If you think the defining characteristic of google search is that it is 'driven by algorithms' you are massively underestimating it.
Search is the problem of understanding what a person is looking for, and finding a resource which provides it. That is 100% about people and human factors. There's a reason why people look at google search frequencies to understand social trends; why we read meaning into the 'suggested search completions' google provides for certain terms; why an unfortunate first-placed search result for a term can make global news headlines. Search is so much more than an algorithmic problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if this issue is as mysterious to Google staff as it is to you.
Google Search no longer runs a clearly defined algorithm to find search results. It is a collection of AI systems that are trained continuously on a variety of data. There is probably no human alive who fully understands how Google makes decisions about which results to return and how to rank them. They just understand how to provide feedback to adjust results they don't like.
If the system gets rewarded for finding common things quickly, then it will adjust its internal algorithms to make that happen--perhaps even if that means dropping unpopular results altogether.
I take issue with the premise that search implies loss. When you solve a maths problem you could be "searching for an answer" -- it doesn't mean you've lost it before now. For me, Google isn't really about searching for something you're missing, it's about solving a problem. So it's not really serving results, it's serving "answers". Some of them are more correct than others.
I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.
I'm just trying to emphasize that most people only care about results. I think it minimizes Google's problems to think it is some technical stack problem. The problem is that Google has a disconnect with some quanity of users on what good search results look like. If Google and the users can't agree on the correct search results... Who is wrong the person doing the searching or google?
That seems extremely short-sighted. There’s nothing stopping people from coming up with a better way to find what you’re looking for than Google’s search engine.
What's the solution to this problem? Google search makes the extremely complex problem of finding content a simple text search. Have they oversimplified it to a system which can be scammed?
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.
For a huge pile of things that aren't consumer goods, google is pretty good at figuring out what you're looking for even if you use imprecise terms, especially if the particular imprecision is common among non-specialists. That's sort of the selling point of google search and why the primary interface to just about all general-purpose web search engines isn't what used to be called 'keyword search'. It's definitely a search engine quality problem
Search is the problem of understanding what a person is looking for, and finding a resource which provides it. That is 100% about people and human factors. There's a reason why people look at google search frequencies to understand social trends; why we read meaning into the 'suggested search completions' google provides for certain terms; why an unfortunate first-placed search result for a term can make global news headlines. Search is so much more than an algorithmic problem.
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