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>they're using it to find pages with similar text.

This is one vision of what a search engine's job is, but I'm not sure it's what most users are looking for. Even barebones pagerank goes far beyond just finding similar text - it uses structure of the web's link graph to estimate the quality of a page. Now obviously pagerank is not directly trying to ascertain which pages are truthful and which are not, but it is arguably using connectedness as a proxy - the assumption is that people tend to link to reliable, useful pages and tend not to link to incorrect, harmful ones.

Does vanilla pagerank also violate your boundaries for what a search engine should do?

> Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text.

I’m confident this is factually incorrect for a very very large subset of searches. Probably a majority.

It's never going to work for that though. This is like changing a hammer design because some people are hurting themselves using it as a comb.

It does work for that. For a large number of searches, on relatively uncontroversial topics, search engines have effectively become oracles of truth.

This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

Obviously I’m aware that not all data is uncontroversial and agreed upon, but it’s a fact that a large percentage of searches are quite literally treating search engines as oracles of truth

>It does work for that.

It does not. I used the moon thing from last year as an example. Here[1] is a very noncontroversial query that still yields factually incorrect results in the box at the top. Yes if you read the results carefully and think about it you'll realize it's wrong but then you're doing the same thing you would be doing otherwise.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APq-WBv0RNgr6Q3zUOjDc1lM...

And this example https://i.imgur.com/UkcR945.png that's still broken as it was half a year ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622613 )

> It does not.

In the "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" example that the person gave, it absolutely does work that way in regards to the user's motivations.

When a user googles for "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday" They are almost certainly attempting to use a search engine as an oracle of truth.

> that still yields factually incorrect results

Search engines aren't perfect. That does not change the fact that the oracle of truth model, is a good model to describe a user's motivations.

Such as when they google "Abraham Lincoln’s birthday".

helen___keller wrote:

>This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”

But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result. At most the search engine needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the search query against variations of "born on" that are present in the article.

> But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox

I am not saying that there is only a singular way of displaying information.

Instead the point here is that Yes, users who search that are actually trying to use Google as an Oracle of Truth here, and if the top results are anything other than what his actual birthday is, then that is a problem.

So in other words, yes it is being used as an oracle of truth, even if there are different ways of precisely displaying that.

> I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result

Only if the article links is actually the truth, and not some other number. So yes the search engine is being used as an oracle of truth, to find out what the actual answer is to what his actual birthday is.

"The Covid vaccine doesn't prevent deaths 100% of the time. So it does not work."

Something doesn't need to be perfect to work well.

Could you source what you're basing your facts on? I know many people like myself are just looking to expand on the text we're searching for, and letting the free market decide what's a good search result.

The best supporting data is the rise in no-click searches. See https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-sear...

No-click searches continue to grow in share while google continues to adopt design that presents information outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the fact you were looking for presented at the top in large text outside the scope of a link.

This suggests a growing share of searches weren’t looking for links in the first place, they were looking for information and when the search engine provided that information, the user left without clicking a link

I’m rarely an expert on the broad keywords I search for. That’s why I’m searching: to learn.

I would use a search engine that makes some attempt to rank higher quality, more accurate information higher than others.

> Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text.

The reason google removes factually incorrect results is because this is actually exactly what the vast majority of people use search engines for.

Your view is completely opposed to all of the recent "Google search is totally broken due to garbage SEO sites" HN articles.