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I dont know how common this is, but in my 12 years using this site this is the first time I see a Google employee address a customer regarding a product they work on.

Congrats and hope Google takes advantage of HN, similar to how startups use this forum to engage with users - it is now a meme that Google Search is unusable so there must be something to learn from the audience.

I will use the send feedback button tomorrow as you suggest.

Thank you for the kind words. Long time HN member here like you (going on 11 years) that recently started working on Search as a SWE.

Yes, that meme is very common. I hope I can contribute positively to these discussions by offering an outlet for feedback, and humanizing our organization. Google’s Search organization is large, so it’s certainly not monolithic, but we’re staffed with a bunch of normal, hardworking, genuine human beings like most companies, that care about the impact we’re having.

I’m happy you’ve found some value in our discussion. :)

There are cases where Google doesn't return anything close to all known exact matches.

1. Most large classic forums using vbulletin. Try picking any rare word or phrase with less than 100 total matches via the forum's search tool and compare to the Google verbatim results.

2. This very site, searching for an uncommon word such as "memeplex" returns hundreds of unique results according to hn.algolia.com, but only 65 according to Google via site:news.ycombinator.com "memeplex".

3. Fanfiction sites such as fanfiction.net . Try randomly picking an obscure 'fandom' with only a few hundred stories, and search for the name of one of the main protagonists. It will only retrieves a small fraction of all the existing stories that mention the protagonist's name.

EDIT: I originally had another example involving macrumors.com but then realized there was a formatting mistake in the search query.

Hey Michael, I appreciate the effort you put into describing a few examples:

1. If you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be super helpful for someone like me that’s not active on the forums you’re describing.

2. Algolia is a fuzzy matching search engine. Searching for memeplex [1] returns matches like “megaplex”, “memepher”, “meeples”, etc. Unchecking typo tolerance in the settings returns < 100 results in line with Google’s results.

3. Again, if you could link to specific examples and queries that’d be helpful.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=19&prefix=true&qu...

Thanks for looking into it Denzel.

I'm not quite sure what you mean for 2., I see every exact match highlighted in a rectangular box in a different color. Do you not see that on your end?

Just counting the exact matches, there are well over 100 unique results.

On the other hand why does one of the richest company on earth, who can afford to hire the smartest people on earth, resort to unpaid volunteers on a site like HN to fix their product?

Don't they use their own tools? Is there an internal search engine that everyone uses at Google? Are they trying to gaslight us pretending there's no problem? Can't they hire a hundred people to use Google search and report what they found?

Sure, props to that person for engaging with the userbase but we're not talking about an obscure bug here. Every day there are dozens of complaints about Google search on HN alone. Surely we're talking about low hanging fruits in terms of bug reproduction.

You should try to assume good faith when engaging with a person who’s just like yourself.

First, we can agree that Google Search is attempting to solve an astronomically hard problem. Like mind boggling hard. Indexing the entire web and serving quality results to unstructured queries from billions of users every day in under one second is no small feat.

Second, Google is not monolithic. We employ more people than most cities have citizens. Furthermore, many more people than our current staff have come and gone over our 20+ year existence. It’s better to think of Google as an organic entity than a rigid command-and-control hierarchy. Are you able to think of a city in the world that does everything perfectly? I certainly can’t, and yet, there are cities that are better and those that are worse for any set of criteria that one may care about. As it is with large companies like Google.

Third, while there’s an objective element to search result quality, there’s also a significant amount of subjectivity. Your idea of quality results may differ from another person’s idea.

Checkout Paul Haahr’s talk on “Improving Search over the Years” [1]. He summarizes our work the best when he says things that look easy on the outside can take a lot of work to implement.

As it was with our state-of-the-art automatic synonym system that works on any written language in our corpus. (More details in his presentation.) This system is a transparent workhorse from the user’s perspective.

Here’s a simple example you can compare between Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo: “united flight formations”.

Two of those search engines will show a bunch of things about United Airlines as top results because that’s what you would expect to get when you’re only focused on matching terms. Only one of those search engines understands the meaning behind the query and returns everything to do with formation flying as the top results.

If you use our products and you mostly enjoy our products, it’s in your best interest to give feedback when you feel we’re not serving your needs. You’ll find that most of products, Search included, have open feedback channels that we do review and act upon.

[1]: https://youtu.be/DeW-9fhvkLM

I'm sure you're a real person deserving of respect and love. If I say that the search results are terrible it's not a comment on your humanity or that if your colleagues. People have genuine problems with Google and a reasonable expectation based on experience that they won't get any joy by trying to appeal to big G. You can say that you're just flesh and blood, but don't discount the well-founded displeasure of users.

> Google states that some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed were omitted, and I'm able to remove that filter.

I've definitely seen that sort of thing before but there is no such link there at the moment -- at least not when searching from my iPhone, whether or not I'm in desktop mode. I just see a large error box that says "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" followed by the link to the a0x80 fork.

By the way, the a0x80 result highlights a serious problem with search results: the GitHub URL is strangely modified. Instead of showing the full URL or even a prefix leading up to it Google is selecting parts of the URL, showing "https://github.com > src > transaction" on mobile and "https://github.com > kafka > coordinator > transaction" when I request the desktop site. In neither case is it obvious that the content isn't the canonical source from Apache. I've noticed this middle-out truncation for GH urls before but I'm not sure when it started.

How often do people use the send feedback button? How many of the reports are looked at?

I’m not authorized to disclose data that’s not public knowledge.

What I can say is that we have a feedback process in place for Google Search that we use to improve our product. You can send feedback and check the box to allow our teams to contact you if you’re interested in a follow up. Of course, given our scale, we’re not able to follow up on every bit of feedback but that doesn’t mean we don’t review or act upon that feedback in some way.