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For clarification, “red queen” means a conflict between two or more entities where the cost of engagement grows, but the relative advantage does not change.

Simply put, search engines have been at war with SEO for over 30-years, which has significantly raised the bar not only being a search engine, but producing content; not to mention knowing how to search for information. With the introduction of machine generated content, information wars between countries, global dependence of online commerce & information, etc — the speed of change shows no signs of letting up.

In my opinion, for the average person, knowing how to search for information is the real issue, not that the quality of information available has become worse or that Google has become a worse search engine. If anything, Google has reduced its advantage search capabilities not for financial gain, but because average user is just too lazy to learn how to search and keep up with changes required to continue to be an advanced searcher.



To your last point, I don’t quite agree. Google’s incentives are misaligned such that keeping you on Google.com just a little longer is better than not because you are more likely to click on an ad.

But also yes the users and the UI both fail. When I used to search for something I would type in something like “gutter clog clean” but slowly started noticing that Google likes longer sentences like “how do I clean a clog in my gutters?”. In pursuit of making Knowsmore (from Ralph Breaks the Internet), Google lost the power user features. Search would be infinitely better if they actually fucking respected literal mode and stopped trying to treat me like an idiot with no attention span. Having search results that contain one out of like 8 words in my query and asking me if I want to include others and then when I say I do still showing me results without them is broken UI and not a user problem.


Google search, from very early on, considered it a success metric when users went quickly to a result. I have no idea how that factors into the current surely hideously complex ranking algorithms, though.

As for the parsing of queries, that's probably based on how most users use search. Not everyone is familiar with keyword -based search. I expect they've done tons of A/B tests to determine what kind of query interpretation makes most users get better results. We're just not "most users".


>Search would be infinitely better if they actually fucking respected literal mode and stopped trying to treat me like an idiot with no attention span. Having search results that contain one out of like 8 words in my query and asking me if I want to include others and then when I say I do still showing me results without them is broken UI and not a user problem.

Use Verbatim?


Agree verbatim in this specific situation is likely answer, though did not point it out since they clearly think they understand how to search; verbatim has been an option as long as non-verbatim search has been used by Google.

Beyond that, complaining Google does not do XYZ misses the point. Google is a search engine designed for the average user and the average user does not want verbatim search. They also do not want: advanced search operators, true Boolean search, regular expressions, API access to search, open source code, real-time streams of pages Google’s crawling, etc.

What they do want and always have is natural language based searches in there language of preference with clarifying responses from the search engine in natural language; that is, they want to treat a search engine like a person and be treated like a person; which was odd that they referenced Knowsmore, since Knowsmore [1] used keyword based searches, not plain language searches.

Google is not the primary problem, the average user is the issue. Unless people realize that — they’re fighting in a war they do not even understand.

To make it even more clear, Google is easily able to detect and block users blocking ADs, but they do not. More than 60% of users still don’t block ADs; not because they love ADs, but because effort to figure it out simply is not worth it to them, they like ADs, etc.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T3wiGSXbeQE


>What they do want and always have is natural language based searches in there language of preference with clarifying responses from the search engine in natural language; that is, they want to treat a search engine like a person and be treated like a person

I agree with you but Google is not yet at that point where it can act and serve people like an Answer Machine that knows everything; both the people's preferences and the perfect answers.

>Google is not the primary problem, the average user is the issue. Unless people realize that — they’re fighting in a war they do not even understand.

Again I agree that casual users are the problem but how we can help them? This is the The Innovator's Dilemma[0] where if we ask casual users what new stuff they want from Google Search, they will answer "nothing". Because even they themselves don't know how their UX can be or should be improved and on top of that they are satisfied with Google's mediocrity. They would just respond "Google is Google".

>Beyond that, complaining Google does not do XYZ misses the point. Google is a search engine designed for the average user and the average user does not want verbatim search. They also do not want: advanced search operators, true Boolean search, regular expressions, API access to search, open source code, real-time streams of pages Google’s crawling, etc.

Complexity of constructing "complex" search queries needs to be simplified so casual users can use such features and queries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma


>To your last point, I don’t quite agree. Google’s incentives are misaligned such that keeping you on Google.com just a little longer is better than not because you are more likely to click on an ad.

I agree, which leads me to the conclusion that subscription is the best way to avoid this conflict of interest. Unfortunately, most of the world won't subscribe to a search engine, and doesn't seem to mind ads - to a degree. With Google looking more and more like AltaVista before its demise (to Google), my conclusion is that Google will strangle itself out of existence and give way for the next "new, streamlined, not-full-of-ads" competitor.


Here's a search engine that I'm subscribed to: https://kagi.com

In the 20-30 searches that I do in a day, I still have to google about half of them. Either because it's stuff Google does well (currency conversion, for example), or Kagi just doesn't get what I'm trying to search.

I remember starting out with the Internet searching on Altavista and Yahoo and Lycos. The information that was present was nowhere near as now, and it was more "exploratory". Nowadays people just kind of know what they want and just wants to quickly get there.


> In the 20-30 searches that I do in a day, I still have to google about half of them. Either because it's stuff Google does well (currency conversion, for example), or Kagi just doesn't get what I'm trying to search.

Currency conversion is not technically a search. It is question answering and Kagi capabilities are still being built. Google only has a 20 year headstart. Can you report all such cases to kagifeedback.org so they are on our radar?


Thanks, currency conversion was an example off the top of my head only. I am active on orionfeedback and kagifeedback, I find that they're really prompt and effective in answering to feedback.

The other examples are a bit harder to describe and I can't quite describe how Google gets it right. I think I might need more time to describe it out, as it involves search in another language.


Currency conversion is nothing you have to sell yourself to Google for. Just bookmark a bank, a financial or an academic research site that seems trustworthy. I have used the same ones for over 20 years, probably found them using Altavista at the time...


What about one funded by universities or libraries as a research project?

There have been lots of no ads (for now) attempts. DDG had like one small ad at one point. But people didn’t leave in droves. It’s almost like people are ok with ads.




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