Google Search: Change is Coming

Well Google, a word of warning that will probably never be seen. I have loved you almost since you started. You have been a very good companion, which never crashed, (almost) never disappointed me for many years. Then you changed, you thought that adding your dumb immediate search after every keystroke would be a good idea (I hate being wasteful). Then you thought that adding some social component in it would be a good idea but I didn't care much about it. Now if there's more "Social bullshit flavor" in your result, I'm out, I am going to find another Search engine that suits better my needs.<p>Joke apart, Google has always been the way I search for KNOWLEDGE. Because of this "Social trend", it tends to become more and more aimed at searching for TRENDS. And they are two totally different things and pretty much... incompatible. Don't mix it up Google!<p>For any other additional information about search or more relevant results, I'm in!

I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning while Steve Martin was talking about his experiences with twitter on NPR.<p>The problem with search right now is that PageRank is not at all a good indicator of individualizing social search results, and contrary to Facebook's, reddit's, or the new, hot social network's goals, the social network ecosystem is constantly evolving. In ten years, I hope, for the sake of progress, that the social networks we have now are mostly dead, relegated to the core of dedicated users similar to sites like metafilter, MySpace and kuro5hin.<p>What I'm awaiting is a dedicated, personalized (but not 'personalized' or Personalized) social search engine that has enough implicit value for user buy-in. A search engine with enough context to make the facebook wall obsolete.<p>This hybrid search that Google is attempting wont have the value that they think it does - Wikipedia already does that, and better, without ads. Google needs to step back and think about what made their <i>approach</i> to search a killer app ten years ago and try and understand how to apply that value to the search needs of people today, instead of trying to apply their <i>model</i> from ten years ago to the search needs of people today.

&#62;<i>"In practice, that means that over the next few months you will begin to see subtly different results to searches"</i><p>Every time I notice subtle changes to my search results with Google, it's because they are worse [in the sense that they are less relevant to the actual terms I have searched for].<p>&#62;<i>'"the most important thing about an artist is his greatest works."'</i><p>That doesn't mean they are the most relevant results for my search terms.

Interesting. I wonder if I happened to see some test of this a long while back? You see, I was looking up the specific gravity of a whole bunch of different things for something (I couldn't find them all on Wolfram Alpha).<p>Then, out of the blue, Google started giving me the answers directly, saying that it had calculated some number by averaging X sources. But that's not the odd part.<p>The odd part? The Google search page then asked me if that number was correct. I've never seen that before or since.

&#62;As further outlined in a Wall Street Journal story on the subject on Thursday, a search for “Lake Tahoe” will produce “key attributes” that Google knows about the lake, including its altitude, location, salt content and average temperature. The query “What are the 10 largest lakes in California?,” meanwhile, would yield an answer instead of just links to relevant sites.<p>Sounds like WolframAlpha.

Sounds like it's time for someone to build pg's search engine for the top 10,000 hackers. Google's entering the uncanny valley; it's ai will be alright, but it won't be faster or better than my ability to parse a page of relevant links from 'old Google'.

The search algorithm should not try to understand people. People should be enabled to understand the algorithm.<p>Google is heading the false direction.

&#62;"It’s unclear how the plan overlaps, if at all, with Google’s other recent search initiative, Google plus Your World, which integrates Google+ results into standard searches."<p>I would have to assume that going forward any tweak to the Google user experience will in some way benefit their social initiative. It seems to matter a lot to them.

I'm curious what will happen to queries like, 'Thai'. Will they show me local Thai Restaurants? Will they show me travel deals to Thailand? Will these 'attributes' tell me something of Thai culture. God I would hate to have to be working on the query parser with these NLP type changes coming down the path.

<i>For instance, a Google search can distinguish a search for “New York” as opposed to one for “New” and “York.”</i><p>OMG, what kind of sophisticated AI did they use to accomplish this? I'm thinking random forests mixed with neural networks and SVMs.

Are they trying to turn google into wolfram alpha?