I Just Want to Search

gtowey

I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here. Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste. So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Zambyte

While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical operators, etc. which are mentioned as generally rotting capabilities.

Xotic007

Tbh I too have experienced the same but I think that is just what we are moving towards. I mean everything is now shifting to semantic search and it is better for natural language yeah it sucks that literals dont work as good now but "Optimization".

pbronez

If I quote a search terms, every returned result must contain that string. Even if that means showing zero results. Anything else is madness.

nubinetwork

I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well... Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?

superxpro12

I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct. They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results. Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you are too restrictive. Hell, even the autotrader sites are going the facebook way now. It's maddening.

syntaxing

It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.

imzadi

I use protonmail and the search is genuinely atrocious. Like the word can be in the title and it still won't find it.

eggbrain

I've stopped waiting for sites to do what I want in terms of features and functionality -- their incentives and mine very rarely align. I think the solution here eventually will be a search engine that lives on your personal computer (it's also what I'm building currently). Ingest content from the web -> sort/filter/view it locally as you choose.

dreamcompiler

> what if we just show people the results we think they want Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*? * Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.

100percentjake

Yesterday I was doing an automotive auction photography gig with a 2006-ish convertible Chevrolet Corvette. I received the car with the top down, and in the midst of a 104 degree day needed to raise the top. No obvious buttons or latches were present and the owners manual, naturally, was on vacation as well. Googling "C6 Corvette top down button" showed where a button should be, but wasn't, so I concluded this car had a manual top instead of power. Thus began an infuriating cycle where Google ignored all attempts to search for manual Corvette top lowering instructions and instead simply INSISTED that what I was actually looking for was the instructions to manually lower a power top. Agitation multiplied when I finally found the answer, which was reaching blindly under a plastic trim panel for a hidden downward-facing button to open the panel, lift the top up, and then balance the top midway between open and closed while I finesse the plastic tonneau cover panel back down under the rear part of the top. Garbage UX on both the part of Chevrolet and Google. I wish to become a hermit in the woods.

yipinwong

When you sleep, and staring blank, you brain connect dots subconciously. The author is consciously trying to connect dots together via active searching through contents. I can recommend him a puzzle as a pasttime (as he's bored after retiring in his 30s)

pooploop64

Google search still has that feature where the little preview blurb will bolden where it matches parts of your query so you can see what context the pattern appeared in. Always very useful but now it gives you a pretty good look at what google replaced your actual query with. Since I started paying attention to this, I've realized that most of the cases where I need to add a bunch of excluded keywords, I'm actually just gradually twisting googles arm into searching what I wanted to search. It takes a lot of excluded keywords sometimes until it finally runs out of ideas for stuff to replace my entire query with.

derefr

It's obvious that the companies exposing search features for their own service data don't actually want you to be able to search the data with precision. They 1. think they know better than you, and so want to show you stuff besides "what you think you want", because their metrics say you might click it anyway; and 2. they want big long listings for you to scroll through, so they have more opportunities to inject paid promotional elements into those listings. It's just another kind of enshittification. That being said... the first wave of web search engines weren't built by the companies hosting the content. Search engines as tools became popular because, even in 1998, browsing and navigating sites (esp. corporate sites) to surface content, was already becoming an increasingly adversarial experience. Search engines were built by companies spidering other sites' content. This was content that was often — if you were navigating along these sites' happy paths — found five to ten links deep through a confusing warren of subtle and unintuitive click targets. This content was the original "deep web." And search engines made it shallow... often against the spidered sites' consent. Companies at the time much preferred "directory" sites that would only ever link to their landing pages. To companies of that era, sites linking directly to specific URLs of your site would be like if the Yellow Pages listed specific directory-extensions of your company's phone number! But this first battle in the "war against deep-linking" was a losing one from the moment it began, since early websites were almost inherently bot-accessible. The second battle, in the early 2000s, where sites were built as [non-deep-linkable] Flash apps, took longer to determine, only finally resolving (again in favor of an open web, and thus third-party search) when laws and regulatory compliances both started to force companies back toward UA accessibility. But for going on a decade now, we've been embroiled in a seemingly-indefinite third battle in the "war against deep-linking" — this time with companies tucking every possible type of user-generated content behind a login wall of some walled-garden everything [web]apps. Permalink URLs for individual content-items still exist in these webapps; but you get redirected to a login interstitial if you visit them. Where's the adversarial spirit of the first search-engine companies today? Where are the companies trying to index the modern "deep web" of login-walled content? Why can't any company give me a search box that searches "into" YouTube video transcripts, "into" Facebook Marketplace, "into" public Slack and Discord and Telegram communities (probably requiring archiving, ala how Deja News/Google Groups surfaced Usenet), etc? Sure, this sort of thing is intensely adversarial (but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn — while it might be against a site's ToS, but it's not against the law.) And sure, this sort of thing requires per-service connectors (but any thought of this business model therefore being "unscalable" comes from a pre-coding-agent era.) But isn't it also, very clearly, "what people want"?

shevy-java

> Searching on YouTube means scrolling over two entire rows of Shorts,"People also watched", "Explore more", with your actual results somewhere in between Google ruins all its search interface. I never understood why I would need "people also watched". That made never any sense - neither on youtube, but even less so on google search. Of what interest to me is it when Charly Joker searches for hentai cyborgs? Even IF I were interested in that, I could search for this ON MY OWN. I don't need mental handholding, so this ALWAYS wasted space I could use otherwise. Thanks to ublock origin I block such UI downgrades anyway, but this is not the only example. Google abuses people here. Google wants you to use a privated web that Google controls. This madness has to stop. Google will not budge, so Google has to be ended by mankind.

M95D

I wonder if maybe EU could do something about this. A law mandating that all results must contain quoted search text?

arboles

HN's basic search using quotes can be way more useful than google to me

bogdanoff_2

I think the reason is that no one (who has the correct leverage / area of ownership / authority) cares. Big companies have processes for deciding what gets done and which features are prioritized, and if the people in that loop aren't power users of those features, and they don't have the kind of metrics or analysis framework that would indicate that those features are important, they won't be prioritized. I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy to make search worse... I think it's just that nobody cares enough, and with time the features break as everything else around them is changed

olivierestsage

Just stop using computers for fun. It sucks now and it’s over.

sp1982

One pattern I have observed and guilty of myself is that simple hybrid search patterns work poorly on single-word intent queries. It is better to do pure lexical search for certain queries and then fallback to semantic or hybrid.