>"Search is dead. The web doesn't need it and neither do we"
Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there.
Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.
Agreed. I think the author is focussing too much on semantics as opposed to intent, which is to filter. His over-emphasis of the word "lost" misleads us into thinking that the fact that we're searching suggests that we lost something to begin with. Perhaps an alternate view is that we didn't lose anything, but we had too much to begin with. Eliminating noise is the real problem. Doing so exposes that which we wanted, which was in fact always in front of us to begin with.
I don't understand his jump from "search is unpleasant and implies loss" to "search is dead". Cleaning bathrooms is also unpleasant, but to say companies specializing in it are dead? I don't think we ever globally solved the lost car keys and lost pets issues, either. It's a fact of life. The world is a complex mess. Thinking you can "just organize it" is hopelessly idealistic.
Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.
Yes, I only really "search" google etc when I am looking for new information (which is quite often). For frequently visited sites there are bookmarks etc.
I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,
Adding to that, "just organizing it" has one substantial problem: people generally disagree in how to organize the world and what they see as priorities (stuff they want to find), so any one way to do this would be the wrong one for the big majority.
The alternative is a directory organized and categorized better. You would then need search to find categories faster than clicking through each level. Google killed their directory. Google Directory is no longer available.
We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web.
If you prefer to browse a directory of the web, visit the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org
The problem is that if you try to delegate responsibility for avoiding the scenario where the information is "lost" to begin with, you have to make sure that the process performing the searching and organizing knows what to look for at least as well as, or better than, the person for who the finding is being performed. I'll be very impressed if you can create an algorithm that knows what I want, up to the second, better than I do.
I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others.
I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.
He's not quite making the leap I thought he would, so I'll make it.
Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better.
I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).
Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result.
Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc.
None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.
I actually have an idea for an alternative that I'm building for my website (artjutsu.com). I've been using it for about 3 months now and I still have a ways to go to make it more useful. I believe it may be something that you're interested in.
I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me.
Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.
I found stumble-upon to be pretty good in this regard (mainly due to the user curated bookmarks) though the quality has gone down a bit recently (thanks to the spammers)
I've found the cases you describe to be one of these areas where Firefox seems to behave way superior than Chrome. It's not entirely as advanced as you describe of course, but usually just typing parts of a few key words returns a list of relevant sites you've ever been to, and the ranking is very good. The algorithm seems to even take into account whether you originally typed in the link etc.
In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.
If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move into this direction.
This is the one reason I stick with Firefox. In Chrome if you search for the name of a YouTube video, with a string you know was in the title of the page, you're very unlikely to get that page as a result. If you're lucky you'll get another page with a link to the page you want in the suggestions list. In Firefox it'll almost always be an instant result, right at the top of the list. It seems strange, but Firefox's search really blows Chrome's out of the water.
The Awesomebar is one of my main reasons why I never left Firefox. It really is just too great. The ability to use wildcards to narrow my searches is too great. Plus adding keywords for searches is too great, if I want to search Youtube, I type yt <search term>, Wikipedia? wk <search term>, these small features are such great boosts to my browsing experience.
Your web history, which is what the address bar searches in Firefox.
In Chrome these two aspects (history and Google search) are blurred, but it's not better for it. I'd say it is a good example of 2 half-assed features not making up for 1 good one.
If you want to search your Web History explicitly, just hit Ctrl-H. This is a case of personal preference. I rarely search my Web History, so I want my Omnibox real estate to be web search. Some people will prefer history ranked above search, others will prefer it the other way. Chrome should give you a preference setting for it.
With Vimperator and the command-line input, it's downright uncanny. For me to open, say, Hacker News, I'll type ":o[tab] hacker new[tab]" and a list of completions will appear. Including the main page, my comments thread, etc.
Completions are based on history and bookmarks and includes not just URLs but page titles, bookmark text, and tags, possibly more (I'm still figuring this out).
Plus you lose all the menubars and crap that steal vertical real estate.
vimperator + tree style tab + ghostery + noscript + adblock plus + all-in-one sidebar + autopager + remove it permanently makes for a pretty slick browsing experience.
Chrome is better IMO as an applications interface. Especially, of course, Google's apps: gmail, maps, G+.
I'm leaning strongly toward a bifurcation of browsers. One mode is information aquisition / research, the other is as an AJAX web-app engine. The two needs differ, and my extensively tweeked Firefox config doesn't play particularly well with applications (GMail's keyboard shortcuts, f'rex). But it makes actually, you know, surfing the web, much better.
>I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).
Doesn't google do this "in the cloud" (ugh) already?
They use your past history to tailor results to you (as DuckDuckGo calls it, "in your bubble"). It's done on their servers because they want the information, and quite frankly, have better resources to compute it on (not to mention they benefit from comparing you to others like you and so on and so forth).
They're not recording any of your activity on those pages (typing, mouse movements, copying, etc) and storing that as well. Mixing in all that usage meta-data is what I'm talking about.
Apart from privacy policy bullshit, if google can save my searches and behavior securely and show me when I need it, it will definitely save me couple of hours a week.
It's sad to me only one person here seems to "get" his point. When I search for something, I still tend to have to open four or five pages to get the answer I'm looking for.
"javascript remove part of an array"
Why when I "search" for that, do I have to parse, in my brain, titles, descriptions (and so on) just to get my answer? I've searched for this a few times before,I know, because I'm terrible at remembering particular functions across languages.
Why can't my browser know when I've found the answer before? Hell, why can't my browser even offer me an option to remember that answer. I'll be happy to highlight it for it, but it's clunky and clumsy with a dumb bookmark. No nuance. Nothing was solved. And god forbid I bookmark every answer I look for; try searching through that.
I see your point, but I don't think it's a real problem. Bookmark a Javascript reference and then you can go there directly, no searching necessary.
If it's specifically previously answered queries you're interested in, maybe something like OneNote would be a better solution? Then you could search your notes and probably find the old answer with a lot less noise.
It looks like Google are working on it. Here's what I see when I search for [regular expression], as I often do to double-check syntax: http://screencast.com/t/A9DoZXes6
Edit: It used to be the case that if you bookmarked the result (and had your bookmarks synced with Google), it'd star the result as well. Seems this feature has gone, though.
Great article. What really strikes me about this is that we just saw Google's new glass video - a device in which search is primarily implied. Google knows search is dumb and wants to fix it, primarily through external devices (android) that are context aware and have access to incredible amounts of personally relative data. They can't kill their money cow, not directly, and haven't shown us how they'll monetize products without relying on ads, so they'll have to leave search alone, at least for now.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. "Semantic Web" was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the first couple paragraphs of the article. I thought he was going to head that direction as well. I was sorely disappointed!
There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc.
Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current.
Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns.
Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.
This seems to be a semantics issue. "To search" has multiple meanings, and only one of them implies loss.
In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.
Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).
This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them.
Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity.
Is anyone else not surprised that the doc is working for microsoft? Perhaps instead of associating himself as a former googler, former professor, and former startup founder, he should assert himself as an individual and an authority on whatever new and exciting product he's working on at mcsft.
I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.
To me this just feels reaching. Sure, he does a good job of highlighting a problem but doesn't really offer any vision for a solution. But why go to Microsoft? GOOG 635.15, MSFT 31.21
The problem with Internet search is that being stupid about it is profitable. The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?
Microsoft failed, miserably, at search. So search doesn't matter. Right?
It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy.
What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon."
Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions.
Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that.
It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works.
EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.
There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.
Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?
Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.
And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free.
Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.
I don't agree entirely with OP, but there is truth in what he says.
> The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well?
One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from sites within that catalog.
This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and greatly improve search productivity, there are many others. That google hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.
Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect? By registering your +1's for sites and users, Google gets a good fix of where you like your information from.
However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up hurting the "open" web.
> Um...isn't this what Google+ is supposed to do, in effect?
Maybe, I have no idea. It lacks the manual grouping though.
>Users do not like manually curating lists
No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search.
>your solution requires that users know what they don't know
No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site)
A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".
disclaimer I work at blekko. What you are describing is like saying that wikipedia is useless because not everyone edits articles. As it turns out, a very small number of people can curate an enormous amount of content on the web, and you can get very good results. try searching for 'cure for headaches /monte' on blekko. the '/monte' slashtag gives you results for bing, blekko and google, with branding removed.
Perhaps we'd be better off with different products for different types of searches. If I need a specific tool or utility, I search the App Store. If I need a review, Yelp. If I need to compare prices, ShopZilla. What I'd love to see if a search engine that only returns authority websites, sort of what Blekko was doing.
I for one would vote for common sense, which would get rid of, say 1/3 of the entire planet's search queries. That amount of course is taken completely off the ceiling, but it get's my point across. That being said, if no one were searching, then no one would be finding. Searching is the thing that makes us learn, I mean, in a school library you also search for a book, right? No books are going to run into your lap by themselves. So, unless some of you geniuses have a way to fix that and make human race even more lazier, do let me know.
"Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for."
One word: competition.
Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is very difficult to get them back.
This guy seems to forget that the reason Google won was because they actually presented search in a usable, non-intrusive way. They were the first company to do search _well_, providing good, reliable results, and also the first company not to surround their search box with a border full of ads.
To me this makes his assertion,
> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.
fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed.
Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.
My thoughts exactly. Here's an excerpt from "In the Plex"
http://goo.gl/5YPtb
"Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” "
I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image.
Well, I just didn't want to go too far into making the debate about the OP personally rather than just evaluating the merits of his claim. It's possible that Google killed his dog and that his anti-Google argument has merit.
I don't think Google were the first to do search well - in my opinion that was DEC's AltaVista. But Altavista and the other keyword matchers suffered from the later pollution of their results by spammers and then compounded the problem by polluting their own search results with barely distinguishable adverts. We stopped trusting them.
Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.
Altavista's search was fast. It was a showcase for DEC's 64 bit Alpha and Ultrix technologies, and the ability for the systems to place the entire search index in memory (as I recall).
The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV.
What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff.
When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted.
It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.
All the author really did was restate the innovator's dilemma for this specific case.
Yahoo's directories were more profitable to it than search and thus search innovations were a threat to existing revenue. (See also: pg's Yahoo article about Yahoo's ad sales)
So innovation in search (and ads) came from outside Yahoo.
Similarly, any innovation that fundamentally threatens Google's ad revenue is unlikely to be pursued by Google itself. So there's no good reason to expect that sort of innovation to come from them.
Hence the example of Siri turning a spoken query into a vocalized answer (whenever it can), rather than a list of links with ads around them.
Though the author is off a bit when they imply there's no room for ads in the process. As most use of Siri still involves looking at the screen, on which it would be trivial to drop a narrow banner ad or promoted link.
Not to mention that he does not seem to understand the Google ad model. From the post:
> Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for.
Google gets paid when their search ads get clicked, not when they get displayed, so to maximize profit it is in their best interest to serve the absolute best results first.
Wow I feel trolled by the author. Come on Google shaped the web as we know today with PageRank and AdWords, isn't it totally unfair to put things in that way? Also the author confuses search with discovery just to prove his point.
I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people.
Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.
You know, if I ever quit Google and joined Microsoft, I still wouldn't write crap like this, even if my boss tried to force me.
Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)
Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google?
So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials?
And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber?
And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] threadOkay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there.
Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.
Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.
I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,
Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?
I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.
Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better.
I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).
Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result.
Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc.
None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.
I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me.
Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.
In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.
If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move into this direction.
In Chrome these two aspects (history and Google search) are blurred, but it's not better for it. I'd say it is a good example of 2 half-assed features not making up for 1 good one.
Completions are based on history and bookmarks and includes not just URLs but page titles, bookmark text, and tags, possibly more (I'm still figuring this out).
Plus you lose all the menubars and crap that steal vertical real estate.
vimperator + tree style tab + ghostery + noscript + adblock plus + all-in-one sidebar + autopager + remove it permanently makes for a pretty slick browsing experience.
Chrome is better IMO as an applications interface. Especially, of course, Google's apps: gmail, maps, G+.
I'm leaning strongly toward a bifurcation of browsers. One mode is information aquisition / research, the other is as an AJAX web-app engine. The two needs differ, and my extensively tweeked Firefox config doesn't play particularly well with applications (GMail's keyboard shortcuts, f'rex). But it makes actually, you know, surfing the web, much better.
Doesn't google do this "in the cloud" (ugh) already?
They use your past history to tailor results to you (as DuckDuckGo calls it, "in your bubble"). It's done on their servers because they want the information, and quite frankly, have better resources to compute it on (not to mention they benefit from comparing you to others like you and so on and so forth).
Just thought I'd point out that Chrome supports different search engines and even politely asks you which one you'd like to use at first launch.
"javascript remove part of an array"
Why when I "search" for that, do I have to parse, in my brain, titles, descriptions (and so on) just to get my answer? I've searched for this a few times before,I know, because I'm terrible at remembering particular functions across languages.
Why can't my browser know when I've found the answer before? Hell, why can't my browser even offer me an option to remember that answer. I'll be happy to highlight it for it, but it's clunky and clumsy with a dumb bookmark. No nuance. Nothing was solved. And god forbid I bookmark every answer I look for; try searching through that.
If it's specifically previously answered queries you're interested in, maybe something like OneNote would be a better solution? Then you could search your notes and probably find the old answer with a lot less noise.
Edit: It used to be the case that if you bookmarked the result (and had your bookmarks synced with Google), it'd star the result as well. Seems this feature has gone, though.
He claims we could do better, but how?
There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc.
Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current.
Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns.
Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.
In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.
Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).
This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them.
Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...
Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"
These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution?
I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices.. Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?
I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.
Share prices are not directly comparable. Market cap is, where MSFT is beating GOOG.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?
It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy.
What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon."
Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions.
Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that.
It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works.
EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.
There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.
Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?
Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.
And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.
> The more ugly blue links you serve up, the more time users have to click on ads. Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for. Why be part of the solution when being part of the problem pays so damn well?
One thing that to me seems like a no brainer is for google to have user-configurable catalogs, or groups of websites. So, if I am logged in, I should be able to make a group called "Poker" and add the 10 websites that I know have good content to that group. So then when I am doing a search on that topic, I can choose my "Poker" catalog and results will only be returned from sites within that catalog.
This is just one extremely simple idea that would be immensely valuable and greatly improve search productivity, there are many others. That google hasn't thought of this idea, or has thought of it but decided it wouldn't be beneficial to users, seems very hard to believe. They have a vested interest in search being good (better than everyone else), but not great.
However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up hurting the "open" web.
>Users do not like manually curating lists No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search.
>your solution requires that users know what they don't know No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site)
A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".
One word: competition.
Google knows that, for its users, Bing or Yahoo is only a click away. They also know that their customer's loyalty is only as strong as their last search and, once a user switches default search engine, it is very difficult to get them back.
To me this makes his assertion,
> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.
fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed.
Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.
"Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” "
I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image.
--- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html
He seems to have an axe to grind on Google, he seems to write negative stuff about them.
Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.
The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV.
What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff.
When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted.
It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.
Yahoo's directories were more profitable to it than search and thus search innovations were a threat to existing revenue. (See also: pg's Yahoo article about Yahoo's ad sales)
So innovation in search (and ads) came from outside Yahoo.
Similarly, any innovation that fundamentally threatens Google's ad revenue is unlikely to be pursued by Google itself. So there's no good reason to expect that sort of innovation to come from them.
Hence the example of Siri turning a spoken query into a vocalized answer (whenever it can), rather than a list of links with ads around them.
Though the author is off a bit when they imply there's no room for ads in the process. As most use of Siri still involves looking at the screen, on which it would be trivial to drop a narrow banner ad or promoted link.
> Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for.
Google gets paid when their search ads get clicked, not when they get displayed, so to maximize profit it is in their best interest to serve the absolute best results first.
I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people.
Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.
Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)
Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google?
So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials?
And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber?
And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google.
Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?