Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages.
Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle”
This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.
I remember in like 5th grade rural PA schools learning about Boolean operators in search engines and falling in love with them. For context, they were presenting alta vista and yahoo kids search as the most popular with Google being a "simple but effective new search platform" we might want to check out.
By the time I graduated highschool you already couldn't trust that Boolean operators would be treated literally. By the time I graduated college, they basically didn't seem to do anything, at best a weak suggestion.
Nowadays quotes don't even seem to be consistently honored.
Even though I miss using boolean operators in search, I doubt that it was ever sustainable outside of specialized search engines. Very few people seem to think in those terms. Many of those who do would still have difficulty forming complex queries.
I suspect the real problem is that search engines ceased being search engines when they stopped taking things literally and started trying to interpret what people mean. Then they became some sort of poor man's AI. Now that we have LLMs, of course it is going to replace the poor excuse for search engines that exist today. We were heading down that road already, and it actually summarizes what is out there.
People were learning. Just like with mice and menus, people are capable of learning new skills and querying search engines was one. I remember when it was considered a really "n00b" thing to type a full question into a search engine.
Then Google decided to start enforcing that, because they had this idea that they would be able to divine your "intent" from a "natural question" rather than just matching documents including your search terms.
> just make search engines look for text in webpages.
Google’s verbatim search option roughly does that for me (plus an ad blocker that removes ads from the results page). I have it activated by default as a search shortcut.
(To activate it, one can add “tbs=li:1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.)
To me the stupidest thing was the removal of things like + and -. You can say it's because of Google+ but annoyingly duckduckgo also doesn't seem to honor it. Kagi seems to and I hope they don't follow the others down the road of stupid
Funny, I can’t even test this because I’d need to know another neat trick to get my browser to let me actually edit the URL.
Seems that Firefox on mobile allows editing the url for most pages, but on google search results pages, the url bar magically turns into a did-you-mean alternate search selector where I cannot see nor edit a url. Surprised but not surprised.
Sure, there’s a work around for this too, somehow. But I don’t want to spend my life collecting and constantly updating a huge list of temporary hacks to fix things that others have intentionally broken.
You can select verbatim search manually on the Google results page under Search tools > All results > Verbatim. You can also have a bookmark with a dummy search activating it, so you can then type your search terms into the Google search field instead of into the address bar.
Yes, it’s annoying that you can’t set it as the default on Google search itself.
> Maybe it is naive but I think search would probably work again if they could roll back code to 10 or 15 years ago and just make search engines look for text in webpages.
Even more naive, but my personal preference: just ban all advertising. The fact that people will pay for ChatGPT implies people will also pay for good search if the free alternative goes away.
Google wasn’t crushed by spam, they decided to stop doing text search and build search bubbles that are user specific, location-specific, decided to surface pages that mention search terms in metadata instead of in text users might read, etc. Oh yeah, and about a decade before LLMs were actually usable, they started to sabotage simple substring searches and kind of force this more conversational interface. That’s when simple search terms stopped working very well, and you had to instead ask yourself “hmm how would a very old person or a small child phrase this question for a magic oracle”
This is how we get stuff like: Did you mean “when did Shakespeare die near my location”? If anyone at google cared more about quality than printing money, that thirsty gambit would at least be at the bottom of the page instead of the top.