they think you are interested in.

You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure some marketing head will remove even that option.

Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some technology that's "in fashion".

Maybe I never experienced it, because if I want to force exact match results I simply place the error message within double quotes. But often you do not need exact match searches to get good results for a random error message. If it happens to you a lot, it should not be a problem to post a single example query that returns useless results.

I do agree that Google is focusing more and more on the common internet user, and not the early tech adopters. This forces us to use tricks like the double quotes, while keeping the search engine user-friendly for the vast majority of ad-clicking internetters.

The behavior you are referring to is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion and while this improves the search results for many people with imprecise or misspelled queries, if you trained yourself to search with exact matches, you'll need some time to adapt (or get in the habbit of adding double quotes).

Maybe I never experienced it, because if I want to force exact match results I simply place the error message within double quotes.

Come on!!! This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been on the InterNet (yes, with a capital N) since 1993 and I use double quote searching all the time, except that in cases like these one gets zero results back.

It is not relevant that you were on the internet before Google even existed.

Apparently you are the only person in the universe that regularly gets never-before-seen error messages. I feel for you, but I hope you stay away from any issue tracker I am involved in, because no matter your vast experience, the quality of your error reporting is downright poor.

If exact match search is unable to find your error message, then you wouldn't have found it on 2005 Google either. You wouldn't find it on any other search engine. You are (poorly and vaguely) describing a problem that must have always been there and blaming it on an unrelated recent UI change.

All the while unable/unwilling to give a single concrete example, just noisy ranting. For all I know you are, despite your experience, banging your head against the keyboard, until you get 0 results. The burden is on you to show that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun. Good luck!

Very interesting. We tell you that google's invasion of privacy is polluting search results, and you keep telling us there are ways around it.

Why should we have to work around it?

It is not relevant that you were on the internet before Google even existed.

That’s where you’re wrong: I’ve used the double quotation marks search technique since before Google and I’ve known about it and used it since Google’s debut.

I already told you I’m not compiling anything and can’t give you a reproducible test case right now but you chose to disregard that; I’ve also told you what to do to reproduce the problem yourself (“attempt to compile GCC, get an error, search with Google with and without double quotation marks”), but you don’t want to do that because it’s a lot of work, I know, but that’s your problem and here’s why:

The burden is on you to show that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun.

that is why, since you’re wrong again: I’ve switched to “DuckDuckGo” as my primary search engine and rarely use Google any more since the results are nothing but advertising-soiled false positives; I don’t care whether you do something about it or not. Now, you might wisen up and take my feedback about exact or partial error searching earnestly or not. You wanted feedback, you got it; your move on what to do about it. Good luck.

Unfortunately (according to Wikipedia) like DuckDuckGo, also Qwant is mainly a meta search engine, meaning the are using Bing & Yandex and have only a small scale own web crawler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Criticism

Sponsored by European Union, France and a Germany and dubbed as Google clone a few years ago is "Exalead", a real large scale web search engine. Unfortunately it got bought by Daussault (Catia 3D CAD), but it's still online and works:

https://www.exalead.com/search/

> First of all, this is okay. But not good.

They are going through aggressive growth phase right now and could need a hand fix many things. As you mentioned (the NLP problem):

https://about.qwant.com/job/ml-engineer-specialized-natural-...

I feel like Qwant works much better in french than english.

I think qwant is a company from france.

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