[HN Gopher] Customizing Web Search
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Customizing Web Search
Author : npilk
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-01-23 15:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.npilk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.npilk.com)
| webmaven wrote:
| From the post:
|
| _> In the end, though, Google is heavily invested in users
| landing on their result pages so they can be served ads. So it 's
| hard to imagine they would voluntarily redirect people away, even
| if they are clearly searching for a specific page._
|
| The sad part of this is that Google, in the "10 blue links" era,
| actually _did_ optimize for users clicking through to a result
| (and not immediately coming back to click another, which
| indicates the page wasn 't satisfactory). This extended well into
| the early AdWords period where optimization extended to showing
| highly relevant ads in the sidebar or at the top of the results.
|
| Things seem to have started to go wrong first with a series of
| design changes that made it harder to distinguish between ads and
| search results, and accelerated with the introduction of info
| boxes sometimes scraped from external sources and integrating
| results from other Google services (such as maps).
|
| Since those changes, Google seems to have been optimizing for two
| use cases: either the user does a search and then stops
| (indicating they received the answer they were looking for) or
| they click through to a Google property or an ad and don't come
| back to the search engine. Clicking through to a search result is
| a lower priority.
|
| The problem, as I see it, is that the first case of searching and
| then stopping also indicates "these results are garbage, why even
| bother" which dilutes the signal. You can potentially distinguish
| the two cases of 'completely satisfied' vs. 'completely
| unsatisfied' with a bunch of other weaker signals (clicking
| through to the long tail of SERPs, trying a bunch of search
| variations one after the other), but most users today won't try
| further no matter what (Google, ironically, has all along been
| training users that the first result page of the first query they
| try satisfices).
|
| In short, Google has been shooting themselves in the foot by
| muddying the strongest signal it had for search quality.
|
| I imagine that Google's solution to this involves behavioral
| tracking/profiling and analysis as in "is the user in the 'easily
| frustrated' bucket" to amplify or discard the weaker signals
| appropriately, but clearly whatever they're doing isn't working
| as well as the unambiguous signal did.
| tksb wrote:
| Re: iOS Safari default search conundrum: You could use something
| like Launch Center Pro[1] to pass queries to your search URL in
| Safari. Minor convention change (eg. initiate search from LC vs.
| directly in Safari) but it's still at least one less step.
|
| [1: https://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/]
| rsoto wrote:
| One thing I really liked about Firefox was that it used to do two
| different types of searches. The search bar acts as it does
| today, but the nav bar used to redirect to the first result. This
| was very useful because sometimes you just know what you're
| looking for (as per the OP's example, "tom hanks imdb"), while
| other times you are going to do some digging.
|
| Now that I'm using Kagi as my main search engine, I wish I could
| tell Firefox to use another search engine in my nav bar, and when
| I'm incognito. Mozilla used to let us modify a lot of things (via
| the UI, or the about:config panel), but from a few years it has
| been removing lots of customization options.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > One thing I really liked about Firefox was that it used to do
| two different types of searches. The search bar acts as it does
| today, but the nav bar used to redirect to the first result.
|
| You can actually do this yourself if you set your search engine
| to DuckDuckGo and prepend your search with a backslash (\, e.g.
| "\bats" or "\tom hanks imdb" in your case -- works great). I
| discovered this by accident; it's very useful.
| npilk wrote:
| Nice! I had discovered that adding a '!' does this on DDG,
| but didn't know about the backslash - cool tip.
|
| I will say that it's nice to be able to add the exclamation
| point at the end, instead of putting it at the start like the
| backslash. That way, you can decide after you type your query
| whether you want to go directly to the first link or see the
| full results.
| rambambram wrote:
| Nice idea! And your search bar to test it out worked well for me.
|
| I'm in the process of collecting local HTML files from all kinds
| of pages I find interesting (I use an FF plugin called
| WebScrapBook for this). Eventually, I want to be able to have
| some locally running search bar in my browser (thanks LAMP stack)
| that first checks my local library of information, and then gives
| me the option to search online with DuckDuckGo.
| feep wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I've been noodling with this sort of idea for years. Never got
| around to it.
|
| Thanks for a simple starter. I will be modifying this for my
| needs at my leisure.
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