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Why does every site's search now insist on giving me what I don't search for?

33 points by sathackr ↗ HN
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.

20 comments

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toldyouso2022
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
didgetmaster
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.

daemonologist
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.)
m463
This is so ridiculous and so true.

it's even worse because the searches and even sidebar checkboxes don't let you filter OUT things.

   "dishwasher -smart"
   "lawnmower without wifi"
It reminds me of the article about supermarkets who periodically rearrange the entire store to bump sales (to the distress of customers)
toomuchtodo
Use Kagi
guiraldelli
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.

pcunite
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.
Apreche
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.

yjftsjthsd-h
> 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.

didgetmaster
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.
add-sub-mul-div
Deterministic search is power for you, manipulated search is power for them.
more_corn
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?
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blackhaj7
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
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linuxdaemon
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?
fallinghawks
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.