Why does every site's search now insist on giving me what I don't search for?
Google ignores "must have" quotes
Zocdoc insists on giving me appointments weeks away even when I set a date range
Amazon insists on showing me products that they can't deliver tomorrow.
What happened to deterministic search parameter results? It's like every search function now just take what I ask for as a suggestion and then ignores it.
If I search on many shopping sites, the more specifics I give, the broader the results become.
It's as if every term gets translated down to a sql statement where each part of the query statement is a bunch of OR clauses instead of AND clauses.
That's probably more or less what's happening. If the site is doing full-text search, and there are no exact matches, adding more terms is going to generate more and more partial matches. Some kind of re-ranker might be able to make sense of them but those are difficult to get good results out of, probably rarely employed by a run-of-the-mill commerce site, and might be drowned out by competing objectives (sponsored results, ranking by likelihood of purchase, etc.)
If you've got 15 minutes, here is your answer: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
The ignoring of quoted words is pretty annoying, especially when the search engine assumes you have spelled something wrong. Search is also incredibly sales oriented - shopping results are prioritized and fill up your results over the information you're wanting.
I was joking last year that we needed AI because regular search had gotten so awful. Not really a joke now.
As the old saying goes if you aren’t paying for the service then you aren’t the customer. You are the product. All of these things make money by selling your attention to advertisers and vendors.
Advertisers are paying them to have themselves be shown to you. Their interests factors into the search results as much, if not more than, your query. They are paying to make it happen, so it’s going to happen.
> As the old saying goes if you aren’t paying for the service then you aren’t the customer.
And that saying hasn't been accurate in ages, because some of the best things are free (Debian) and paying doesn't get you good service. In particular, when I am trying to spend money and the stupid site refuses to help me.
Except I am seeing the same thing on shopping sites where I am the paying customer. I was shopping for some RAM the other day. I searched for 'DDR5 6000 cl30 64gb'. I hoped to see all the 64gb kits that met those specs. Instead I had to wade through many results that were only 32gb, had a higher cl rate, or different speeds.
Semi-related: Why do sites grab search keystrokes (like '/' on github) to force me to use their crappy search when I'm trying to find content on the page I'm currently on?
I have also noticed all docs websites seem to be using the same terrible search plugin that means they match pretty much anything except what you are looking for
Doing guesswork of course, they would rather you get what they want but also they probably don't know how to fix it and make it deterministic again
Deterministic search is power for you, manipulated search is power for them.
Why do ppl keep saying quote search doesn't work? Totally gives more focused results for the quoted item than not. As does something like "site:"
You can share in some other related recent anecdotal gripe threads:
Search could be so much better. And I don't mean chatbots with web access
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43563915
I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517828
Use Kagi
Unfortunately, Kagi has a similar problem.
Before, I felt it would search exactly the terms I wrote.
Now, it freely ignores some of the terms, and I find myself prefixing most of my queries' words with plus sign (+) so it enforces the search.
_Personally_, I feel the quality of Kagi's search has decreased, lately.
However, I still prefer it to other search engines.
Because “fuck you”. This appears to be the new customer service philosophy of the major tech companies. Perhaps they’re sick of people pestering them with endless questions?
Its a grand conspiracy, really bad search makes you look at what they want you to see. I've wrote my search tool just to see what was so hard about it all.