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Comment by elaus | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know this, but you're right: 56 results for Facebook! Not even very good results, just the usual random SEO spam mixed with relevant results.

If this isn't an error, this is a HUGE change?

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I would think that any more than one would be incorrect.

I can imagine you might want news about facebook.

You might also be looking for third parties commenting on the trustworthyness or not of facebook as a service/company.

You might be after investing info in meta.

You might want to install their app

you might want help logging in or a guide to setting up an account.

I'd consider all of the above relevant enough to be worthy of a position on the results page.

Yes, but they include a box for news in the first page. I assume 90% of people who search for google /facebook/youtube intend to go to the site itself. And if they want specifics they just type in the additional keywords. so this would be

Facebook trustworthiness Facebook stock Facebook app Facebook account setup help

. I guess google is no longer a "search engine" as in doing a keyword search across multiple webpages and returning the matches, but an AI powered answer engine that guesses what you want based on your keywords and only returns those results.

While you could potentially justify it by evoking an ill defined query intent detection, X returning less results than X+Y will always be surprising for me.

But why? That is the naïve assumption from the context of primitive search techniques, but in the space of actual answers I think its going the right thing. Just give the user what they asked for.

I think this approach is probably in line with Google's, or at least it seems like it. Trying to intuit what I really want instead of paying attention to what I actually searched for is also one of the big reasons why I find Google search to be terrible.

I am not its target demographic, it appears.

Often I'm surprised at how I just seem to be wired differently from others - if I wanted any of the above, I'd probably search for them instead of just "facebook".

Facebook dot com.

Facebook article on Wikipedia.

Perhaps an entry for the movie as well.

Maybe some information on the stock.

I think a single result would be wrong.

Here's what I would search for for each of those.

facebook

facebook wiki

facebook movie

facebook stock (though I of course know the ticker symbol is FB, so I'd just type that into Yahoo Finance and it would know how to handle that)

edit: I guess it's a reflection of my distrust of Google/most (all?) large companies - I really don't like it when they guide me in any direction other than what I've specified because I'm pretty sure it's some dark pattern designed to relieve me of my money.

I dislike needing to be this verbose with search engines, and hate it with voice assistants too. I’d rather a little inference than to have to be explicit every time

I don't really understand why that distrust doesn't seem to extend to wanting them to display a single result for something, as if you can trust that single result to be what you want?

That's a fair point - I could be wrong about my motivation there; I was more or less thinking out loud.

The ticker is meta

I think search should also output links to some Facebook scandals, about Cambridge analytics, clearview, some research papers how Facebook affects children, speech rules dramas, Facebook myanmar scandal.

I think one would have to explicitly search for these terms for anything like it to appear.

If not then search should not be used to discover new topics.

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