[poly2it]

Very cool project!

Just out of interest, I sent a query I've had difficulties getting good results for with major engines: "what are some good options for high-resolution ultrawide monitors?".

The response in this engine for this query at this point seems to have the same fallacy as I've seen in other engines. Meta-pages "specialising" in broad rankings are preferred above specialist data about the specific sought-after item. It seems that the desire for a ranking weighs the most.

If I were to manually try to answer this query, I would start by looking at hardware forums and geeky blogs, pick N candidates, then try to find the specifications and quirks for all products.

Of course, it is difficult to generically answer if a given website has performed this analysis. It can be favourable to rank sites citing specific data higher in these circumstances.

As a user, I would prefer to be presented with the initial sources used for assembling this analysis. Of course, this doesn't happen because engines don't perform this kind of bottom-to-top evaluation.

[ricardobeat]

You could argue that it is not really a search query. There is not a particular page that answers the question “correctly”, it requires collating multiple sources and reasoning. That is not a search problem.

[creesch]

This argument almost feels disingenuous to me. Of course, there isn't going to be one resource that will completely answer the question. However, there are going to be resources that are much likelier to contain correct parts to the answer and there are resources that are much likely to contain just SEO fluff.

The whole premise of what makes a good search engine has been based on the idea of surfacing those results that most likely contain good information. If that was not the case Google would not have risen to such dominance in the first place.

[jacobr1]

And yet ... that is exactly the kind of problem average people want to have solved for them by search engines, and google kept trying to solve. It is probably one reason why ai-chat with websearch is going to beat just search.