Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome.

I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do.

Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.

On my IOS device, under Settings -> Safari -> Search Engine, I have a drop down with options, including Bing and DuckDuckgo, but defaulted to google.

On Macos, with Safari running, Safari -> Preferences… -> Search, Search Engine I have a drop down, defaulted to google, with Bing and DuckDuckgo amongst other choices.

Agreed on google”s effort to get their search engine as the default. However I just don’t understand how changing search engine is impossible given what I’m seeing on my devices? Nor does it seem over the top onerous to my eyes.

So here's a challenge, try adding a search engine not on that list. You can see the search engine I'm working on in my profile if you're interested (I don't want to hijack this thread with self-promotion). I challenge you to change to a new competitive option like it. You simply can't. That is a clear monopoly over distribution.

On desktop in Chrome, as noted it is not something any typical consumer can do easily. But even if they could, Google does not allow you to set the New Tab to another search engine, even by setting the homepage to one. So every new tab opened on Chrome takes you back to Google search, even if a consumer figures out how to change their homepage. As for changing the nav bar search, no ordinary consumer is going to be able to work out how to change a search URL pattern. That is clearly intended to prevent consumers changing.

So I stand by my point, especially on an iPhone, you simply cannot change your search engine to a new search engine like us. It is impossible.

That being said, I try new search engines from time to time and always get back to google, because non of the others have worked for me (in a professional context). I probably do 200 searches per day and google is most likely to give me relevant info on my first query (maybe 80-90% success rate). All others I have tried have been around 40-50% win an avg. of 2-3 search queries to find my result. That is a huge daily time sync on 200 searches per day.

I will also test your search engine.

And before having tested it, I have some unsolicited advice ;) At least these are things that would make me switch: 1) you are strong in my vertical. 50% of my daily search queries are professional. Probably 10-20% are programming related. If you were better 20% better than google at delivering results for that subset, I would probably use you. 2) If you had very strong support for my locale. Based in Germany, 50% of my private searches are in German. Most search engines, apart from google, suck in German. My assumption is their market share is so small that they don‘t put effort into any language specific search syntax understanding. German or large language groups like Spanish, Hindi, French come to mind. 3) If you can‘t become a default search engine on safari, maybe you can role your own browser (chromium fork or something) where you are the default. You could package it as: MySearchEngine App. It is actually a fully functional browser, but users really use it because they want to use your search engine. That might give easier access than having to manually navigate to your website in safari.

</ end of unsolicited advice />

I think most of the search startups are doing their own mobile app. On iOS, the system search and browser remains Google/Safari (and the App is essentially just a wrapper on Safari for browsing). But at least it is something. I think you'll see more people doing desktop apps, although the dominance of Google through Chromium forks for this isn't a coincidence. It feels like the bad old days of re-packaging Internet Explorer with a custom homepage all over again.

Hell, I'd love to have the option to make the search results be completely language agnostic.

I also search in multiple languages but I also know that's an exception. The majority of the people in the world likely would only use a single language and it's easy to believe that search results are better for those users with languages separated.

There are cases when I'd even like REGION agnostic results, or least ones not bound by national boundaries. For example, I have an interest in my state history (MI), and there's plenty of relevant articles/commentary from the Canadians.

A Canadian/Indian/EU-based Google probably would've ended up with multi-lingual support, whereas a China/UK based one probably wouldn't have.

By the time Google got big enough for international considerations, there were already a bunch of baked in assumptions about their users, like them being monolingual.

There's nothing magic about putting a space between words or not. Similar to whether you hyphenate or not.

Which, of course, means that it is yet another barrier to entry for any would-be competitors.

Personalization is a double-edged sword. @pg once wrote about Google results becoming "what's true for you" rather than what's objectively true. And filter bubbles and subtle "personalization censorship" are also dangers. I think it's possible to have high quality results and privacy/anonymity, and it's not a binary choice. It's a challenge worth figuring out.

Unfortunately, while OpenSearch is great where it's supported, outside of Firefox, the only real support is for in-site-search on other platforms (where you type a site name and then a search string), and not for changing your browser search engine. And it doesn't work at all on iOS even for site search.

So unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem of how a consumer can easily change their search engine to something new on Chrome or Safari or an iPhone.

I don't want to sidetrack the discussion, but if you want to confirm the opensearch description, you can open our site in Firefox, then click the "..." in the browser address bar and then click "Install Andi Search". Or reach out and very happy to talk you through it.

Edit: When I click the address bar, I see an small "A" icon in the bottom row. When I hower over it, it shows "install Andi search".

[Edit: just saw the edit that you found it - thanks again for looking around for it too!]

[0] https://blog.mojeek.com/2022/02/search-choices-enable-freedo...

> https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

> https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/926290942/google-paid-apple-b...

etc, etc. Given Google pay a lot more for this privilege today than in years past, this may well have been part of the strategy.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

On Firefox it makes it easier to talk a non-technical user through how to change their default search engine, and at least they aren't entering search pattern strings into a settings field as with Chrome.

  <OpenSearchDescription
      xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
      xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/"
    >

      <ShortName>My Search</ShortName>

      <Description>Personal Search</Description>

      <Url
        type="text/html"
        method="get"
        template="https://mysite.com/?q={searchTerms}"
      />

      <Url
        type="application/rss+xml"
        indexOffset="0"
        rel="results"
        template="/results?query={searchTerms}"
      />

      <Url
        type="application/json"
        rel="suggestions"
        template="/suggest?q={searchTerms}"
      />

      <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>

      <Image height="32" width="32" type="image/x-icon">
        https://yarnpkg.com/favicon.ico
      </Image>

    </OpenSearchDescription>

<link rel="search" href="/opensearch.xml" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="My Search" />

I then went to my site on Chrome iOS and it showed up under Settings > Search Engine > Recently visited. I then selected it and now anything I put in my url bar gets sent to my server. It's pretty sick.

I'm wondering do you see that as an option visiting our site (we have an opensearch description for Andi also) or other search engines like You with one?

Very curious.

That might be part of it.

BTW I really like what you're doing, and I'll definitely like to set it as default in Firefox somehow if I could just to try it out. My first tests were surprisingly good, I didn't expect it to deliver results which are accurate and which appear to at least match DDG. Nice one. [slightly unusual page format on desktop though :)]

For iPhone, iPad, and macOS, you could use Swift and SwiftUI to write a single search app for your service. Flutter is pretty good also, then you could cover Windows and Linux also.

What?

But let's try it. Go to Safari > Preferences > Search and choose the "Search engine" dropdown, and you'll see you have a dropdown with only five options.

Google reportedly pays $15B per year for that top spot.

Though, I couldn't add a keyword to your site in firefox with its "Add a keyword" feature. Might be due to the javascript calling some url behind the screen.

This is not a bad solution; I appreciate your browser rage.

Well, you can. I just tried it and works. Granted, you need a third party app, but it's doable.

I can block elements, and cookies in a site, define custom JavaScript or css, change the default search engine with one in a list o define a new one, and a whole lot of other things. All inside default safari.

Its name is Hyperweb. You can get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/hyperweb/id1581824571

See my post above about iCabMobile, where there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.

There are also other browsers than Safari and iCabMobile on iOS, many of which give alternatives to their search engine choices.

Naturally if you think only users who choose the default browser are interesting as your market, I wonder if those users would take a chance on your alternative search engine?

I duplicated my post because you so pervasively in this thread duplicated your inaccuracies.

You are wrong about this, iCabMobile allows the user to very easily add search engines:

Settings > Tools > Search Engines > Add

Naturally I expect to be plentifully downvoted for this accurate information, just like pointing-out that iCabMobile has 25 search engines to was also extremely unpopular.

Or you are just talking about within your iCabMobile App itself, like anyone can do in their own app?

As far as I know, all the alternative browser and search Apps (including ours for example) are wrappers on top of Safari on iOS. And they are unable to change the iPhone's system-wide search or browser. That's the search engine accessed, for example, when a user swipes down on their iPhone home screen, and enters a query into the "Search" field that appears. Normally, that's Google and Safari at the iOS system-wide level.

Or are you saying that you are able to change these including adding alternative search engines under iOS Settings > Safari > Search Engine?

I'm curious how you're doing this if so, and I'm sure lots of other people would be too. My understanding is that App Store Apps or Extensions can not normally change the iPhone search engines, but I'd love to be wrong about that.

Firefox has removed the ability to set a default page for new tabs and requires users to install an extension to restore the functionality, which in fact provides degraded functionality. As originally implemented the new tab would load the new page instantly. With the extension, a new tab is created, focus is given to the URL bar and after a brief but noticeable pause, the chosen page loads.

Another way to think it is that Google pays Apple, so that they don't create their own search engine.

Just this morning I searched “air purifier” in safari and it suggested the wirecutter “best air purifiers” article

Or, it might be possible. But their constraints will make it far harder to build even a comparable search.

This bluntness does not go far enough. People do not change defaults, no matter how "easy" it may be to do so.

A default is a pre-made choice by someone other than the consumer. There is no set-up process where the consumer makes a choice. The choice has already been made. Consumers do not make this choice. Even if they could, in practice they don't. That fact may seem insignificant but it is worth billions of dollars.

If I am not mistaken, the current CEO of Google spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job. In probably the most important one, Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine. It was estimated at $10 billion in 2020 and $15 billion in 2021.[1]

Defaults are effectively permanent settings. It does not matter how easy it is to change a default setting if practically no one ever does it. $15 billion is too much to pay for something that may or may not change. It does not change. It is money in the bank.

1. https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...

I mean you could spend two seconds to search and realize you were in fact mistaken before bothering to write "If I am not mistaken..."

While the comment might be a little oversimplified, I think it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit. And there's no question that Chrome and Android are the two central planks of Google's search distribution monopoly with consumers, along with the Apple deal.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sundar-pichai-rose-to-be...

let's see:

> spent most of his time working on "default search engine" (or "default web browser") deals before taking the CEO job

even if we take your convenient assumption as correct ("it's reasonable to say that those deals would have fallen under his ambit"), it's still wouldn't be a true statement. But feel free to point out which part is true if we relax any more assumptions.

Based on Pichai being the senior executive at Google responsible for Chrome browser and search defaults, as a matter of public record he held corporate responsibility for getting google search as the default search engine on as many devices as possible.

You stated that the original commenter was mistaken with no supporting evidence and a high level of acrimony in your phrasing. I'd be interested to see supporting evidence for why you think the commenter was mistaken, in the context of the other resources they provided.

> Pichai joined Google in 2004,[8] where he led the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's client software products, including Google Chrome and Chrome OS, as well as being largely responsible for Google Drive. In addition, he went on to oversee the development of other applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. In 2010, Pichai also announced the open-sourcing of the new video codec VP8 by Google and introduced the new video format, WebM. The Chromebook was released in 2012. In 2013, Pichai added Android to the list of Google products that he oversaw.

Thinking about when Firefox defaulted to Yahoo. I wonder what switch rate was.

"Pichai started at Google leading product management for the Google toolbar, a critically strategic product that enabled default search queries on different web browsers to go through Google and allow them to track browsing behavior to power the AdWords targeting engine. At the time, Internet Explorer was the "installed by default" incumbent for many users, while Firefox was the alternative browser of choice."

"Pichai identified a weakness in Google's strategy, and Chrome began as a defensive play against the established browsers to protect and grow Google's search business (which still generates much of the company's revenue)."

https://www.productplan.com/learn/sundar-pichai-product-mana...

"Sundar Pichai is the one who introduced the toolbar, which led to an increase in user searches. It was later merged with Chrome, which became the most used web browser in the world."

https://startuptalky.com/sundar-pichai-story/

""Most people here didn't want us to do a browser, so it was a little bit stealthy. Once we had it up and running, I remember showing it to Larry and Sergey - and even then there was a lot of scepticism." But Pichai got his way: Chrome was released in 2008 and now accounts for nearly 60% of the market, according to NetMarketShare, while Internet Explorer languishes on less than 16%."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/07/google-bo...

"You know how Google's the default search engine for many Web browsers? That was Pichai's work."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/11...

"Pichai's portfolio includes Chrome, Android, search, ad technology, maps, social,commerce and infrastructure."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150226215637/http//www.forbes....

"Ten years ago, the Indian-born Pichai, 42, was a product manager at Google, and his domain consisted of the search bar in the upper right corner of Web browsers. He then persuaded his bosses to wade into the browser wars with Chrome, which in time became the most popular browser on the Internet and led to the Chrome operating system that runs on a line of cheap laptops called Chromebooks."

"Android runs on 1.2 billion devices around the world. It drives users to the company's hugely profitable search engine and the ads on its maps service. Google search and maps are available on phones made by Apple and Microsoft, too, but Google pays those companies referral fees. The more people use Android, the more Google can keep that revenue to itself."

"Google distributes the latest versions free under the agreement that device makers will highlight profitable Google services-especially search and maps-while their own brands and services take a back seat."

"Pichai joined the small team working on Google's search toolbar. It gave users of Internet Explorer and Firefox, the dominant browsers at the time, easy access to Google search. He proposed that Google build its own browser and won the support of the company's co-founders, though he faced an objection from then-CEO Eric Schmidt, who thought that joining the browser wars would be an expensive distraction."

"Rubin had introduced it, but Pichai created an interdisciplinary team with the search group, which had voice search technology and algorithms that could discern what information might be most important to users. "Sundar helped me to formalize a relationship," says Johanna Wright, the product manager who runs Google Now. "Because search and Android sit in two different buildings, we ended up doing a people swap.""

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-24/googles-s...

I doubt this. I'm guessing that 90% of Google Search's development effort is concentrated on defeating SEO, and as soon as a new competitor succeeds well enough to attract SEO attention, their results will suddenly turn to custard.

The competitor then has to combat the extremely sophisticated SEO practises developed against Google over the years. This is likely to be an even bigger barrier to disruption than building market share against Google.

At the least that's a perverse incentive, and at worst it's a corrupting influence.

Whether it is conscious or not, Google does better financially when there is more SEO spam in results.

That's why the better Google does financially, the worse the search results are getting.

However you're arguing as if new competitors had to monetize the same way Google does and that's not the only game available. Imagine a competitor that doesn't monetize clicks but works on donations (like wikipedia does). If results are higher quality than Google's the users will follow. Or maybe a search engine that promotes a particular product like a CRM tool for example.

Disruption typically doesn't come in obvious ways or else someone else would have done it (including Google and its gazillion dollars).

Why don’t you do a show hn so we can have a proper thread I’d love to learn more about the decision making of the AI.

So we're definitely planning to share what we're building with the community here soon. Andi's very much an alpha and a few things are broken, but we're working on a new release that fixes them, and then we're going to share it and learn as much as we can from the feedback and wisdom here.

Small bug I found:

   use the "go" command (e.g. go reddit)
   close the newly opened tab (e.g. reddit)
   click "Learn more about me"
   click the top left icon (Andi)
   => goes directly to reddit.com

One of the secrets with Google is search is that the top searches aren't searches at all. Number one search on google? "facebook" - it's people navigating. So the idea behind that is to let people navigate directly when they want to go somewhere specific, like "go youtube cute cats".

Interestingly, once I turned off my VPN, it works again, Firefox doesn't display the message either. Note that other web pages work fine on the VPN.

update: It work's with MozillaVPN, but not with my University's VPN. Perhaps UC Davis has flagged it from within their firewall.

I've conducted a number of professional searches about neuroscience, obscure R packages, topics on D&D and Pathfinder, and it has done exceptionally well. The one thing my obscure demographic would love is a replacement for Google Scholar, which I use all the time.

Thank you for trying it out and the great feedback too. There hasn't been too much discussion here about Google Scholar, but better research and academic results is something I hear a lot of people talk about as a growing problem.

Took a while to load, and only gave me short text of current conditions.

When I did "denver weather forecast" it gave a bit more and showed results on the right from Wolfram and others but they don't tell me anything. Wolfram is current conditions and wind tomorrow. Next one just meta description for weather underground.

It's going to snow tomorrow. That's what people are searching for.

Google gets this stuff and makes that info super visually accessible.

I really don't get the hate on their search quality. If it has gone down I haven't experienced this outside of mega spam things like recipes.

But I still experience the black magic of typing in some vague thing you are trying to remember and somehow they know what it is.

My own feeling is that the spam and ad problem (and therefore actual result quality) on Google is at its worst for categories like finance, health and travel. Commercial promotion has really taken over there. For many people, ads are essentially spam when they take over the entire screen of results (try, say, "best home loans in the US").

There is huge variation though. Some searches are still pure. Thanks again and please feel welcome to reach out to chat more about this!

I disagree. Two to three years ago I could get more what I wanted in a complex search once I tuned it properly. So Google had a twenty year run of good and useful searches. Google also worked to strong arm their monopoly, yes. But I claim they still served some quality after that. It's not that unusual for a monopoly built on quality to maintain their quality for a period of time after it achieves that monopoly status - institutional standards die but they can die over time.

I don't disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren't actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.

It's a similar situation with the App Stores also. They are monopolies. We've gone from a world of personal computing where software was a free market with open choices, to a closed and proprietary world where there is only one available source of software.

That’s true but at the same time I think most people are pretty happy with it. HN readers aren’t typical in this regard.

I’ve been writing software as my job since the mid-80’s and it’s only been in the past 4 or 5 years where I realized that I’m finally pretty happy with the tech I use day-to-day.

If I had any complaint it would be that app stores have made software too inexpensive. When I look at something like Procreate which I think cost something like $10, I’m blown away. This can’t be sustainable.

Here we have Apple with Google and Bing on their shelves. Microsoft have Bing and Google on their shelves. And Google have Goggle or Bing. Is that healthy or an oligopoly?

It's limited.

It's limited by our attention spans.

There's a reason web designers call specific pages "valuable real estate".

For example Google's search page, the one with the input, is probably the most valuable web real estate in the world, closely followed by the first page of results once you've typed your query and hit Enter.

I'm willing to bet $100 that the second page of results probably gets less than 1000th the hits the first one gets. Heck, make that 1 millionth of the hits the first results page gets.

Shelf space refers to the market with which someone competes, not whether people are thinking of a candy bar or finding a bathroom or a facebook post. Your argument commits survivor bias because it's ignoring the millions of other websites that exist and are being used. Being popular does not mean something is a monopoly, nor does it mean there's limited shelf space.

Following your example, if Google spammed Pixel ads on it's home page, the page would become less popular. One of the reasons it became so popular was it's strict adherence to focusing on utility.

Regardless of why exactly this is the case, it's not a healthy state of affairs.

Not to mention reddit is terrible outside of tech concerns. It leans conservative, young, male, and white. As a woman, contributing there is an invitation for harassment. Even when I don't contribute I do things like research cars to buy only to see forums dominated by "car guys" who mock safety standards, focus only on performance and the "get laid" aspect of cars, and are dismissive towards groups like "soccer moms." Well, I'm a soccer mom and felt wholly unwelcome in those communities and the advice there is actually terrible advice for parents wanting to buy cars.

Then there's a whole religion on gaming be it consoles vs consoles or vs pcs, or publishers or franchises and just endless tribalism. Politics is an absolute nightmare as you can imagine. The savvy reader will say "well you have to know how to sort the comments a special way and never visit the sub you want but the 'true' version of the sub you want, etc" which is a million times more hostile to non-technical people than scrolling past some google ads and finding an article about what they want from a reputable newpaper or consumer reports.

Reddit is just too wild west to be a google replacement. Worse, the good content is almost impossible to find. Google weighs popular discussions more than recent ones so it keeps giving me discussions from many years ago, even if I try to put the year in the search box. It has no idea how to crawl reddit and make it digestible for us and the reddit leadership want nothing to do with google it seems, for capitalistic reasons of keeping out a potential competitor and having their search be really good "any day now."

Posting to reddit is its own kind of nightmare, full of rules per sub, each different and with an algo that will decide if your question gets any visibility, often only getting mean spirited comments in return, if not harassment. For as far as facebook has fallen, I can still visit my town or neighborhood group and ask people what cars they like and get something of a normal discussion. At reddit, I'll be asked for nudes or just mocked/gatekept.

If anything if google is an old man at web 1.0 then reddit is an old man at web 2.0. I suspect google with outlast reddit as reddit looks primed to be overtaken, a bit like how myspace, slashdot and digg looked like unstoppable juggernauts during their time. Its "manboy" culture and its super hostile default subs and everyday misogyny, transphobia, and racism scare normal people away. Forums have always been the seedy underbelly of the internet but reddit is seemingly proud of being seedy, with spez coming out to say that he welcomes covid disinformation when reddit was recently called out about how its become the home of covid conspiracy theories.

If reddit was publicly traded and you asked me between google and reddit, I'd say buy google 100%. I think we'll be reading a lot more "what happened to reddit" articles in the near future, not "what happened to google" articles. Reddit becomes more toxic over time and that's just advertiser poison. Remember, it happily was the home of "jailbait" subs showing sexualized photos of children and "creepshots" showing non-consensual photos of random women until CNN called them out. If there was no call out, then spez would happily be selling those subs as points of pride and growth. "Reddit is the new google" narratives are very echo-chambery, shortsighted, and highly questionable. I think it forever remains this cesspool that chases away advertisers while Google continues to adapt to a new online world and continues to be vastly profitable. Meanwhile, Reddit has yet to make a profit.

Hell, Bernie, and then Biden were both top of reddit during the elections. In what way is that indicative of a "conservative leaning" on reddit. I'll give you young and male, but conservative? You've got to be pulling my leg here.

It was the largest Donald Trump fan site in the world (/r/thedonald before it was shut down for being so big its brigading tactics were damaging the site) and now /r/conservative takes that role. Before it was the biggest Ron Paul fan site. Its deeply pro-guns in nearly every comment section and any mention of Hillary or AOC is an invitation for angry comments and downvotes. Random subs are full of transphobic content and misogyny is near everywhere. /r/conspiracy is a right-wing paradise catering to right wing views.

You cannot talk about money or finance without being yelled at about how bad fiat and the fed are, which are right-wing talking points. You can't have a covid discussion without an army of covid skeptics yelling at everyone. You can't discuss police brutality without dishonest "but both sides" types full of racist dog whistles.

Its absolutely right leaning and token "liberal" positions like legal pot or better healthcare doesn't really change that. I know GOP voters with those positions but they always vote GOP for culture-war related reasons. Not to mention, being able to do drugs in your home is really neither liberal or conservative, its just in the USA only the liberal party is making any effort to make that happen.

Covid skepticism, which spez defends, is extremely coded right-wing, so even leadership acknowledges who reddit users really are.

The few liberal and feminist spaces that exist on reddit have draconian mod rules because of the constant brigading and some of them just give up and lock discussions because mods are exhausted and tired of fighting it. Just running a liberal or feminist or queer sub is a lot of work because reddit conservatives are constantly bridaging. This is not the sign of a liberal community. I mod a few subs and its just a nightmare out there. Just keeping conservatives from trolling and fighting with everyone is a big job. If you see "liberalism" its because the mods are keeping the everyday redditors away and trying to keep up the values and themes of that specific sub and its relatively tiny audience compared to the conservative majority.

Cherry picking AI spammed Bernie posts doesn't change the culture in the comments or what visitors receive when they post. I'm in a lot of Democratic, liberal, feminist, queer, socialist, etc spaces and I can guarantee you reddit is absolutely nothing like those spaces.

Also you are taking my comment out of context, not only is reddit conservative, but as a hypothetic competitor to google its extremely conservative. I can google for things without being hit with Ron/Rand Paul narratives, Trump worship, pro-gun narratives, covid skepticism, transphobia, or racist dog whistles. So just the idea that Reddit is as welcoming as a Google search is very, very questionable. Google will transparently present you ads. Reddit will drown you in propaganda, culture war politics, and harassment. As the meme says, we are not the same.

We can take a quick survey of /r/all sorted by "hot" as of this moment. The very first post I see with AoC is literally this:

"""AOC tells Joe Biden: Cancel more student loans to have "any chance" in 2022"""

The top posts? All in support. Where is the dominant conservative force that warps conversation around it.

HermanCainAward, literally a subreddit celebrating the deaths of the unvaccinated tops all regularly. How the hell is that "covid skeptic right dominant"?

Is your idea of "reddit is conservative" that reddit hosts conservative communities at all? Even if they're smaller than the left-aligned communities there?

EDIT:

Some other quick statistics:

Size of /r/conservative: 923k

Size of /r/lgbt: 864k

Size of /r/hermancainaward: 500k

The "lol antivaxxers died" community is literally half the size of the largest conservative subreddit. The LGBT subreddit is the same size as OP's bugbear /r/conservative. The very much Dem supporting /r/politics is an order of magnitude larger than either of those, at 8 MILLION subscribers.

Reddit is so large that having a potent conservative force is an inevitability - and much as we don't want to admit, for all the nastyness that goes on there, it's still a space that forces conservatives to be relatively speaking on "good behavior" (imagine if gab/voat/parler successfully displaced reddit), and more recently also forces their ideology to be heavily moderated (as in, to become more moderate), and watered down.

Also LOL at criticism of the car community for being bad at recommending SUVs. Reddits car enthusiast community is made up of people whose favorite car by and large is the Miata. Is the Miata a good car for a soccer mom? No. Is the Miata the car of dudebro conservatives? Uh, HELL NO!

I hate to say it, but sorry Karen, Reddit is for your son, not you.

Your loathing (for lack of a better term) of the discourse on Reddit has me wondering if the differences I perceive between our political and cultural tolerance stems from being on opposite sides of a few gnostic / agnostic boundaries, or if the difference between our demographic pigeon holes has spared me orders of magnitude of relative grief, allowing me the additional advantage of getting less overwhelmed by ambient asshattery.

I will readily admit that the latter could easily lead to the former; I guess I wonder if the 2 —> 1 causal order holds overwhelmingly in practice, and how to satisfactorily determine that in a way that manages to be honest, systematic, and compassionate.

I'm of the opinion that this is fine. Rather, the better approach here might be instead gatekeeping and exclusivity. Now, before you tear my head off for that, let me elaborate a bit.

Much of the issues of existing communities, seem to me to stem from an inability to deal with scale. A single heretic isn't a problem, but when the heretics outnumber the believers, they can then proceed to dominate the community. One potential solution I've wondered about is entry-restrictions and finer grained restrictions on permissions for a community. For instance, a community might be public view but member-only for posts/comments, with invite-only membership. Or perhaps memberships have to be approved by N randomly selected members.

The catch of course, is that what I propose is also yet another contributor to the death of the open internet, much like discord is doing.

This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving the option to turn the previews on / off.

With different views like compact vs visual, our feeling is that it's good to give people choices. If you get chance on desktop with Andi, try a search and then under Search Results, click "Change View", and try some of the other views. List view gives straight compact text results, and there is a Hacker view that presents results in the same information dense view as HN. That's my favorite. There is even a view Goggles that has a similar format to Google circa 2000 :)

I'd love to chat more with you about this, and it is a great topic for when we share what we're building in its own thread here. Just based on feedback, we have two fairly passionate groups of early users on this topic - some love the conversational interface and others just want it to look like Google. So the approach we're taking is to give people choice.

May I ask how you arrived at this observation? This is the first time I am hearing this. I know of NO ONE who uses any other search engine. The term "Googled" is not yet a proxy for other search sites.

Consumers use Google because it's the default and the only visible option when they turn their phones on. Unfortunately, that's what a monopoly on distribution looks like. People no longer make a choice and don't even realize they have one.

It's easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it.

As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included with it is a dense two page sheet of detailed information about the drug. I see nothing like that online with a search. Why is this sort of thing not online?

The interesting thing would be coming up with a sustainable business model for it. One way might be the users pay for it, either per-search or per-month. This way the incentives to provide good search results align with the interests of the people doing the searching, not the people being searched.

The people who want to be searched would have an incentive to make a quality site that the search service would believe would please their customers.

I can think of people willing to pay for quality searches - professionals looking for things they need, like programmers, lawyers, researchers, etc.

Even though I loathe ads, I wouldn't mind one simple, clearly designated ad spawned from keywords in the search. No tracking and no cross site linking. No result promoting, etc...

And yes, I believe that the current iteration of the web requires human moderation to be usefully searched.

Let's start pitting the searches against each other again.

I gave up after a few weeks and had to switch it back to Google. Google's not perfect - it's never been perfect, it was just better than the alternatives - but it's still less bad than others.

I mean maybe they was true and now they don't... But yeah good luck!

With the current Mozilla leadership it never even occurred to me that it could be a bug. I just assumed that it was something they do on purpose to get more money from Google.

Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google" literally means "to search the internet".

People don't change their search engine from something else to Google, because it is already the default search engine on the devices they buy and the web browsers they use.

So people do not make a conscious choice to use Google. The vast majority make no choice at all. Google is synonymous with search because it is already the search engine on their phones and computers. They are simply never asked which search engine they want to use.

Most consumers have no idea that you can even change your search engine. After talking with hundreds of users, they find it's either impossible to change (iPhone/MacOS) or too hard (Chrome).

If you're Duck Duck Go or Bing, at least you're in a very limited dropdown list if someone does want to try something else. If you're a new search engine startup, you're not an option at all.

I don't use google search if i can avoid it. I'll try 3 others first, and generally just give up. Google doesn't deserve any money.

There are five (very simply accessible) different choices for Safari on iOS.

But if you switch to iCabMobile on iOS there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.

I think you might as well be asking regular consumers to root their device so they can use whatever Apps from outside the App Store, or whatever search engine they want.

Also, even for a technical user, there is simply no way on an iPhone to change to a new search engine not already on a tiny list, and from talking with hundreds of consumers, I have not talked with a single non-technical person who could work out themselves how to change their Safari search engine to even one of the 5 limited choices, let alone a new option.

Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search results people type in.

Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”?

It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.

I don't believe that it's worth anything near what they are charging for it, except perhaps in the case of politics, which has always been an extremely efficient use of money. And even then, it's not worth a tiny fraction of the real cost it has to society.

Data analytics truly feels like a bubble.

Netflix has achieved the dream of movie studios going back more than a century now. They have the talent, the money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you watch, which movie covers work best.

And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.

Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Wire. HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and cancelling it before people even know it existed. I'm really curious what the data said about funding that particular project. On one hand, you have the cult following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year old anime.

Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission of defeat I don't know what is.

I think Netflix has two big issues. The first is the way they drop seasons all at once prevents the natural cycle of pre-episode hype, post-episode interviews, speculation and leaks, fan anticipation, fan arguments (ship wars, etc), etc. Fan culture can't develop around this content as easily because there's never any breathing space for fans to collectively sit with the story so far. The shows that become a cultural force like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones need us to keep coming back to the conversation every week. They have us talking about what happened last week and will happen this week with our colleagues at work and around the dinner table. How can these Netflix IPs enter stable orbit in the cultural zeitgeist when they're once-a-year events? It devalues the work, positioning it more like a movie that you watch and then forget rather than a story you become invested in over a long period of time.

Full season drops also allow people to binge a whole season of content for a single month's subscription and then immediately churn (ask me how I know). I assume they have some data-driven reasons for doing this, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Besides that, I think they should put more wood behind fewer arrows. They've developed a reputation for aggressively cancelling smaller shows with passionate followings which makes a lot of people not even want to bother until something has become an established mainstream success. I think of them now as the Google of content-creation, putting out a lot of solid (but not amazing) products and then cancelling them once people start to grow attached.

That's not how the entertainment business works. If I had to guess, Netflix's data-driven approach to content production is like card-counting in blackjack. It only gives them a slight edge on the house. A net positive outcome over hundreds or thousands of hands but offering no guarantee over the outcome of any single hand.

> HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix

Netflix did win the most Emmys in 2021.[1] And they only started producing original content in 2013 or so. That's pretty good.

1. https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/netflix-emmys-the-crown-que...

They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)

But most people are lazy and won’t account switch for different contexts like that anyway, so there’s just no way they can keep the profile data as clean as it needs to be for a television.

This is exactly what their data analytics has told them to do.

Have a few popular, quality tv shows with star-studded casts as loss-leaders to bring in new viewers. Otherwise the model is to produce and recommend the shows that get them the most eyeballs per dollar; the bare-minimum to keep their subscribers there:

- Stand up specials are dirt-cheap, quite popular, and provide never-ending variety.

- Ditto with 'reality' shows, bake-offs, make-offs, expose documentaries, etc.

- Old sitcoms and b-movies that have a proven re-watch-rate.

Throw in a handful of first seasons to keep the FOMO up, and you've got a captive audience on the cheap. Maybe one or two will catch on and become the next loss-leaders.

They may not have the quality shows that are 'running laps around' HBO and AMC, but by any of the metrics Netflix cares about they are simply running laps around HBO, AMC and everyone else.

I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?

Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.

If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.

Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.

Ironically, it seems like AmazonPrime is far better at that.

As for then top ten being bottom barrel stuff, I think you overestimate how popular mad men was vs. something like king of queens.

I will say, Netflix seems to fail in many cases, and I don't understand how they think content discovery is supposed to work.

There may be others, but off the top of my head: Bojack Horseman.

The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel."

However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.

And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India.

Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.

For example, I'm about to list my house on the market. The real estate agents who reached out to me last year and the year before that to try to induce me to sell the house had no chance of succeeding. Now is the time if they knew the secret that I'm about the list the house that they should all be competing for my business. The only relevant piece of information is that I'm about to sell the house. That is a valuable lead that many in my region would bid on. My background information is frankly not that relevant to the value of that lead, and isn't something that is readily surfaced by the kind of deep profiling that is supposed to be going on. It can be signaled by me signing up to some kind of list that sells my lead to a zillion people at once, but is never going to be surfaced accurately to the people who can earn the most profits from it by my Youtube habits or whatever.

Zillow sells the logged in user data in the market I'm buying in to the real estate agents listing the houses, but that again is not something being modeled by some kind of big data operation, but is merely the same kind of "little data" provided on things like dating websites or LinkedIn when people browse your profile. There's no modeling going on there that requires sophistication.

I've had a supposition for a while now that the targeted advertising industry should be closing the consumer cashflow loop by advertising effective self- and employment improvement, with the objective of increasing the disposable income people have so they can then make more brokering traditional sales

Personalized adverts and recommendations can be incredibly, horrendously dumb.

Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the moment : A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless charger (I already bought two before). An entire line dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than a year ago) An entire line dedicated to headphones (I recently bought wireless IEMs) An entire line dedicated to watches (same)

I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me things after I don't need to buy them anymore!

Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted advertising to do : After buying a smartphone, recommend accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles, chargers, whatever) Here's what targeted advertisement actually does : show me smartphones ads everywhere I go after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent replacement, amazon!

The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's overvalued nonsense.

Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier.

But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.

Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've interacted with in the very recent past.

Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it machine learning/AI/data science.

So the question is this: if they're not (and never were) using that data for what they say they were, what are they doing with it?

The most common pattern I see relating to personalized advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will often see an ad for something I just bought (or some competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of days after buying it and this is after not seeing any related ads during the days prior where I was actually doing some research into the product space.

Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a commonly repeated pattern.

A return rate of say 1% may lead to more people looking to buy a drill who have just bought one in the last week than people looking to buy their first drill.

If that's true, they left something out of their calculation: What percentage of people will install an adblocker as a result of feeling like they're being hounded for a few weeks? This scenario was mentioned specifically by Tim Cook when he introduced the Safari anti-tracking features.

So that you can continue to show me ads for a washing machine for months after I purchased a washing machine.

Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?

https://adssettings.google.com/

Poorly!

At the time I was a late 20s, college educated, South Asian male. I’m very cis and very straight. And yeah my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, but that was a weird profile to settle me on.

Better to just follow people's interests, instead of using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.

Something about my actual interests and activity apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all the crazy shit found there.

Now, who else has this same value judgement about me? This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor even ratified.

It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows me conservative wackjob stuff.

But is that same profile in someone else's database that marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive or responsible, basically any of the things where someone either private or the state does any sort of background or credit check on you for any reason, and there are really many of those when you think a out it.

I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.

I spent a lot of time learning about association rule mining in my AI courses, including the implementation details of competing ways to mine them. The technique seems extremely useful and fascinating (I jury rigged it for on the fly league of legends champ recommendations to maximize calculated win rate change given limited information), but I almost never see it used in the real world or even see it talked about anymore.

What happened to association rule mining?

Personalized page rank is not significantly better at summarization in my experience, even "queryable" summarization, but that also could be a pure implementation problem or a problem of hyperparamater selection...

Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?

Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing it on purpose.

Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's fascinating if true.

It's pretty straightforward to understand that when the vast majority of your sites income is generated from ad revenue, that data is being used to optimize for generating ad clicks, etc., rather than actually giving users the best/most relevant/useful/desireable information for their purposes.

It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the one way ads add societal value.

Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-b...

I can't understand why every company want me offer “personalized” service. It never works, and if I can't manually set preferences, then it's not personalized (because “personalization” means exactly that).

You're missing what "personalization" has come to really mean. It means knowing enough about the user to give them an experience you can profit from and which they will accept. If there isn't something you can expect profit from, there's no reason to give them anything.

I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I commented[1] about this a few months back with a random phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day also.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094

Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page.

Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.

I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.

I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")

We don't have control over this and it's very frustrating.

What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them.

Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception.

If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.

Though, why does enabling "Verbatim" (in tools) on a search reduce the number of search results if all my terms are already quoted? Enabling Verbatim often does it make it feels like my queries are interpreted more literally, but if quotes are already being respected I don't understand how Verbatim would reduce the number of search results.

On the counts -- basically, it's all really rough estimates. We make a rough quick count, you go deeper into the page, we make a fresh estimate. It can change, and it doesn't always make sense and personally, I'd hope we just get rid of counts because of this, perhaps more confusing than helpful.

Thank you, Google, for continuing to respect quotes!

Interestingly I tried my pet peeve search, and it worked for the first time this year! It is for a specific recipe, and I search for 'ocau slow cooked balsamic beef'. I have had to manually find it in the archive of the overclockers.com.au forum for the past year, as Google seemingly forgot it existed no matter what search terms or operators I used.

The main difference is I am using Firefox on Manjaro and not my historically typical environment for searching. Normally I would either be using Chrome on Windows or Chrome on iOS if I am in the kitchen.

I will play around on some other devices and see what evidence I can find.

P.s. I'm being referred in for a role at Google currently, is the Search team only in a specific area like Silicon Valley or is it a global team? Most of the jobs in Australia seem to be commercial facing, not product facing.

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/users/ https://blog.google/products/search/overview-our-rater-guide... https://blog.google/products/search/raters-experiments-impro...

Today I stumbled upon one. Here's a broken example query: linux next hop "[::]"

Here's the archive of the incorrect query result: https://archive.md/9WGe7

The first result (the man pages) does not contain [::] anywhere in the page text, the source, or the cached result. Could you take a look at this one?

I’m guessing this happens when there are less results matching my phrase

Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."

And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.

Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.

"kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%2...

Nothing useful at all. Nothing mentioning disassembly. Not even a YouTube link.

It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.

Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says:

    Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes):
    It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search

What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches.

IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that.

Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing).

Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking.

To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.

Showing results for non-quoted words isn't intended to be condescending nor an indication that we think someone made a mistake. Apologies that it comes across that way.

We think we're clearly saying there are no matches with the "No results found" message. If we stopped there, the page would have nothing else. And I get that for you -- and perhaps others -- that might be preferable, a further reinforcement that there's nothing out there.

For others, not so helpful. They potentially might give up with no real way of going forward, when just losing the quotes perhaps could get them useful information.

And I get the trade-off concerns. I've seen many comments here that things done to support less "pro" users are annoying. And yet, we do need to find a way to support everyone. I think that's why we've probably gone with the message about no matches with and showing the quotes.

Perhaps we should consider making that an option -- "Would you like to try this search again without quotes."

As for the message about not good matches, we always try to show the best stuff we have first. That's the point of our ranking. The warning is meant to indicate that even though we'll list the best we have, for that query, none of it is particularly helpful -- not that here are a bunch of results, and there's some good matches mixed in with poor ones. Ranking that way would make no sense.

But it might be also that we're so close to it -- that we always try to rank the most useful stuff first -- that we didn't consider the interpretation you had. So thank you again, it's really helpful to get that feedback.

Sorry the information doesn't appear to be out there. I hope if you disassemble it on your own, you'll post the info out to the open web. I'm pretty sure you'd end up ranking well for that and helping others who might have a similar need.

1. This is still horrific UX/UI 2. The culture internally at Google seems to have a "we know better than the users" attitude in all things. 3. Query rewriting is a horrific technique in general with almost zero value to life/society outside of fixing spelling errors. Whatever your A/B testing says about it's purported utility is polluted by Google's own dark patterns and political whims of the managers who run the internal search organizations.

It helps to actually know better than your users if you want to take the attitude in number 2. I don't believe that you or Google knows better than it's users, for many reasons previously enumerated in this thread and others.

One day Google search is going to be displaced and it's current utilization of query rewriting techniques will be one of the fundamental reasons for this.

You should take the absolutely massive amount of recent criticism and the fact that users repeatedly claim it's happening in the face of your claim it's not seriously rather than literally blaming the users writ large for a problem that is fundementally with the behavior of Google search.

Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that.

The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.

You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."

As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.

Or just quote the words in regular mode then use our before/after commands: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

Have you tried this? It immediately turns verbatim off. For everyone! It's been like this forever. Years and years. Gaslighting won't help here!

In terms of quotes, again, this does NOT work like +, like verbatim. If it did, then that term would absolutely show up, just as it is, in search results. Yet, over the years I've seen:

- aliasing happen from within quotes (EG, bob -> robert)

- quotes entirely ignored (eg, those terms NOT showing up)

Yet searching with verbatim on, immediately causes those quoted words to appear!

You are absolutely gaslighting people on this! Right now, in this thread. And if it isn't intentional, if you aren't gaslighting, then how can you not even notice that verbatim turns off, the second you select a date range?

I want to say so much more here, but it's filled with such ... vitriol, that I think my terminal would melt.

Yes, I tried this for some of the presets before I replied. It worked. It still works.

My sincere apologies for not specifically testing custom date range option as well. I should have; you are correct. That won't work. I'll pass it on to see if there's a way it can. My apologies again.

If you need to do this another way, what I also said works. Do it in the search bar using the before/after command. Just quote all the words, and that's the same as verbatim.

Take a look here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094

It's like you're just spouting Google propaganda, without validating what you're saying. Just like with vertabim/date range, which has been a thing for close ot a decade, which Google has received endless reports about, this too does not do what you say.

Your responses are akin to those canned responses one gets when you post a bad review. "So sorry, please contact us here at this email address.", which of course is all about impression, and results in nothing ever happening.

This has been going on almost a decade, yet oh what, no, haha is your response.

So if you did this search in verbatim: [search for this]

It's the same as: ["search" "for" "this"]

in terms of the instructions we're getting on what to retrieve -- look for content that has all of those words and only those words. No spell check. No synonyms. Just those words.

The ranking of the results might differ, because we probably use slightly different ranking systems when using verbatim versus quoted words. But in either case, the retrieval requirement is the same. Results should have all the required words.

I don't really see what the link above is saying to somehow refute all this. That link is about a quoted search for ["eggzackly this"] and nothing to do with verbatim mode. And it says that it found those two words in that order with punctuation...

Which is what I explained elsewhere in this (now huge) thread. But to give it again:

Typically the reasons people believe quotes are not working when they are is because:

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

In the [eggzackly this] example, that's what was happening as the poster saw -- we found those words separated by punctuation, which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.

Personally, I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.

Most important -- quotes SHOULD work as you and others are expecting. We WANT them to work that way. That's why we spend time looking at these reports saying they're not. I have spent lots of time doing just that. We find the matches. But if anyone believes they aren't working, and the reasons involved above aren't happening, let me know. We'll get on it. We want them to work as expected, and we want everyone to feel they're working that way.

It wasn't. It isn't. I never has been. Ever.

Verbatim was introduced to replicate that lost + functionality, after massive outrage at the inability to find search results. The fact that you, and other Googlers still think "" is the same as verbatim/+, when it doesn't even show the same search results, is highly, highly questionable.

To be beyond blunt, you're wrong. You are completely and totally wrong. +/verbatim and "" are not the same thing.

Please go away, and learn how your own product works, before commenting on it, ok?

At the time, + was used to require that something be present. Quotes were used to require words appear in a particular order. You could do a search where you quoted a phrase, but that didn't necessarily require it to be present (as I recall). If you absolutely wanted the quoted phrase to be there, you had to quote and put a + in front of the quoted phrase. So yes, they were different things.

When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.

With +, then with quotes and with verbatim, it's about what you retrieve. Verbatim says get these words or words and only those words. Quoting says get these words and only those words (and only those words in a particular order, if you indicate that). Just like + used to mean get these words and only these words.

The ranking of results might vary when you quote versus verbatim, but what you're asking to be retrieved is the same to us.

When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.

No, quoting did not take its place. At all. That's why verbatim was introduced, after outrage. Google claimed it did, but it still aliased. It still decided to provide results without quotes.

Again, this is why verbatim was born. From that "Google no longer gives precise results, ever" angst.

I can confirm, one of the reasons I haven't used Google in several years.

The query syntax:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Quoting works perfectly for me dunno.

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

But it seems people don't (my original comment is being heavily downvoted because of this). And although they can't submit even one example, the fact that they don't believe you is obviously a symptom of a bigger problem.

For some reason, Google is losing the trust of power users.

- no results with or without quotes:

    No results containing all your search terms were found.

    Your search did not match any documents.

    It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
    Tip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking
    for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."

I have yet to find any instance where Google corrects the inside of quotes without any warning.

Baby talk (or CDS, child-directed speech) helps engage their attention and provides valuable feedback. Kids who experience less CDS develop language more slowly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk

(I heard about this research a number of years ago. Although I must admit, now I wonder if it’s affected by the science reproducibility crisis!)

Could just be luck (well, genetics, probably) I guess. Maybe they'd have developed even faster if we'd used baby talk. One shitty thing about parenting is it's really hard to tell what helped, what hurt, and what didn't matter at all.

I would put a lot more of it to having (seemingly) engaged parents. Even a backwards strategy enacted by a loving parent who is consistently trying their best is likely to outperform the result that most can manage (owing to time/money/education/etc).

Genetics are a marginal element approaching none.

Compare a toddler living in a ghetto concrete jungle to one who takes daily strolls through Central Park or Suburbia. The enrichment of parents teaching about the trucks and the trees and the lady with a purple hat pays massive returns.

But, but... I didn't say anything about baby talk!!

The definition in that Wikipedia page is about something completely different: exaggerating intonation.

Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just force perfect talk from the start. They do this instinctively.

There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at home and documented this phenomenon

The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites returned, and often think that the site's owners must be morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog search results. I think think about how moronic it is that Googs allows this.

I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.

I subscribe to the theory that this helps babies understand what they sound like, and therefore helps them learn how to produce the sounds they want.

Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.

I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you to personalise your search like that.

https://archive.md/wwMY3

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+...

I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search.

It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.

Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references.

They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water

Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches.

Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good, but they have to be shown the way.

Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people

This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they're giving up on Google entirely.

Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources.

When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it's not on the web. That's Google's failure.

As someone who's been a public librarian, I can tell you that is not how people work.

A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of:

- What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital)

- How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see.

- The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively.

- Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search

- What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'.

Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.

Many people already resort to real food, even with plenty of junk food around.

“Problem” is unfortunately, that it comes at a price, that many are simply not ready or able to pay.

Who should step in is a good question, and probably governments should make access to information a right and have high quality public service available (in this case a public web search engine). Public libraries used to fulfill this role for centuries.

Why would someone want to search Pinterest? Every time I've gotten a search result to Pinterest it's been some scraped image completely and frustratingly devoid of the context I was originally searching for. Pinterest is one of the worst offenders on the web.

They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.

I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose.

Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers.

The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.

Of course, influencer means something different now too.

Google is optimizing for that.

Though Google is at fault for letting their service falter to the "payola" race, many other factors are in play all across the Internet since data quality has faltered almost totally. For major-cost and non-refundable purchases I need to trust, I go to brick and mortar stores and inspect what I am buying. I am thankful not everything has shifted to an online-only model. It's going to be a very bumpy ride on the Internet until Congress and consumer protection laws wake TF up and do their job.

The price is that you pay more -- effectively, you are paying for that branding.

I've had so many bad experiences on Amazon that I am increasingly doing just that. It doesn't apply to everything, but it is a useful strategy.

Not that I'm convinced it will keep working, since reddit isn't really a vendor in the same sense, and doesn't have those incentives.

I just wrote my own "rant" on the matter and posted it here along with the start to fixing them:

Yes, your frustration with the Internet and modern business is real

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350322

This isn't obvious to me. How do you know this?

The thing about users getting entirely banned from a platform is that they aren't able to complain anywhere near to the forum about unfairness. It's all done in stealth.

Platform algorithms now often do a lot to keep dissent about platforms themselves and partner companies out of sight. It's pretty crazy how companies that publicly advocate equality and fairness serve to undermine speech when it's about their business.

Last winter people got fed up with antivax-dewormer-nomasker bullshit and a lot of subreddits just took the trash out, so those complaints you saw might just be be those dumbasses.

I'm not saying there aren't annoying powertripping mods on Reddit, e.g. r/Linux, but there always tends to be an alternative subreddit one can use.

Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Online newspapers and portals are increasingly using paywalls. Most of the genuine human interactions and quality content is not indexable anymore. Instead we have a million affiliate marketers fighting for the top positions in search results with every possible seo trick.

Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.

Lobste.rs, for instance, has an interesting "invite tree" concept where your reputation is bound to people you've invited and who they've invited and so on.

There are still some pretty active enthusiast message boards, e.g., https://www.tacomaworld.com

But your overall point is valid, I think. My pointing to a single active forum doesn't change the fact that many of other enthusiast groups have moved to facebook groups and the like.

A question worth posing to this community: how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers? Secondarily, how can said internet also be much more accessible to content authors so they won’t have to learn a css, html, and JS to publish some stuff? Finally, how can that content be discovered from within this network?

Maybe a tax on ISPs? I think I'd happily pay $10 extra per month for access to an ad-free interrnet. Maybe $20. But how many of the people that are already happy with the ads and poor google results would do so? Would it be sustainable?

> The Premium fee is basically about $7 per year, which is less than what a free user generates in ad revenue. Thus leagues that pay for Premium and use an ad-blocker are generating less revenue than free users.

They charge about $20 per user per year to remove ads. I pay for that, so I'm not sure what kind of ads they have, but I'd love to see what they're advertising and what the click through + conversion rates look like.

What you said makes sense to me. I wonder if advertisers are paying a fortune to acquire users with a lot of disposable income.

1. https://www.fantrax.com/forums/general/messages/public/l72mh...

IIRC for Facebook American users the average revenue was 50+ dollars per year. Furthermore, if you're the type of person for whom saving a few dollars doesn't matter, you're likely worth more than that average; and for FB to break even on your ads an appropriate price is likely to be closer to $100 per year.

It's easy to imagine a future where the infrastructure is something analogous to a public good, like clean water. The infrastructure is agnostic to the content.

The content, on the other hand, is a product of a massive, churning, never-ending process of intellectual work. Ads, for the most part, provide the underlying economic incentive for that work.

And the dirty little secret of all that ad-supported creative content? Its value is minimal. Truly minimal. Often low quality, incoherent. If it all went away tomorrow, I would hardly notice.

That it is nevertheless so popular is something of a paradox. I know I sound ridiculous, but at the core, I'm beginning to believe that the fact that advertising is as powerful an economic force as it is, is a reflection of the fact that people's lives are more boring and devoid of meaning than we often admit.

You have to reify "trust" into concrete, computer-representable data. Maybe borrow the "web of trust" concept from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the amount you trust someone's recommendation online is the product of the trust relationships between you and the recommender. That's really the best you can do - even legislation against online advertising will be subverted by companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.

The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles.

The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.

It's people but they work like bots.

It may be becoming borderline. I expect that sentence/paragraph completion is already becoming useful to people who churn out quick content for a living. In any case, the important part isn't whether or not it's bots. The important part is whether or not it's authentic. The precise meaning of authenticity gets squishy, but it exists nonetheless.

IMO the sentiments are correct, whatever the details. Part of why google sucks is that the internet is worse, for a bunch of the things we use google to search for. The internet becoming a larger, more profitable industry changed it. Instagramming for influencer perks, SEOing, or selling targeted ads like FB do... it does not lead to the same places that earlier iterations of the WWW produced. Times change.

Significantly more time required for consciously choosing a product to purchase (which in my case is critical because I am like Sheldon Cooper trying to choose between PS4 and XBOX One normally, to the horror of my wife, she wants a new TV and it is months long project based on accurate and quick data, and now this, with Google, which makes our family atmosphere even more tense : ) )

There are very few exceptions to this.

I especially like the scan function where brother web connect OCR’s the document and saves it as a pdf directly in your Box/Dropbox/OneDrive/GoogleDrive folder. Just wish it worked with iCloud Drive.

I'm interested in the printing quality though.

I've seen a few of those wine documentaries about sommeliers, and they certainly made it seem like it was a legitimate ability to identify stuff. I'd be interested to see how close they are in a more neutral, measured environment.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta... 2. http://www.morssglobalfinance.com/the-ultimate-wine-tasting-...

Actually, this one is bullshit. While it may be true that the average person without blind tasting experience cannot do this, anyone who has actually done blind tasting seriously should be pretty accurate at this. Purely structurally, red wines generally have much more tannin and more alcohol than whites.

The famous study that led to this claim (which survives because people, especially the HN type, love feeling smug about expertise) doesn't really hold up. See eg http://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-ex...

Instead Sommelier exams are subjective - candidates are judged by another Sommelier on subjective criteria rather than objective measurement. In my opinion they judge it as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the language they use to describe the flavours? How does the candidate present themselves? Sommeliers dress in fine suits, but this should have no impact on actual wine tasting ability. Yet I am sure if I showed up in a draggy old t-shirt I would fail regardless.

The whole industry seems allergic to objective scientific measurement. I am sure Sommelier's do have some ability to identify varieties, but are they actually tasting all those subtle hints they list off? I doubt it.

>But I don't believe they are actually judged on their ability to taste wines and detect flavours. Designing such tests would be simple - rate of successful flavour identification based on data from other Somemeliers.

That is exactly how the tasting portion of the exam works. And

>In my opinion they judge it as a dramatic performance: how quickly can the candidate rattle-off various flavours? How "high class" is the language they use to describe the flavours?

This isn't really how it works, especially the "high class" language comment. Actually there are a variety of different things that they are supposed to identify about the wine, known as "the grid" [1]. You can take a look at it yourself. They are essentially judged based on how well their grid matches up with the consensus grid from the master sommeliers.

[1] https://www.courtofmastersommeliers.org/wp-content/uploads/D...

https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/37328

Reminds me of those ways to catch spammers or bots by occupying some of their resources with meaningless tasks for as long as possible. Except it’s turned around.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any real money in ads anymore or if it’s just a giant circle jerk that slowly destroys society…

Word of warning: it has the answer to both today and tomorrows wordles.

My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a entropic gene pool in nature, but with information.

Bar that, it’s humans outrunning AI in the race to the bottom with a head start. Human people can be forced to be incredibly machine like.

Amazon has a site for humans to pick up small tasks and get paid for them called mechanical turk [1], which is a reference to a fake chess playing machine with a human inside [2]. With the great resignation and the workforce otherwise pushing for a reasonable standard of living, I'm not sure how heavily mturk is still used as depending on tasks and speed it's really sub-minimum wage work for many people. [3] But as The Atlantic article says, sometimes it's the only work people can get.

[1] https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...

I think the quality of searches like “best TV” will improve dramatically once language models are used to generate SEO spam. Anything would be an improvement over what today’s human spam bots produce.

Absolute worst UX ever, yet they allow it because it's their SV buddies.

At one time, Google used to ban sites for "cloaking": offering one version of the page to the crawler, and another to the user.

But over time they got into trouble from these sites, getting sued left and right. Being accused of putting up a wall, and abusing their monopoly. Eventually, these sites won out and Google dropped this requirement.

It's a shame. I've really enjoyed a lot of the well written responses there but I can't be bothered to create another account.

You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And they will all have wording like "Put some X on the stained Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!".

Nope, nothing relevant. Found a counterexample.

Put some jet fuel on the stained yak... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!

https://www.buttercookie.de/temp/AI/GPT-J%20stained%20yak.tx...

Right now, I don't think you can tell it to use some specific terms in the text it generates, but it doesn't sound like a difficult extension.

I guess HN would be a weird outlier, because there are no ads. Except maybe the bots would be useful after all when various "Show HN" or "Launch HN" and have the bots cheer those companies and get random publicity.

> Little-known Fact #839: There are only twenty-three people alive today, and you're one of them; everyone else you know just looks human to lull vou into not searching for the other twenty-two. Lonely? You should be.

https://images.app.goo.gl/aSexFX2Gy4hdAnYh9

Beings so acceptive of others as to make me oblivious there's a difference? That's far more than humans ever accomplished.

> Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.

Fake plastic trees.

https://archive.fo/1EjSu

It's completely pointless, you just get a bunch of articles from news sites (??) that transcript the quest but not tell you anything more. I miss a nice community wiki like I'm used to from playing Dark Souls etc.

I've just started appending site:reddit.com to everything, works a lot better.

https://zapier.com/blog/add-search-engine-to-chrome/

https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...

Take StackOverflow for example. Almost any programmer will find a SO result as the top result and it's usually exactly what you're looking for. Since there's no money to be made by companies writing blog posts on debugging a compiler error, Google's algorithm works as intended.

Question is: Why hasn't Google done anything about this? It's the organic results that are terrible, so they're not losing ad revenue by placing these garbage sites at the top. Perhaps its to intentionally make better websites pay for ads to get better placement? But those won't be the ones to ever pay to begin with...

Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool face

A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.

Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash...

> Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash...

Yikes, I hadn't thought of that angle. That would explain some of the long-dormant accounts on Some Other Place that suddenly start spewing out-of-character garbage, assuming they weren't password-guessed, data-breached, or keylogged by some rando.

The only marketeer that would be able to consistently fool me might be a marketeer that was a developer. But last time I applied for a junior marketeer position I was asked: given your resume, don't you want to be a developer instead? So devs seem to get pidgeonholed into always being devs.

I also have the same kind of bookmarklet for Reddit and Google Scholar.

(This isn't an argument against your point, just a bit of additional context that increasingly is odd to me as Reddit gains more and more social weight)

I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and how individuals always act to maximise profits.

Someone on HN phrased this and I am not taking credit for it but it explains beautifully whats going on: "Google is not making money by showing you the best search result they can, they make money by keeping you searching."

Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit.

This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage search results to people.

You are right but overestimate the number of people doing these restrictive searches. They should be in the <0.1% range. I personally switched (to duck and latly kagi.com) and know quite some people in tech that did so too, but the non tech-savy person (which are the majority of overall users) doesn't even know other search engines.

Advertising always creates perverse incentives. It works in traditional media too. Look at what happened to things like Discovery and The Learning Channel when they became subject to advertising based pressure for ratings. They went from having actual educational content to being full of tabloid trash.

A month or so ago, I was trying to help someone retrieve some very old Wordpress for Mac files. I found http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos and was so touched, I sent the author a few dollars for a coffee

Google's compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a web site easier to make?

They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only solve Google problems (e.g. Go).

If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help. If you want to write a blog or make a simple web app, it's unlikely you're going to think "Google has some great stuff to help, and has awesome tools". Mozilla's web resources are better. Microsoft's web resources are better.

You mean having to pay them for the priviledge of not being flagged as "dangerous" by shitty machine learning algorithms?

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.

Yeah I remember this being mentioned in a local presentation at university. As a great thing. Google doesn't search for what you write, but what you want.

The problem is that very often Google don't know what I want. Before they introduced this, I was able to define my query so that I got exactly what I wanted.

But there is no conceivable universe where seo spam isn't the arch enemy of Google. Google needs to fight spam to survive, it knows it and it does. But that's hard. So hard in fact, that nobody else has cracked the problem, and for all the anecdotal evidence of someone switching to Bing, Google's marketshare is still utterly dominant.

The Dead Internet Theory may have some weight: Google hasn't dropped the ball, but it is slowly drowning into the sea of "content-free content".

But if that's the case, so is everyone else.

That said, the reason the Reddit trick works is that it uses information Google explicitly excludes when ranking content (engagement signals).

Google has a bunch of “objective standards” that it uses to paternalistically shape what the web looks like. Many of these are divorced from what users actually want for pieces of content (https, AMP, a life story in front of recipes to demonstrate authorship, etc).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349460

The other dimension is that, in the past, if you searched for stuff your results were likely to be a blog or a forum thread. Today the bloggers have evolved into instagrammers, TikTokkers, YouTubers, or Podcasters. The Forums and community pages have moved to Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc.

So it’s not just that SEO and botspam has eaten the Google results page, it’s that this is all that’s left of the open internet that needed search to navigate. Much of it truly is a wasteland. Google owns part of the blame for crippling RSS and privileging recent pages and specific domains or AMP pages over evergreen, self-hosted content in search results. But also users have given up on the open internet in droves. Instead of starting a fansite they start fan subreddits or discords instead.

Even HN is starting to feel like it wants to sell me something.

Even DDG knows that it can't handle everything, and so it has its bang shortcuts. I've used the !reddit one, and I'd use !w (Wikipedia) except I do those from the Firefox search bar.

I've heard the "everything's a bot" theory before, but never saw a name put to it before. I'd have to guess that 99% of all SMTP traffic is spam at this point.

In terms of direct ads, perhaps. But for SEO spam, in many cases, DDG already seems to be there. For example, things as simple as "python datetime", "python json", or "python datetime.now", where it would seem obvious that the top result would be the documentation for the module/function, have spam sites above the actual Python documentation. Meanwhile, search for "matplotlib", and your screen will fill up with ads.

So are reddit-comments and entries. There it's even worse, because most people don't connect the content with manipulation.

> The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now.

So, like reddit? I mean every platform has their hive mind, and reddit is even worse, because the hive mind can be manipulated with paid upvotes, not just reposting and comments.

> The same for trending programmer tools.

Aren't most of them yet again commercial products from companies?

This is the least of the issues with Google.

I don’t think this is the problem. The problem is the need for public companies to grow exponentially. If you take away the need to constantly grow exponentially, then ads on search can be both balanced well and make an insane amount of money.

I figured that's why it's so high, is Reddit's UX keeps slowly getting worse so the best way to find stuff on Reddit is by searching outside of it.

So are a lot of Reddit comments.

This is for me exactly too. Search "best XXX for YYY", and I get back two pages of dubious websites that smell like paid ads a mile away.

The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse, there is no other place that's grown to fill the void. This place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but it's small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.

/r/nfl had a reputation for high-quality content and wasn’t a particular battleground in the Trump Wars. It’s still a good breaking news feed, and the live game threads are fun, but every post is dominated by joke comments and memes.

To the extent there is a change in quality, it probably comes from other factors, including having a bigger, broader, and different user base now than in the past (and only a small portion of that change likely came from Trump-related bans).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

i think that specialised search engines are gaining ground. For example, I am using github search for searching code samples, that works better than google.

You might want to check my side project that tries to explore the subject. I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators, i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines.

https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - (best viewed on a PC).

The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags.

I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the 'low end'.

The projects source is here: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang

Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...

Reddit especially has horrible search.

This point especially rings true for me, but it also concerns me a bit. Reddit has killed a lot of other forums over the years. If something happens to Reddit, we run the risk of losing a large corpus of information.

> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.

I hate this too. I do get typos corrected by Google. But I don't need that - if I put a typo in my query and get bad results, I can correct the typo myself. But if Google decides I must not have meant what I actually said, there's no way for me to correct that. It's a ridiculously bad tradeoff - we eliminate errors that are trivially fixed by introducing errors that can't be fixed at all.

I have similar feelings about phone input autocorrect, which automatically converts typos that are very easy to read into (mostly) correctly spelled words, plus (sometimes) completely unintelligible nonsense.

So let mainstream use fuzzy and keep power user features. The big issue is power user support is gone for people with Google fu.

Ads or no ads isn’t really an issue for this because it’s such a small percentage of users that know Google fu.

>This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.

It should do both. And it used to do both.

Reddit is gamed way more than google. Paid posters, moderation of anything against a narrative. Google search may be dying, but reddit ain't doing much better.

It's only a matter of time before reddit too becomes too inauthentic to trust. Not only is it directly funded by advertising, its audience is mainstream enough for advertisers to invest time and money posting fake opinions in order to make it look like it's coming from real people.

I seriously hope I never see comments or news about people appending hacker news to searches. I don't want advertisers to kill this site when they catch wind of it.

You can still can get exact searches by google dorks but "normal" people might find "google trying to be smart" actually useful.

Nice try. That's totally what a bot would say.

I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past

Last valuation was at 10b$ which is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to "go on strike" by locking the subs because they don't like something/someone else on the website.

It happened before and the admins yielded to them so I don't see why it wouldn't happen again, especially since it's not like they can run the website without that weird cabal of (mostly delusional/psychotic) power mods doing their work for free.

I have a story about this - and its worse than just mods -- Admins intervene and set narrative on for whom is allowed to mod and make mod decisions...

I wont reveal the details - but I have seen Admins literally come in and fuck up Mod orders because (my suspicion) is that the Admins have MANY accounts that /appear/ as mods - but are actually Admin shill accounts...

I had this happen to me first hand and I was appalled.

Reddit's ethics are absolute garbage in this regard.

Are they still under them?

regardless, what is reddit's current value? (I've been on reddit for 15 years - but I have recently deleted my accounts due to censorship and ban-hammering for the most ridiculous reasons.)

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

Archive: https://archive.ph/VoaxV

Reminds me of the "birds aren't real" theory. Its almost more social commentary than a serious theory

Are you a fan of r/mtb or r/mountainbiking?

I just wanted to mention that a friend of mine made an app for user-reported trail conditions that might be worth taking a look at: https://trekko.app/

Oh my sweet summer child. Reddit is absolutely infested with paid shills.

There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for you indirectly.

The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the information you’re reading is highly compromised and biased in one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your further research and it’s a great tool.

Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.

Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet will be.

I increasingly think that upvote/downvote culture is the worst thing to happen to the internet and the world at large.

The problem is I don't have an alternative solution to propose.

Your comment is spot-on in my opinion though - I usually start with Reddit results, but try to check against other sources before relying on it.

A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one?

Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It's trivial to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment history and set them loose on the rest of the site.

Third-party clients?

I don't think woke activists would care too much about shoe brands, so I think your response is missing the point at hand, which is that search results (including but not only political ones) are deteriorating fast

likewise "american inventors", 9/10 image results are african-american inventors.

It appears the image search is closely tied to the overall web search; the images returned are images from pages that match the search terms.

What would I expect a search for something like "white inventors" to return? Are there lots of websites cataloging inventors who are specially white, or discussing inventors specifically because they are white? Probably not, why would there be? But what about websites discussing non-white inventors, or talking about white vs non-white inventors? That seems much more likely to me since discussing and/or promoting a minority is more notable and common.

So it seems like the algorithm has decided to categorize "white inventor" and "black inventor" in very similar ways - both search terms are returning results relating to inventors of different races, whereby a non-white inventor is more interesting since it's the exception. I don't think it is surprising that these search results are as they are, and this seems much more likely to me than the whatever the alternative is that you are suggesting.

On a related topic, if you search for "black people" one of the image results is King Kong, and it comes from a website discussing comparing black people to monkeys. Another one of the images is (white) Mitch McConnell surrounded by other white people.

If you want an image search engine that is returning images whose content matches your search terms, there are tools that specifically focus on this.

For "American inventors:" probably it is keying to the second half of "African-American"

White American inventors are typically just referred to as "inventors," have you tried searching that?

when I search "inventors", 7/39 images are from articles specifically about overlooked black inventors. all searches relating to inventors are poisoned by american (i.e. foreign) culture war topics.

>probably it is keying to the second half of "African-American"

I refuse to believe that google can be so stupid as to do this after over two decades of development in natural language processing.

I don't. They might have spent those decades speeding up and scaling their ability to be stupid. Stupidity at scale describes a pretty significant chunk of the internet.

Anyway, I don't think misinterpreting your intent on this type of search really costs them much, it seems like an edge case example to me.

If you google Donald Trump you get a bunch of news results about his legal troubles. Not because Google has an axe to grind, but because Donald Trump has legal troubles, and it's in the news.