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by obelix_
2932 days ago
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We are still in the stone age when it comes to search. Ask Google who played the mens semifinals of Wimbeldon three years ago and Google will tell you it indexed 6 million pages to provide a link that may or may not have the 4 names I am looking for. Why is it doing all this pointless work? And why is it that dumb in 2018? We have got so used to what it does that lot of people have stopped asking questions about how it does things and wether all the stuff it does is required. Wolframalpha, Freebase/SemanticWeb/Wikidata/dbpedia approaches, NLP/NLU are still very underdeveloped and untapped. Having open and distributed indexes like we see in nature with DNA is also totally unexplored because of Google type centralised index monopolies in various domains. It just takes a Gig or so to store a local offline index off all Wikipedia or Stackoverflow pages. And given the massive RAM and hard disks everyone has these days why aren't we seeing sophisticated local offline search apps? The internet is getting exponentially more noisy day by day and in many ways its easier to find quality info going through a top notch library's index than wading through Google's. So there are lots of blindspots and areas to explore in search right now imho. |
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My first query string idea was 'men semifinals Wimbeldon 2015 wiki' and the resulting page contains the list in a nice format.
This is because I have the context that wiki pages would contain this sort of information. Google and others are getting better at processing more vague queries (like 'three years ago'), but I do agree we are nowhere close to being able to ask general questions. Knowing how to use the tools like google search (and other searches) and really advanced queries syntax is a force multiplier/enabler.