Comments about Web Search: Prompted by a Hacker News Thread

November 13, 2020

I spotted a Web search related threat on Hacker News. You can locate the comments at this link. Several observations:

  1. Metasearch. Confusion seems to exist between a dedicated Web search system like Bing, Google, and Yandex and metasearch systems like DuckDuckGo and Startpage. Dedicated Web search systems require considerable effort, but there is less appreciation for the depth of the crawl, the index updating cycle, and similar factors.
  2. Competitors to Google. The comments present a list of search systems which are relatively well known. Omitted are some other services; for example, iSeek, Swisscows, and 50kft.
  3. Bias. The comments do not highlight some of the biases of Web search systems; for example, when are pages reindexed, what pages are on a slow or never update cycle, blacklisted, or processed against a stop word list.

So what?

  1. Many profess to be experts at finding information online. The comments suggest that perception is different from reality.
  2. Locating content on publicly accessible Web sites is more difficult than at any other time in my professional career in the online information sector.
  3. Locating relevant information is increasingly time consuming because predictive, personalized, and wisdom of crowd results don’t work; for example, run this query on any of the search engines:

Voyager search

Did your results point to the Voyager Labs’s system, the UK HR company’s search engine, a venture capital firm, or a Lucene repackager in Orange County? What about Voyager patents?  What about Voyager customers?

How can one disambiguate when the index scope is unknown, entity extraction is almost non existent, and deduplication almost laughable? Real time? Ho ho ho.

One can do this work manually. Who wants to volunteer for that. The most innovative specialized search vendors try to automate the process. Some of these systems are helpful; most are not.

Is search getting better? Rerun that Voyager search. See for yourself.

Without field codes, Boolean, and a mechanism to search across publicly accessible content domains, Web search reveals its shortcomings to those who care to look.

Not many look, including professionals at some of the better known Web search outfits.

Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2020

Comments

Comments are closed.

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta