Ask HN: Have search engines become hard of hearing?

3 points by obviuosly 7 years ago | 1 comment

Maybe my judgement is clouded, but it seems Google and other search engines have started to reinterpret search queries to a really annoying degree. More often than ever I have to put things in quotes to get what I am looking for. I often use quotes even with foresight that it will show nonsense otherwise. Is this a result of forcing "AI" methods to be a main ranking signal? I wished search engines would return to give simple full-text search precedence, or at least allow users to configure their own weights for different ranking signals.

PaulHoule 7 years ago |

No. It is a simple profit motive.

If the search results were 100% good (impossible) or even 70% good (state of the art) you would click on the results instead of the ads. The worse the results, the more ad clicks.

There is no real competition (not unless you are going to pay for a search engine directly as opposed to bloated prices for everything) so no incentive to do better.