Thoughts on the current state of discoverability and search
I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion. Personally I first...
I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion.
Personally I first noticed significant degradation of search functionality around 2018 or so, while specifically Google was mentioned at least as far back as 2016. But it is not simply Google or even just general search engines. Any random site specific search functionality or discoverability algorithms on various sites share these trends too.
It really seems that the focus is simply on delivering as many results as possible with actual quality or even relevance being somewhere on the tail end of priorities. It is not even just lack of(useful, consistent) search operators, lack of transparency, lack of structured search possibilities, lack of sorting options, lack of granularity - it is the simple disregard for the basic intent of the query with some implementations sometimes being actually more accurate with fewer keywords with no option to modify this behavior.
It is especially damaging for(at least my) ability to research a topic. A decade and half ago I could go in with a topic I had no idea about and emerge two hours later with a very basic but likely mostly accurate and slightly in-depth overview by refining my searches. Now I'm lucky to get one single thoughtful blog post or discussion among dozens or tutorials, 10-bests and ads with the query being almost completely disregarded and keywords being straight up ignored to deliver this deluge of both low quality and mostly completely irrelevant results.
Are there any projects, search engines or anything other that aim to deliver actually useful, steerable, user directed results?
On one hand I agree with large parts of the essay but on the other I think that(among guilt-tripping) it advocates for a thing that is far harder to achieve than most people can achieve for any single one thing that is not their sole focus and that makes it easier to just dismiss and move on.
I find that a lot of things in that that would be net positive to do(or avoid) in a life of a person are order(s) of magnitude harder to eliminate entirely than just minimize as much as possible(and that much as possible can be once a month I ...) due to pressure of society and practical concerns. There are so many things that one should care about that it is simply too much.
A better world would steer our decisions the other direction, but in the meantime only asking people to do as much as they can and elaborating on the reasons why it is important is likely to be more widely accepted and consequently have bigger impact.