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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Why? I have a higher chance of finding what I want if it returns something than if it returns nothing.

Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query. There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.

Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.

> There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.

With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies.

But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress.

On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that.

Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress.

Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for.

Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.

>Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for.

I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.

> But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want.

This has never been the case. If it can’t find your title, it’ll display “titles similar to”, right at the head part of your search. No 20 seconds of confirmation needed.

I actually prefer Netflix’ way because if I search for “Demolition Man” and they don’t have it, it might be that I’m in the mood for any <2000s action schlok, and who says I already know about “Escape From New York”?

I just tried searching in browser and Netflix says nothing like "titles similar to".

I searched for "Ted Lasso".

It has grey text "More to explore:", white text "Ted Lasso" and then thumbnail list of different shows, and it's literally just thumbnails, you can't even Ctrl + F and you have to read all the titles in different colored and stylised fonts.

It's as if it is intentionally built in such a way to make it hard to understand that it's really not there.

https://imgur.com/vgohSVP

Edit:

And in TV it says nothing, just gives you the thumbnails and since it takes longer to type you must check after each character whether one of the thumbnails happens to be what you are searching for.

I'm not home rn so I can't test it, but I'm quite sure that netflix says something like "we don't have X, these titles are similar" or smth like that. Maybe I just have an old version in my TV idk.

I've seen both. Sometimes it says it doesn't have it, other times it just displays results like it does have it even though it doesn't. You might be onto something, it's probably the difference between the web interface and app interface (on various devices).

My LG tv with webOS also doesn't give any indication that the title does not exist.

No. It is the single most important reason why I pay for Kagi.

It seems to me "everyone" think it is always about privacy or features or something.

But the main thing that keeps me on Kagi is the results. They seem to have most relevant results and few irrelevant results and if I decide to be specific using doublequotes I get no irrelevant results wrt that word. (And if you find one it is a bug and will be dealt with.)

I have lost enough hours of my life clicking through Google or Bing results that maybe has something relevant to my search.

Edit: I have been beating this drum since matt_cutts was in Google and used to frequent HN and so I think it is relatively clear that Google does not care about the quality of the search results.

So many times I'll often search something on Kagi, get no results, and tag on the "!g" at the end to see what would happen. Of course, I get a ton of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for. I love Kagi.

We've reached a point where if an "alternative" search engine can't find something, then neither can Google.

Kagi uses results from almost every search engine in the world plus its own results. If you can not find something on Kagi, it is likely you will not be able to find it anywhere.

If nothing is returned, I can reword my query instead of reading through pages of irrelevant search results.

I can not remember a time where going to another page gave me the result I was looking for. If it's not in the top 10 it's probably not the right query.

This never happened to me until I started iOS development. Everything is built on top of layers and layers all the way down to APIs prefixed with “NS” for NextSTEP. Obviously, first the modern APIs are surfaced, but sometimes you really are looking for something deep, so you go deep into search as well, eventually finding stuff written in 2010 and such

Seconding this. When this happens, wise to take a step back and rewording the query with possible specificity helps.

if bad results are returned, you still can reword your query to match it better. I would prefer to see related, or slightly related results instead of 0.

I won't, because I have to actually scroll through those results to realize that they couldn't find what I want. It's like asking for where the apples are and then being led to an aisle with bananas, melons and pears. I'd much rather just be told that they have no apples.

Returning random unrelated garbage does not mean you have a higher chance of finding what you're looking for, it just means you're going to waste time sifting through useless noise.

And that is time you don't spend on refining your query, so it makes you actually less effective at searching if you consider people do not have infinite time.

A decent library returns nothing if you ask something absurd. A decent professor nudges you to the correct path if you're wrong on your reasoning.

A decent search engine should do the same, be able to tell that you're doing something wrong, and do better if you want some answers.

If we balk at AI when it hallucinates, we should balk at search engines when they hallucinate, too.

Kagi does the correct thing, IMHO.

No data is better than bad data

You also have a higher chance of wasting a great deal of time combing through useless results when no clear answer exists for your query.

You have a higher chance of finding something. I think you actually have a lower chance of finding what you want if it returns irrelevant results, because then you have to spend time manually evaluate and decide that the results are irrelevant before making another query.

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