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#search#results#top#where#google#web#more#should#actually#going
Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Agitation multiplied when I finally found the answer, which was reaching blindly under a plastic trim panel for a hidden downward-facing button to open the panel, lift the top up, and then balance the top midway between open and closed while I finesse the plastic tonneau cover panel back down under the rear part of the top. Garbage UX on both the part of Chevrolet and Google. I wish to become a hermit in the woods.
They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.
Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you are too restrictive. Hell, even the autotrader sites are going the facebook way now. It's maddening.
You try to peer through the noisy results to see if any of them are actually a match, you try again with different terms, you give up and engage with a result outside your parameters, or (best of all) you give up and engage with an ad or get distracted by some other Facebook feature.
As far as they're concerned, engagement is the key factor and satisfaction is only a tiny little bonus when things work out. Engagement is what earns them money and makes them make bigger claims in investment statements and is what keeps eyeballs away from their competitors.
Everything is working perfectly for them... just not for you, and they don't really care. That was the big business insight of the 2010's and there's still very little reason for anyone in online media to stop aiming for it.
If FB marketplace is showing me a thing I can't buy because it's too far away to pick up, doesn't fit in the space I'm specifying, and over my stated price range, I'm just going to assume there were no results and look elsewhere. I guess FB gets paid for an impression, but an advertiser that sees impressions going up and conversions not changing is a pretty unhappy advertiser.
Yeah, I'm sure the newsfeed is an example where ignoring settings/search params like this works, because there's no real hard-lines to what posts someone will be somehow able to read other than maybe the language it's in, and even that's flexible. You can just blast users with whatever slop pays FB the most. But some sponsored decor tchotchke being 500 miles away might as well be on the moon.
Yesterday I searched for "3/8 inch handles", and got several ball-shaped ones, plus some things that included (but were not) handles.
I added the term - "3/8 inch ball handles" - and only the not-actually-handles remained.
Give me search like McMaster-Carr. Everything is an instance of a category class with madatory properties. If your product doesn't fit in any existing category, tough shit. Go convince someone at McBezos-Carr that whatever premade-landfill product you're selling is a category, along with providing dimensions/materials/properties that category varies by, and maybe they'll consider adding it.
Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.
So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preempt a litany of more granular searches.
This might be an area where a traditional, respectful search engine style crawler backed by a small cheap LLM paired with human curation would work well. The crawler+LLM finds sites, attempts to compute some quality score, figures out where they'd fit in the directory's hierarchy, and then submits them for human review and approval. If a poor quality link makes its way through, users can flag it for review and if curation agrees it gets booted.
We have to remember that they decided to side with the SEOmongers rather than crush them, because it was better for Google's bottom line.
Where did you get this idea from? They actively promote it.
I think the solution here eventually will be a search engine that lives on your personal computer (it's also what I'm building currently). Ingest content from the web -> sort/filter/view it locally as you choose.
Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?
Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?
* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.