They are obviously and purposefully keeping the feed full to get as many ads in front of you as possible, not to give you accurate results.

Contrast this with craigslist which actually gives you a "zero results" found if you are too restrictive. Hell, even the autotrader sites are going the facebook way now. It's maddening.

Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.

So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?

* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.

More often than not you know exactly what you are looking for, you're not browsing to see what's out there. The systems should optimize for that instead of whatever this is.

Paraphrasing, but is it too hard to "SELECT FROM 'posts' WHERE 'text' LIKE %search%"?

I think the solution here eventually will be a search engine that lives on your personal computer (it's also what I'm building currently). Ingest content from the web -> sort/filter/view it locally as you choose.

Agitation multiplied when I finally found the answer, which was reaching blindly under a plastic trim panel for a hidden downward-facing button to open the panel, lift the top up, and then balance the top midway between open and closed while I finesse the plastic tonneau cover panel back down under the rear part of the top. Garbage UX on both the part of Chevrolet and Google. I wish to become a hermit in the woods.

Big companies have processes for deciding what gets done and which features are prioritized, and if the people in that loop aren't power users of those features, and they don't have the kind of metrics or analysis framework that would indicate that those features are important, they won't be prioritized.

I don't think there's some kind of conspiracy to make search worse... I think it's just that nobody cares enough, and with time the features break as everything else around them is changed

Google ruins all its search interface. I never understood why I would need "people also watched". That made never any sense - neither on youtube, but even less so on google search. Of what interest to me is it when Charly Joker searches for hentai cyborgs? Even IF I were interested in that, I could search for this ON MY OWN. I don't need mental handholding, so this ALWAYS wasted space I could use otherwise. Thanks to ublock origin I block such UI downgrades anyway, but this is not the only example. Google abuses people here. Google wants you to use a privated web that Google controls. This madness has to stop. Google will not budge, so Google has to be ended by mankind.

That being said... the first wave of web search engines weren't built by the companies hosting the content. Search engines as tools became popular because, even in 1998, browsing and navigating sites (esp. corporate sites) to surface content, was already becoming an increasingly adversarial experience.

Search engines were built by companies spidering other sites' content. This was content that was often — if you were navigating along these sites' happy paths — found five to ten links deep through a confusing warren of subtle and unintuitive click targets. This content was the original "deep web." And search engines made it shallow... often against the spidered sites' consent.

Companies at the time much preferred "directory" sites that would only ever link to their landing pages. To companies of that era, sites linking directly to specific URLs of your site would be like if the Yellow Pages listed specific directory-extensions of your company's phone number! But this first battle in the "war against deep-linking" was a losing one from the moment it began, since early websites were almost inherently bot-accessible.

The second battle, in the early 2000s, where sites were built as [non-deep-linkable] Flash apps, took longer to determine, only finally resolving (again in favor of an open web, and thus third-party search) when laws and regulatory compliances both started to force companies back toward UA accessibility.

But for going on a decade now, we've been embroiled in a seemingly-indefinite third battle in the "war against deep-linking" — this time with companies tucking every possible type of user-generated content behind a login wall of some walled-garden everything [web]apps. Permalink URLs for individual content-items still exist in these webapps; but you get redirected to a login interstitial if you visit them.

Where's the adversarial spirit of the first search-engine companies today? Where are the companies trying to index the modern "deep web" of login-walled content? Why can't any company give me a search box that searches "into" YouTube video transcripts, "into" Facebook Marketplace, "into" public Slack and Discord and Telegram communities (probably requiring archiving, ala how Deja News/Google Groups surfaced Usenet), etc?

Sure, this sort of thing is intensely adversarial (but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn — while it might be against a site's ToS, but it's not against the law.) And sure, this sort of thing requires per-service connectors (but any thought of this business model therefore being "unscalable" comes from a pre-coding-agent era.)

But isn't it also, very clearly, "what people want"?

I would personally find this useful at least, particularly when diving into unfamiliar topics. In a lot of those situations, a handful of high quality links can preempt a litany of more granular searches.

This might be an area where a traditional, respectful search engine style crawler backed by a small cheap LLM paired with human curation would work well. The crawler+LLM finds sites, attempts to compute some quality score, figures out where they'd fit in the directory's hierarchy, and then submits them for human review and approval. If a poor quality link makes its way through, users can flag it for review and if curation agrees it gets booted.

We have to remember that they decided to side with the SEOmongers rather than crush them, because it was better for Google's bottom line.

Where did you get this idea from? They actively promote it.