I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away.
Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter
Price? Merely a construct.
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.
Yeah, but as you're "going mad" at Facebook, you keep engaging with the site.
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.
Maybe I'm just dense and there's some weird psychology thing FB is doing here. but I can't think of any reason why ignoring search parameters would be intentional, especially for a classifieds search! Even if it's for sponsored listings, they're just bogging down the conversion rate.
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.
It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.
I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.
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.
Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched.
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.
I've stopped waiting for sites to do what I want in terms of features and functionality -- their incentives and mine very rarely align.
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.
I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well...
Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
The current state of things makes the problem seem worse than it is, but it is not a simple problem. Should a page about "L'acteur Gérard Philipe" be found by a search for "gerard", without the accent, through collation? Probably, but should quoted/verbatim searches also do collation? How about the non-verbatim but misspelled "gérard philippe"? What if the search has a correct spelling, but not the page? What if the search is for "ジェラール", or if the page only has the name "ジェラール"? Should "acteur" find "l'acteur", and vice-versa? How about "comédien gérard", even though "comédien" does not appear on the page? Should a search for a "theater" find "theatre", and vice-versa?
More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?
While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical operators, etc. which are mentioned as generally rotting capabilities.
Honestly I haven't found kagi that useful in the last 12 months. I used to be a paying member but then dropped it because the results didn't feel more useful than just asking the free versions of Gemini, claude, etc
Tbh I too have experienced the same but I think that is just what we are moving towards. I mean everything is now shifting to semantic search and it is better for natural language yeah it sucks that literals dont work as good now but "Optimization".
> what if we just show people the results we think they want
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.
I've been going mad with facebook search. It ignores every search parameter. Geofence? Here's results from 500mi away. Length of item? nah here's soemthing 50% shorter Price? Merely a construct.
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.
Yeah, but as you're "going mad" at Facebook, you keep engaging with the site.
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.
Maybe I'm just dense and there's some weird psychology thing FB is doing here. but I can't think of any reason why ignoring search parameters would be intentional, especially for a classifieds search! Even if it's for sponsored listings, they're just bogging down the conversion rate.
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.
Amazon has gotten that bad.
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.
It’s wild how broken search has become, LLM made it worse but it was already downhill prior to that. Even Reddit forces you login to search within a subreddit and displays the annoying “Best place on internet” overlay after staying on the site for 2 min. I just use AnythingLLM with DuckDuckGo + local LLM model to do searches now.
Most sites required you to log in to do a search. At least every forum that I've ever used was like this.
"Computer. Search result. Relevant."
I'm increasingly thinking that the only solution may be to have a search index with human editorial control. As much as I think Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO and spam. It feels like they have mostly given up. Any automatic solution will always be an arms race where they will be one step behind. The only way to get ahead is to ensure that all content has to pass through human moderation before it can be included -- that's the only way I can think of to break the cat and mouse game dynamics at play here.
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.
Figuring out how to scale it may be a challenge, but it may be worth considering something along the lines of the directory sites that used to be the main method of discovery on the web prior to the rise of search engines, which itself can be searched.
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're fighting a battle against SEO and spam
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.
> Google deserves scorn for how badly they have made the search experience on the web, we have to remember that they're fighting a battle against SEO
Where did you get this idea from? They actively promote it.
On one hand they fight SEO and spam, on the other they take advertising money to manipulate the order of search results...
I've stopped waiting for sites to do what I want in terms of features and functionality -- their incentives and mine very rarely align.
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.
I had a huge rant a couple weeks ago about how I couldn't find anything in discord's search, it used to be pretty decent, but it's been getting worse as well...
Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?
The current state of things makes the problem seem worse than it is, but it is not a simple problem. Should a page about "L'acteur Gérard Philipe" be found by a search for "gerard", without the accent, through collation? Probably, but should quoted/verbatim searches also do collation? How about the non-verbatim but misspelled "gérard philippe"? What if the search has a correct spelling, but not the page? What if the search is for "ジェラール", or if the page only has the name "ジェラール"? Should "acteur" find "l'acteur", and vice-versa? How about "comédien gérard", even though "comédien" does not appear on the page? Should a search for a "theater" find "theatre", and vice-versa?
More importantly, how do you rank the thousands of hits?
While the article is more about specialized search (videos, shopping) for general web search, Kagi has to be mentioned. It's been so long since I've used another search engine (years), I'm generally shocked to see what they look like and how they behave now. It makes web search just work, including things like exact phrases with quotes, logical operators, etc. which are mentioned as generally rotting capabilities.
Honestly I haven't found kagi that useful in the last 12 months. I used to be a paying member but then dropped it because the results didn't feel more useful than just asking the free versions of Gemini, claude, etc
Tbh I too have experienced the same but I think that is just what we are moving towards. I mean everything is now shifting to semantic search and it is better for natural language yeah it sucks that literals dont work as good now but "Optimization".
> what if we just show people the results we think they want
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.
I use protonmail and the search is genuinely atrocious. Like the word can be in the title and it still won't find it.
If I quote a search terms, every returned result must contain that string. Even if that means showing zero results. Anything else is madness.