[HN Gopher] The Vindication of Ask Jeeves
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The Vindication of Ask Jeeves
Author : marban
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-03-06 03:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| [deleted]
| petercooper wrote:
| A few years ago I was looking up US trademarks and randomly tried
| Ask Jeeves and noticed all the registrations were dead. I've just
| looked again and some random guy in Seattle has a registration
| going through for it as we speak.. so maybe Jeeves will return in
| some form or another.
| iafiaf wrote:
| HotBot represent!
| jszymborski wrote:
| Anyone able to speculate on who the "unnamed third-party" Ask
| outsourced their search to in 2010?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| harry8 wrote:
| Search appears to be dead.
|
| Recent example. I've got a pine64 a64 board with an ES9023 audio
| "POT" daughter board that runs and boots linux using armbian
| fine. Doesn't know about the ES9023 audio DAC, spdif and i2s(?)
| rca output. Ok so first thing I think of is, what kernel module
| is the driver for it so I know if it is even available or do I
| need to compile a kernel.
|
| Sure pine64 documentation is woeful unless you want to read
| schematics or something so it could have been there, but it
| isn't. This should not be a hard question to answer with a search
| engine.
|
| pine64 a64 audio es9203 linux kernel driver
|
| Try it. Watch google do the wrong thing no matter what you do.
| Quote. allintext: you name it. It's nuts. Google wants to show
| you what it wants, not what you want. That appears to be what it
| is. You want to find something, get stuffed. Google is no use to
| find things. Google is good to show you things it chooses in the
| general area of your interest. Ok but that is not a "search"
| engine. It's a recommendation system, fine if that is what you
| want but a flipping diaster of orwellian proportions if that
| recommendation engine is the best we have for search and we
| haven't noted it and responded.
|
| I'm more likely to get the answer faster posting about how
| garbage google search his than repeatedly trying different google
| "tricks" just crazy.
|
| So yeah the answer I really want is what else can we use that
| actually does search?
| Nition wrote:
| What's the ideal result you'd want for that search?
|
| This is what I get: https://i.imgur.com/t0roTR2.png
| harry8 wrote:
| So the question I want to answer is "What is the name of the
| kernel module that drives the es9023 daughter board on the
| pine64 a64"
|
| Which of those results are you recommending as the answer?
|
| edit: completely and totally prepared to accept I'm being a
| moron. The name of the driver, the link where you got it and
| how you got the link from google and I will decry it loudly
| here.
| chiph wrote:
| I gave ChatGPT a try - it just tells you to use lsmod and
| modinfo
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I used Altavista and Yahoo in that time.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| As I recall, Altavista and Lycos tended to prove the most
| useful for me in the pre-Google era. Yahoo was hit or miss and
| Excite was middling.
|
| I'd bet that the things being searched for influenced which
| engines were best for a given individual. It's too bad there's
| no way to see what each excelled at.
| shiftoutbox wrote:
| Uhh we are talking about ask.com / iac and the same idiots who
| made the ask tollbar; Hey they also claimed they did yoga in
| their data center too . Let's talk about that
| spicybright wrote:
| That doesn't have much to do with the subject of the article.
| Why stay salty about a tool bar and yoga 20+ years later?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I just want an effective boolean search. I don't want it
| automatically fixing type-os or including synonyms in results. If
| I remember a specific phrase, or misspelling from some random
| blog, I want to type that in and find it. Google search has
| gotten significantly worse since they started trying to be a
| generalized question/answer tool. Of course it doesn't help that
| most of the internet is walled off now. I suspect that AI search
| will be very useful for looking up information, but awful for
| searching webpages.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Google PageRank was a breakthrough, but IIRC, another huge
| search improvement was Google AND'ing search terms instead of
| OR'ing them: if you searched for _apple pie_ , AltaVista would
| return a list of pages that include _apple_ OR _pie_ (perhaps a
| lot of useless hits about Apple Computer and cherry pies),
| while would Google return only pages with _apple_ AND _pie_.
| xnx wrote:
| Is quoting terms not working for you? I don't think I've had
| problems with any specific searches when I explicitly quote my
| terms. e.g. "this is exactly the phrase I want to search" or
| "search" "these" "words"
| JohnFen wrote:
| Google's quoting has never worked well for me since they made
| the shift away from keyword searching. Oddly, before they
| made that shift, it did work.
| Izkata wrote:
| You also have to go into the "Tools" menu at the top of the
| results and change "All results" to "Verbatim", otherwise
| it'll probably include conjugations even with the quotes.
| [deleted]
| swatcoder wrote:
| Google search can't do what you want because there's just too
| much noise in the "crawl everything" internet and the noise
| grows exponentially faster than the techniques that can
| automatically organize and rank it. There was a period of time
| where the ratio between indexing techniques and content worked,
| but we're leaving that era now. All those things you hate about
| modern Google are necessary survival strategies for this model.
|
| AI search can't solve that problem. What it _can_ do is give up
| on the idea of surfacing specific sources in favor of
| synthesizing answers from slurry of all the content, finding
| (or hallucinating) signal in the noise.
|
| If you want strict keywords and boolean operators, you can't
| expect to find that from the universal search engines that
| you're used to. You want to look for and support curated
| engines that aggressively restrict what they index so that it
| contains high signal and low noise. Internal walled garden
| searches do this. Marginalia does this. Others probably do too.
| That's what you're looking for.
| eitland wrote:
| > Google search can't do what you want because there's just
| too much noise in the "crawl everything" internet and the
| noise grows exponentially faster than the techniques that can
| automatically organize and rank it.
|
| Go check search.marginalia.nu. Do some sample searches about
| history or linux or git or something and see how it often
| outclasses Google.
|
| Then ponder the fact that it is run by one Swede and it runs
| on one (admittedly beefy but nothing unusual) workstation in
| his living room.
|
| Personally at least I have seen enough to have made up my
| mind that it isn't impossible to do better than Google, they
| just don't want to.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Did you read my whole comment? I even mention Marginalia!
| ravenstine wrote:
| _Supposedly._
|
| The trouble is there's no way for me to know how true this
| noise theory is. I'm given no option by these search engines
| to "just show me all the crap." What search engines do today
| is so filtered and heuristical that there are apparently
| phrases and ideas that have never been expressed on the
| internet ever, or at least that's the impression I'd get if I
| was more naive.
|
| Besides, it's not like there isn't noise _anyway_. Ever click
| on the top results only to find that nothing matches your
| query and probably never did?
| Clent wrote:
| Google is not a search engine. It is a curation service. It
| only searches this collection of data that it decided was
| worthy of curation.
|
| Google tells us this is for the best. We are forced to take
| their word for it since their algorithms are not public.
| Google tells us this is also for the best.
| allturtles wrote:
| Do you really expect them to maintain an entire other
| version of the search product just to prove to skeptics
| that that version is not good?
| ravenstine wrote:
| No.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > All those things you hate about modern Google are necessary
| survival strategies for this model.
|
| The reason I doubt this is because right now, I can find what
| I'm looking for through keyword searches on search engines
| that allow that, where I very often can't through the likes
| of Google.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| What search engines allow this?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Very few, but the closest approximation that I can find
| right now is DDG. Kagi might fulfill this role better. I
| haven't investigated it yet, though.
| substation13 wrote:
| Sometimes I want a simpler system so that I can understand how
| it works in order to make it do exactly what I want. This is
| like driving your own car.
|
| Other times, I want an intelligent system that figures out what
| I really meant and take care of the details. This is like
| having a chauffeur.
|
| Which is better? It depends. But Google seems to think that
| only chauffeur style is important.
| OJFord wrote:
| Much as I'm a bit of a sceptic, this is actually quite a
| compelling aspect of ChatGPT isn't it? It's not even the LLM
| _necessarily_ , it's the interaction and the NLP: 'those
| results are not what I'm looking for [remove all those], I
| remember something I saw before [if you have access to my
| history..] which included the phrase 'hunter2' [refine for
| exactly that, not hunter without number, not different
| numbers, not synonyms for hunter]'
| JohnFen wrote:
| When I'm looking for web pages, though, I actively don't
| want to use natural language. Natural language is too vague
| and open to interpretation. To make it work, you have to
| get very precise in your wording, and it's just easier to
| get the right precision using keywords and operators.
| _puk wrote:
| Why does it have to be so binary?
|
| Natural Language is great for loosely defining what you
| want, whilst literal searches are great for finding the
| exact occurrence of something you know you are looking
| for.
|
| I can imagine something like:
|
| Search for the error code: "XY123", triggered by product
| "ABC" when I try and start it bound to port 123. I'm
| using version 1.0.0, and want results from the official
| documentation or sites of good repute. Only include
| solved problems, and give me references in your results.
|
| Granted, a lot of that could be covered by special
| incantations in a more literal search, but that just
| feels far more flexible.
|
| Note I'm trying to delineate between literal (in quotes)
| and Natural Language in this example if it's not clear.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I suppose it depends on what you're searching for? In
| your example, you're looking for an answer to a very
| specific question. That's more of an "answer engine" sort
| of thing than a web search.
|
| When I'm searching the web, I'm very rarely doing that
| sort of search. I'm more usually looking for a variety of
| websites that talk about a thing, not for a specific
| answer.
| KMag wrote:
| Early Google was somewhat intentionally optimized for long-tail
| searches, the thought being that common searches are served
| fine by most search engines and it's the difficult long-tail
| searches where people actually try other search engines and
| cause people to switch their defaults/habits.
|
| I suspect it's very difficult to properly define a machine
| learning objective to specifically optimize for the long-tail.
| Without very careful crafting, I suspect learn-to-rank
| optimizes more evenly, resulting in poorer ranking performance
| in the difficult long-tail.
|
| Back 20 years ago when I worked on web search infra at Google,
| a bunch of the "do what I mean, not what I say" features were
| disabled if you used any of the search operators in your query.
| If I recall correctly, it even used its "Kansas" database of
| per-user data to check if you'd recently used any search
| operators. Most of that would be very difficult and/or costly
| to implement with learn-to-rank, though, I guess you could pass
| a "power_user" boolean to learn-to-rank to try and regain some
| of the lost functionality.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Are you sure? From the original Google paper:
|
| _In fact, as of November 1997, only one of the top four
| commercial search engines finds itself (returns its own
| search page in response to its name in the top ten results)._
| [0]
|
| [0]http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
| KMag wrote:
| Circa 2003, Yahoo wasn't terrible. By our internal metrics,
| Yahoo search had better results than Bing before Yahoo
| started using Bing as their back-end. By that point, I
| suspect all of the major search engines were using some
| form of link-graph based ranking signals, likely modified
| both for scalability and avoiding the PageRank patent.
|
| Maybe I was a bit loose with my definition of "Early
| Google", but in the 2003-2010 time frame, the major search
| engines had pretty well figured out the most common 95% to
| 99% of queries.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Most of the time when I have a tool that tries to guess what I
| want, I hate it. I hate it with a deep and burning hatred. I
| call it the "Clippy" effect.
| cubefox wrote:
| We a right at the point in history were this is about to
| change. I tried "new Bing" and it understands better than
| ChatGPT while also being able to use online search. And
| Google's Bard is just a few months, or weeks, away. Just a
| few years ago (pre GPT-3) this would have been unthinkable.
| pphysch wrote:
| Suggestions/autocomplete are force multipliers that can also
| go <1. When they are accurate, they save you a lot of
| typing/work. When they are inaccurate, you waste time
| processing the noise and have to do the work anyways.
| munk-a wrote:
| Here's the problem (and why I personally hate overly smart
| IDEs) - my job is a creative one where most of the time I'm
| thinking and want my hands to be on autopilot. Writing out
| a skeleton class definition is something I can do
| blindfolded it takes almost no effort - an autocompleter
| getting that skeleton wrong (or writing a skeleton for a
| class with no interfaces and requiring me to backtrack
| through its garbled crap) takes effort. Reacting to things
| (observing the world and acting in response) will always
| take more mental effort than mindlessly slamming out some
| rote BS.
|
| IDEs optimize a part of my job that I honestly could care
| less about (writing massive amounts of green field code) at
| the expense of making occasional mistakes when I'm doing my
| actual job (examining and tweaking existing code). This
| trade off is not worth it.
|
| I'll uh - I'll keep function autocompletion though. Trying
| to remember whether my coworker called it `getWidget()` or
| `WidgetRegistry::get()` is something I don't need to waste
| brain cells on.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The history of useless code-automation tools is long.
| Back in the day, it was generating boilerplate API code
| for Windows etc. Write an app in a day!
|
| But the lie was, in an app development schedule of 2000
| hours, the tool made the 6-hour window definition effort
| into a 1-hour effort.
|
| So what? It was good for demo-ware showing what an app
| might look like. But pointless for real work. Popular
| among the vaporware crowd, marketing and pitching etc.
| But not for software engineers.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > fixing type-os
|
| I see what you did there ("typos").
|
| Your reasons for search usefulness declining somehow ignore the
| elephant in the room: SEO. Because search as a business tends
| to be about advertising monetization, that's the system that
| gets gamed.
|
| Want better search? Or at least a differently-skewed search?
| Find a way to make it not be about ad money.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Fixing typos in "search" illustrates the difference between
| "search" as a means to find out whether something exists in a
| database versus a means for an advertising company to direct
| the searcher to the most optimum page for supporting
| advertising services.1
|
| What is the difference between showing someone the winning
| advertisement versus showing them the winning "search result".1
| The advertising company makes a decision according to secret
| criteria which ad/search result to show. A long, successful
| tradition of using alphabetical or chronological sorting for
| information, objective criteria, is jettisoned in favour of
| manipulation for commercial benefit of a middleman. The
| advertising company gets to decide what comes first and last,
| according to subjective criteria. Then make it infeasible to
| see what is last.
|
| Google has admitted that in the majority of cases, an
| appropriate ad does not exist to pair with a given search
| query. That is what I call the noncommercial web. It has little
| direct value to "tech" companies and advertisers. Yet "tech"
| company intermediaries want to surveil and control our access
| to it nonetheless. As the parent states, "most of the internet
| is walled off."
|
| In sum, the advertising company, and "AI", allow people to
| search for web content that exists, cf. allowing people to
| search for whether certain web content exists. The advertising
| company will make "suggestions". However not all content that
| exists is made searchable by the advertising company. If the
| content has no commercial value, e.g., it is "unpopular", it is
| considered garbage.3
|
| 1. When we search Wikipedia, typos do not result in "guessing"
| by an advertising company. If something does not exist,
| Wikipedia does not try to guess "what we want".
|
| 2. The term "winning" applies because the advertising company
| makes the process an actual auction or an effective contest.
|
| 3. If the web is mostly garbage, then its users should be
| entitled to know that through discovery. It seems as if the
| discoverable web, the one optimised for the advertising
| company, is mostly commercial garbage anyway. It is difficult
| to be serious about "AI" when it is trained on mostly garbage.
| klooney wrote:
| I'm really on the fence about Kagi. Results are good, but I'm
| just so accustomed to search being free.
| eitland wrote:
| For most techies in the west at least the price of Kagi
| should be next to nothing.
|
| I personally will happily pay $10 a month for a search
| engine that works and takes search quality seriously and
| has its incentives aligned with my best interest.
|
| And no, Google, Bing and DDG are utterly broken for many of
| the searches I do every week and I have written about it a
| number of times here and elsewhere since 10 years ago.
| knoebber wrote:
| I'm a happy paying user... I almost never have to !g. I
| tried DDG before kagi, and it just seemed like a worse
| version of google to me. I definitely prefer the kagi
| results.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past year
| I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has become a
| place that serves the advertisers more than the users.
| Adding more and more ads to the top of the feed, doing
| effectively nothing to combat SEO spam (that generally has
| AdSense on the site), etc.
|
| Kagi comparatively feels like a search engine that serves
| me as the user. It's a hard difference to spot, but the
| results _feel_ higher quality because I've curated them to
| suit what I actually want to see when I search the web.
|
| If there's a site that's unreadable due to adblock-block
| nonsense or is generally very low quality, I can block it
| and move on. If there's something that generally has good
| content, I can raise it to prioritize it in results, or if
| it's something that I know I'll want to see a lot of (like
| AWS documentation when relevant), I can pin it to the top
| of the feed.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > It's hard to articulate, but especially in the past
| year I've noticed that Google (the search engine) has
| become a place that serves the advertisers more than the
| users.
|
| Not hard at all to articulate... Google is not a search
| engine, but an ad platform.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/
|
| "It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set
| of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google -- or with
| us?"
| user3939382 wrote:
| I like paying because I know my interests as the user are
| Kagi's priority. With these "free" solutions of course the
| priority is the advertisers which is often at conflict with
| users.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Fixing typos and ordering results by relevance instead of
| recency enhance user experience. They also help serve better
| ads, but do you really want the top result to be the page
| that was first indexed 3 minutes ago?
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| An "answer machine" such as Ask Jeeves is a fantastic and
| desirable tool. So is a search engine.
|
| I think a lot of people (with Google's encouragement) don't see
| them as two different sorts of tasks, but they are. In an ideal
| world, we'd have both.
|
| If Google (or whoever) wants to be an answer machine, that's
| cool. My fear is that it will be done instead of, rather than
| along with, a search engine.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| spicybright wrote:
| A side tangent, it would be really cool if they brought the
| Jeeves character back somehow. I always loved that goofy yet
| classy little dude.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230307213007/https://www.theatl...
|
| https://archive.ph/xlOM3
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