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Comment by SquareWheel | Hacker News Reader

That might be true in concept, but I don't think it's true in reality. When people search for something online, they want the first result to be whatever they had in mind. If I search for Python, I want the homepage for the programming language. When somebody else searches for Python, they might be looking to learn about the animal.

You could argue that we should just ask for exactly what we want, but that puts more work on the user and reduces the effectiveness of the tool. I don't want to type more than "python", I just want the link!

Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

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I can type at 100 words per minute. Typing "programming language" after every search will cost me maybe two seconds per search. The savings are trivial. The costs, however, are not trivial. I have on several occasions spent half an hour trying to make a search engine handle a query that I know worked in the past. And that's when I find what I'm looking for at all. They have optimized the happy path but made failures worse and more frequent.

What really bothers me is that no one asked what I want. These companies replaced my tools behind my back. I have seen literal fistfights between machinists over people messing with their tools. This is at least that bad and probably worse. Software is central to how I make sense of the world. Software is not just part of my livelihood; it is how I make sense of the world. Changing my software behind my back is like "upgrading" my eyes while I sleep. Why do we accept that such a central part of our world is completely out of our control?

Totally agree. I want to be surprised by a new UX in a software tool about as much as I want to be surprised by a new UX on my chainsaw. Nobody would put up with this in the physical world, I hate that it has become accepted in the software world.

A lot of major UX changes have resulted in immense outrage, so it's not like everyone is fine with the churn. My best guesses on why it's accepted are:

1. Most big tech companies have monopoly power and get away with not caring much about their users. Maintenence work is famously under-rewarded at many companies, incentivizing changes even if they are net negative for users.

2. People get browbeaten about security concerns. Actually useful security updates often get bundled with UX changes.

People are different, I get it, but I don't want a search engine that tries to second guess me all the time. If I'm a programmer and I'm interested in the actual animal, I don't want to have to fight against the product. I'd much rather use my knowledge to craft my queries intelligently so that I get exactly what I want.

But then when it comes to technology, I'm a bit of a control freak.

What you mean is that you don't want a search engine that guesses wrong.

If you happen to get a search engine that is correctly giving you the right result every time because it happens to know what you want, I am guessing you will not have a problem with that.

I would have a problem with that, because for a search engine to know me well enough to know what I actually want despite what I typed in it would have to know a lot of information about me I wouldn't trust the company behind it with.

I spend most of my browsing time in a browser configured to clear cookies, cache, and history on exit.

I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them.

Now if I could only get a search engine to not ignore query terms because it thinks it knows what I want better than I do, I'd be even happier.

"I'm not sure why most people are okay with companies gathering tons of data about them and trying to use it to manipulate them into buying products they don't actually want or need (among other uses), but I'm not one of them."

It takes a ton of work to prevent it and it's more or less futile anyways. It's not so much that people are okay with this, rather it's a part of modern life and it's exhausting trying to mitigate it. And impulsively buying products due to ads is a personal failing.

Have you ever told someone to "just Google it?" Well, repeatable results are the underlying expectation broken by over-personalization.

Results are already different based on your location, so unless you're very near each other, you already don't have that. You mightn't notice it too much because it's only noticeable on queries where it might matter. Could be similar for personalization.

Here's another example taken from my experience a few years ago. I once googled "pro tour results" and was, as expected, presented with an info box about the results of the recent Pro Tour in Magic: The Gathering.

Some months later I was visiting family for a few weeks and wrote the same query on a family-member's PC. It gave me something about golf which I couldn't care less about. But I got the right results on my phone. I'm sure if I added "golf" to my query on the phone it would have given me info about that tournament instead. While it disturbs me how much I'm being tracked, I'm still happy with the practicality of the implied context being aligned with my interests.

> Search engines provide very little personalization even today. I'm almost surprised a competitor hasn't popped up with a product that tries to fill that niche.

Kagi seems to be that.

https://kagi.com

What about a child who used to be interested in reptiles but is now interested in programming? I get frustrated when Google starts acting "smart" and changing queries or hiding results. I've started to use Bing image search because I'd like more than 20 results, the way Google used to be. If they start acting like that even more, I'll use them even less!

Google's model is the only viable one long term. With growing amount of information, the only way to find you something useful without making you enter a growing amount of terms is to maintain a context of what you are interested in.

No child will be confused if they look up a programming language that they already know have the exact same name as reptile and get reptile first.

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