Ask Slashdot: What Features Would You Like In a Search Engine?

New submitter nicolas.slusarenko writes Nowadays, there is one dominant search engine in the world among few alternatives. I have the impression that the majority of users think that it is the best possible service that could be made. I am sure that we could have a better search engine. During my spare time I been developing Trokam, an online search engine. I am building this service with the features that I would like to find in a service: respectful of user rights, ad-free, built upon open source software, and with auditable results. Well, those are mine. What features would you like in a search engine?

Comments

privacy?

[tommeke100]

Next to working well, maybe the assurance that not all your search queries were logged and sold to third parties or used for advertisement?

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

So, how much are we willing to pay as a subscription to make up the lost revenue?
Or do we just expect the vendor to eat the opportunity cost?

Re:privacy?

[rudy_wayne]

Here's a radical idea. How about if the search engine returns results that are ACTUALLY WHAT I'M SEARCHING FOR.

One day I was trying to find a particular video clip. No matter how i tried to refine my search query, all I got was completely irrelevant bullshit. Now, the video I was looking for was somewhat old and obscure and so its entirely possible that it doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet. That's fine. I can accept that.

But, if that's the case, then my search should return zero results. Not thousands of irrelevant results.

Re:privacy?

[TWX]

It has gotten a lot worse, hasn't it?

I want a search engine to identify when someone is attempting to manipulate it and to counter that. I don't want Google Bombs like "miserable failure" regardless of how I feel about the actual politics, to make the results useless. I'm not so childish as to expect an echo-chamber everywhere I look.

This means no more companies whose entire existence is to try to improve someone's search rankings.

As to data being collected, I'm actually okay with the top 80% of searches in a given day being used for advertising revenue, assuming no geographic data beyond nation, and no personally-identifiable data is collected. That's how a search engine would make money, by selling ads based on what people want to know about. If Ford has a press-release about the new Focus, and people search for that, I'm okay with ads related to the Focus or to Fords coming up. I just don't want more than "this term is being asked for this many times on this day" to be reported.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

If there were millions of users, how much would it COST to keep it operational? Figure that out, then add some reasonable profit percentage. Win-win.

Do you think you could run an operation like that for around $3.5M a year, given 1M users? Great. Charge $5 per year per user. I'd pay it.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, how about if there have to be ads, they are low key static ads that can be easily ignored. How about NO sponsored links. Unbiased search results. No search results not directly related to the search terms. No spam links.

Re:privacy?

[Rei]

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

The cost would seem proportional to the users.
As far as running the business, just let me sharpen my AWS knives a little more. . .
Of course, in our post-capitalistic era, just having a good business plan is necessary but insufficient to protect you from Big Oligarchy and Big Government, assuming you could pry them apart with a crowbar. If you offer a viable alternative, look for "something really, really unfortunate" to arrive with an innocuous name like "Net Neutrality", or something.

Re:privacy?

[dwywit]

Try google verbatim. Saves having to put quotes on every word.

What was wrong with '+' as an operator, anyway?

Re:privacy?

[jenningsthecat]

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for.

This, exactly. Google's ideas regarding 'synonyms' for my search terms would be laughable if they didn't waste so much of my time. Also, these days when I do an 'allintext' search it almost always turns up far more results than did the same query without the 'allintext' operator. Now just how in the fuck does that happen?

I would pay two or three hundred dollars a year for access to a search engine with Google's reach and power, but without all the ad-oriented bloat, the lowest-common-denominator attempts at hand-holding, and the Microsoft Clippy-isms. You know - something that's more suitable for real research and for getting a job done than for figuring out where to have dinner or what meaningless bullshit the Kardashians and other such social parasites are up to. And while they're at it, they need to include a way of searching for exactly what I type, including case, punctuation and special characters. And if my search turns up zero results, that's fine. I'd far rather have that than be insulted by Google's insistence that it must have something I'm interested in.

I'm not so naive as to believe that anyone else can replicate Google's massive search capabilities. So I really wish Google would provide a search interface for those of us who have both a good idea of what we're looking for and a clue about how to do research. It would cost them next to nothing, they could charge for it, and they'd be doing the world a favour.

Hell, right now I'd settle for Google circa ten years ago - it was way better than it is now.

Re:privacy?

[Kohath]

They could sell ads without tracking people.

Re:privacy?

[skegg]

Interpreting as:

not a word that Google thinks may be similar to the one I typed

Interpret instead as:

not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

Unlikely to be an equal revenue stream.

Re: privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ford aren't going to pay to advertise the thing that people are searching for... Their competitors might.

Re: privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

But bases on your previous searches you would really benefit from this Swedish Penis Enlarger.

Re:privacy?

[Kohath]

Equal to what? Why should it be equal? A company like Yahoo would be very happy to have a search that was half as profitable as Google's.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

If you offer a viable alternative, look for "something really, really unfortunate" to arrive with an innocuous name like "Net Neutrality", or something.

Since you brought up Net Neutrality: can you give me one example of a small, innovative startup in the ISP business in the last 10 years?

No? Why not?

I'll tell you why not: it is not a competitive market. It's a de facto oligopoly, with barriers to entry that are far to high for the little guy to vault.

That's where government's legitimate role begins: by regulating or breaking up oligopolies and monopolies, so that there can be competition in the marketplace.

Don't expect market forces to fix a problem when there isn't a real competitive market in the first place. That's not very realistic.

And I'll answer my own question: the only "new" broadband ISP to make a name for itself in many years now is Google, and they can hardly be called a "little guy". They are one of the few groups that has the money and muscle to elbow its way in to a business that is very hostile to outsiders.

Re:privacy?

[fahrbot-bot]

Try google verbatim. Saves having to put quotes on every word.

What was wrong with '+' as an operator, anyway?

According to Google Drops Plus Sign from Search Operators

It has to do with limiting confusion about the search engine’s social network, Google+.

To Baio, “it seems obvious that they’re paving the way for Google+ profile searches. When Google+ launched ... they coined their own format for mentioning people – adding a plus to the beginning of a name... The fate of the ‘+’ symbol was clear: protect a 12-year-old convention loved by power users, or bring Google+ profile searching to the mainstream? It was doomed from the start.”

Re:privacy?

[w_dragon]

Actually a search engine is one of the few things where the cost depends less on use and more on the amount of the Internet you would like to index. It takes a lot of storage and processing power to create an easily-searchable index of the Internet.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

Well, there are incubators that support some shiny new thing, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram but they tend to Do One Little Thing Well, a la Unix, and then sell their soul for rock-n-roll.
But we think about IT here. There are also business in the Real World http://www.groundedcoffeeshop.com/ but both of these examples underscore your broader point, if I may radically restate it: economic activity of consequence is a top-down, not a bottom-up affair these days.

Re:privacy?

[bloodhawk]

There are other ways to monetize your product. If the engine is actually good and popular then they can monetize licensing for mobile devices, selling into the corporate space with indexing and appliances for the enterprise, definitely not as profitable as advertising and given greed is number one priority for companies like google, and just about every company for that matter, it isn't likely to happen.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

You really gotta walk back that excessive, exuberant, irrational optimism, Sparky.

Re:privacy?

[rtb61]

Seek government funding as an independent service to the community to ensure equal access to all business by all the people. Attempt to create a level playing field, obviously the corporate greed driven solution is not working quite that well. Many companies, in fact likely the majority would be better off setting up an organisation to fund independent equal search with a fixed set of rules to set ranking results, likely in partnership with government.

Designing a search engine. The two obvious things are optional categories (too many categories can be problematic and difficult to use) and regional search with various levels of region, country, state, city, suburb. Next up registered users with, the user being able to block sites they have no interest in, from showing up in their results (and hopefully this information collated to push those places to page one hundred thousand and one of search results).

The flip side of having fully tracked and monitored search is better individual control of search but that needs to be a choice of the user. In that regard also a thumbs up for a good search result, to promote those sites, taking into account the search query and category and region (as well as of course negative responses). Taking on board properly registered volunteer users willing to contribute some time to the community at large by helping to evaluate search results and being one of the quality control methods to ensure fair and good search results. Some level of randomness in search output where, the other factors are equal to ensure more players get a shot at the first three pages and their location on those pages.

The search rules publicly defined and seek community support in establishing and protecting those rules from interference, at a civil suit an criminal prosecution level ie is corrupt SEO interfering with a persons computer network access by purposefully misdirecting their search results?

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just pointing out that in response to his question asking for examples of small, innovative ISPs you responded with a photo sharing/social networking website and a cafe. Well done, Einstein.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://startpage.com/

Re:privacy?

[Jack Griffin]

And, have it do an "untailored" search by default. If I type in a search phrase I get results relevant to where I live. This can be useful in the odd case I want to find a local service provider, but the 99% of the other times I want non-local, fully globalised results, and I can no longer seem to be able to that.

One example, we had a local rugby player Jarryd Hayne who went to the US to gamble on an NFL career. No matter what I search I only get results from Australian media outlets which I don't want. I want to find out the reaction in the US media (if any), but the search always tailors my results to my location which is annoying. This results in my world view being skewed because I'm increasingly only being exposed to local opinions
The Internet is supposed to be a global village. Google ruining that.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, if that's the case, then my search should return zero results. Not thousands of irrelevant results.

Irrelevant results aren't good but they're better than none because in a sense they perform the function of a syntax error message. At least I have been able to refine my search and later find what I was looking for based on the irrelevant results. For instance, I needed to find a thread but had no recollection of what forum it was since it was in the random category and all I remembered was a funny comment in it and googled that. Well, the irrelevant results enlightened me that the comment was a quote from a movie and thus posted a million times. Simple improvement to my search: Exclude results with the movie title. Thread found on first page of results.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"So, how much are we willing to pay as a subscription to make up the lost revenue?
Or do we just expect the vendor to eat the opportunity cost?"

Hey, we were asked what we wanted in a search engine, not to work out how to monetize one. I agree with the parent that I'd prefer my searches aren't tracked for targeted advertising.

If any new search engine wants to do what google does, why should I bother using their search engine? What proof do they have that it's BETTER than Google? Because not only does it have to be better it'll have to be a good deal better. It's hard to get away from google tracking you, but you can at least keep a new startup from doing the same and having yet another new company compiling information.

Re:privacy?

[Runaway1956]

Have you tried a VPN? If I log into my VPN through the UK, I get tons of results from Google that seem to be UK-centric. If I log in through Dallas, Texas, the results look very much the same as not using a VPN at all. Log in through Denmark, and everything is presented in some language which I presume to be Danish, and I have to click the little UK flag to get English results. I don't know if I can log in through Oz or not - I may have to check that out. There is a LONG list of places that I can log onto the internet through, but I've only tested a few of them.

You might give it a try, if you want regionally / nationally / culturally flavored search results.

Yes, I realize that you've asked for unflavored results, but my idea offers different flavors, which might satisfy your cravings after all!

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is simple: the moment you set up a paid search service, you have to restrict access to those people who have paid the subscription fees. And how will you know which of the potentially billions of users of the internet are your subscribers and which are not?

You can only realistically do this via some form of authentication mechanism - which of course is going to defeat the intent of anonymous searching.

Others have posted that they would accept advertisements as a means to fund the engine, but the only problem with this would be blocking technology such as Adblock.

Upshot is: this is hard.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, missed "ISP".

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

The whole point of this thread is that you don't go dictating to corporations to take a haircut. Unless you're the government.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

The problem with this is simple: the moment you set up a paid search service, you have to restrict access to those people who have paid the subscription fees.

How so? You're going to have all sorts of promotional access.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where government's legitimate role begins: by regulating or breaking up oligopolies and monopolies, so that there can be competition in the marketplace.

Oh, you mean like this?

Before building out new networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must negotiate with local governments for access to publicly owned “rights of way” so they can place their wires above and below both public and private property. ISPs also need “pole attachment” contracts with public utilities so they can rent space on utility poles for above-ground wires, or in ducts and conduits for wires laid underground.

The problem? Local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than these things actually cost. For example, rights of way and pole attachments fees can double the cost of network construction.

So the real bottleneck isn’t incumbent providers of broadband, but incumbent providers of rights-of-way. These incumbents — the real monopolists — also have the final say on whether an ISP can build a network. They determine what hoops an ISP must jump through to get approval.

This reduces the number of potential competitors who can profitably deploy service — such as AT&T’s U-Verse, Google Fiber, and Verizon FiOS. The lack of competition makes it easier for local governments and utilities to charge more for rights of way and pole attachments.

(Source: Wired)

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

no relevant results at the top is the MOST important and I'm sure that the I know the search engine that you are referring to. You're going to have to some manage to severely beat the relevancy of their search results which IMNHO I don't think that you can do w/o SIGNIFICANT resources for crawling/data storage/indexing/etc.

As to privacy heard of duckduckgo? Startpage? many others offering similar services? Although with those usually you also get an amalgamation of the crappier search engine results as well, which incredibly reduces the value of suchsearch intermediaries given the spurious results that other search engines constantly turn up as "high ranked" results.

OK, so beyond that as a UI? : possibly a way to filter out based on "fields", e.g. filter commercial results/retailers in a simpler fashion than that offered by said implied search engine. (You wouldn't believe some of the search queries that I apply as even that engine on occasion returns poor results for some search queries... well I guess not poor but probably results that got there by gaming the "system"... I'm sorry to say that it has been a while since I ran into one of those queries so cannot give a current example, but it DOES happen from time-to-time.)

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Since you brought up Net Neutrality: can you give me one example of a small, innovative startup in the ISP business in the last 10 years?

A small company in Switzerland: https://www.fiber7.ch/ - 1 gigabit/s symmetric for 777CHF (815.97 US Dollar) per year

And yes, they have some problems due to the lack of net neutrality.

Re: privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of potential competitors is already reduced. What you state is happening now, before NN was even thought up. I have never seen any of those ISPs you mention compete with each other. It's always I own this part of the neighborhood, and you own that part. Nice business model :/

Re: privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two buttons at the top right, you can refine for local results or global.

Re:privacy?

[jtev]

Instagram may be banal, but it is an innovation. When it was started it was a disruptive technology. It may be a bit "weak" of an innovation, but you didn't actually refute the argument.

You're right that these are not ISPs, however they are companies that would be exploited under a non-neutral net. It's not the ISP barrier to entry that is the problem that net neutrality is supposed to address, it's the barrier for those who provide services on the internet, which he did mention.

Re: privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Google.com/ncr work anymore?
No Country Redirect

Re:privacy?

[gzuckier]

Actually a search engine is one of the few things where the cost depends less on use and more on the amount of the Internet you would like to index. It takes a lot of storage and processing power to create an easily-searchable index of the Internet.

Indeed. Economies of scale most definitely doesn't sound like something an internet search engine would experience. Quite the opposite.

Re:privacy?

[gzuckier]

It has gotten a lot worse, hasn't it? I want a search engine to identify when someone is attempting to manipulate it and to counter that. I don't want Google Bombs like "miserable failure" regardless of how I feel about the actual politics, to make the results useless. I'm not so childish as to expect an echo-chamber everywhere I look. This means no more companies whose entire existence is to try to improve someone's search rankings. As to data being collected, I'm actually okay with the top 80% of searches in a given day being used for advertising revenue, assuming no geographic data beyond nation, and no personally-identifiable data is collected. That's how a search engine would make money, by selling ads based on what people want to know about. If Ford has a press-release about the new Focus, and people search for that, I'm okay with ads related to the Focus or to Fords coming up. I just don't want more than "this term is being asked for this many times on this day" to be reported.

amen.
I'm sick of searching for "painful rectal itch" and having the first two pages of results all offering to sell me the best painful rectal itch at the lowest prices.

Re:privacy?

[gzuckier]

I just want the search engine to stop changing what I'm searching for. I don't want to have to quote every word like I have to do with Google to make sure that the word is actually in the page, and by "the word", I mean "the word I type, not a word that Google things may be similar to the one I typed". It's worst when you're searching for foreign words, product names, acronyms, or whatnot and Google tries to treat them as if they're English words and declines them or chooses synonyms.

"Did you mean X?" is fine. Even "Searching for X (see original results here)", if you're very confident that the person made a common spelling error or whatnot. But just going in and swapping out words as if this is expected behavior? Terrible. At least let me disable it if you want to do that...

Beyond all this: I do like how one can do simple commonn operations on Google - math, conversions, etc. The more of these the better IMHO, so long as they have a standardized format - be they tracking numbers, flight lookups, whatever. It's okay in my book to be a bit Wolfram-y.

Keep the interface plain, simple, the sort of thing that'll work on any browser, from a modern Chrome to a simple text-only browser. Only use javascript where it's not essential for the site to work. Here's an example of something that would be a good use of javascript: if you need to track clicks, like Google does, do it through javascript rather than by having a link redirect like Google does. I hate how I can't just right click and copy link on Google without getting some massive Google redirect link.

Just my thoughts. :)

I'm in the other camp on this. I appreciate whatever it is that Google is doing to widen my search to find things that might be what I'm looking for that I don't have a precisely verbatim search term for. That's something Google seems to do well. It's their ability to produce crap completely unrelated to any of the search terms due to some clever hack by the search optimizer scum that annoys me.
and while I"m at it, I"d like to see more stuff that is something a person might be searching for, and fewer results that are some high school kid's twitter feed.

Re:privacy?

[Old Grey Beard]

Justifiably, there are a lot of comments here along the line of "too many results". Apparently, search engines think that lots of results are preferable to few results. In a way that makes sense because if you get the right answer (more properly, a right answer) early on, what do you care about the following million irrelevancies?

The /. mindset seems to be "...if only I could enter the right (possibly nonexistent today) command or switch or whatever, then I'd get the right results early in the results list, and to heck with the rest." Personally I think this "forward" approach is unsolvable. If it were doable I think we'd be a lot closer to it today.

Instead of the "forward" approach I suggest a "back-end" approach: if the best a browser can do is hand you a boatload of possibilities, maybe the browser should supply you with tools to refine those possibilities. One idea along these lines is to consider your list of results as a series of entries in a relational database, and let you refine the list with, say, SQL-like commands. For example:

DELETE ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.sequence > 1000;

-- Limits further operations to the first 1000 results. Note this doesn't delete the actual pages (!), just the entries in the "database" of search results.

FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF "clinton" IN ENTRY.url AND "Hillary" IN ENTRY.text THEN DELETE ENTRY;

-- Gets rid of all pages containing "Hillary" if the url contains "clinton". Yes, it's a lot of typing but the browser saves all commands and you can create a file that is auto-executed for every search result, if it means that much to you.

FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.date > '2014/06/20' and ENTRY.date < '2014/12/21' THEN PASS ELSE DELETE ENTRY;

-- Removes everything except pages made in Summer/Fall of 2014. It must have been a very good year.

And so on.

About half of the /. community is about ready to pounce on this as being unworkable. Commands that require searching lots of url's, even if limited to 1000, can take a long time to execute. At the moment this is true but that doesn't mean things will stay that way. "All" it takes are support hooks in the master database. E.g., "Is 'Hillary' in <url0>,<url1>,<url2>,<url3>,<url4>,etc." Presumably the search index can answer this without any network I/O.

Probably what's needed is a research project that identifies what kind of properties are useful in the "results database". No need to build your own search engine -- just send a search command to Google (under program control) and harvest the results, building the "results database". It's not that hard. Building an SQL-like command parser isn't that difficult either, assuming knowledge of lex and yacc, or the like. It's a bit more difficult to figure out what properties and commands are useful. (If any!)

Summer Of Code, anyone?

Re:privacy?

[david_thornley]

When I make a search that might have local vs. global results, at least 90% of the time I want local. I might search for restaurants, for example, and although it may be theoretically interesting to learn of restaurants in New York City that I'd like, a list of restaurants in the Minneapolis area is far more useful to me.

Re:privacy?

[flacco]

Conventional methods of payment would tie one's searches to one's identity. I would want assurances that it was not technically possible to log my searches.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

How would you do that, unless there were a trusted proxy running your searches?

Re:privacy?

[Jack Griffin]

That's fine, but give the user the choice. Google used to have a toggle for local or global, now I'm forced into local only.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

Well, my comment was really meant in the context of ISPs.

Sure, there are small innovative companies. Like Instagram and even Netflix (it didn't start out big). BUT... what about companies that bring those services to the consumer? The ISPs? That's where Net Neutrality really comes in, and they have erected huge barriers to entry for anybody small (or innovative).

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

The barriers are exactly the issue I think that voters should focus on.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

The cost would seem proportional to the users.

Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?

However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

The barriers are exactly the issue I think that voters should focus on.

And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

The barriers are competition at the last mile and cartel behavior from providers. Having the ultimate cartel, the government, manage the rules is not the same as actual marketplace competition, I don't care what the FCC pencil-necks say.

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

Not in dispute. As noted above, I'd missed "ISP" as well. I think I was exhausted when I replied initially.

Re:privacy?

[Jane Q. Public]

Having the ultimate cartel, the government, manage the rules is not the same as actual marketplace competition

Of course. But when you don't have competition anyway, nor any good way to create any, regulation is a better-then-the-alternative last resort.

Re:privacy?

[Anonymous Coward]

... regulation is a better-then-the-alternative last resort.

No, regulations are just the nanny state creating a world suitable only for children. Are you some kind of Obama-loving socialist?

Re:privacy?

[smittyoneeach]

Recreational legislation is an evil exceeding premature optimization.

Best feature

[Goglu]

Confidentiality

Re:Best feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Google and Bing now keep track of which search results you click on. When you hover your mouse over a search result they use JavaScript to show you what the final destination URL will be in the browser status bar, but when you click the link it takes you to a Google or Bing URL to record your selection and then it redirects you to the final destination. Very sneaky, they didn't used to do that. Plus many people log into gmail and leave it logged in all the time, so Google can attach your search queries and result selections to your profile. They are engaging in a war on privacy.

Re:Best feature

[ScentCone]

They are engaging in a war on privacy.

Or, they're trying to make a viable business out of operating mammoth server farms so you can get stuff you don't have to pay for.

Re:Best feature

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It isn't just Google or Bing that does this.

Re:Best feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you honestly claiming that Google was a non-viable business before they started doing that?

Re:Best feature

[Anonymous Coward]

adblock and noscript take much of that out, and what they miss, greasemonkey userscripts to the rescue. don't forget a referrer blocker/modifier browser addon too....

or you can just use ddg, sp, or ix instead of bing, yahoo, or google web search.

Re: Best feature

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out that tracking user behavior is incredibly useful for improving search results. All the information that could be wrung out of matching query and document terms was handled years ago, until/unless we invent near-human-level text understanding technology. But people know what they meant, and what people actually click on and look at tells the search engine what kinds of results it should have returned.

Re:Best feature

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't need to record my search queries or selections for the first 15+ years of operation. Why now?

Re:Best feature

[ScentCone]

They didn't need to record my search queries or selections for the first 15+ years of operation. Why now?

More competition and plummeting ad revenue.

Simple

[JMJimmy]

Search for what I type in, now what you think I want. I'm so sick of having to change every search to "verbatim" because my search terms are being ignored. I'd switch to someone else but they seem to be carbon copies.

Re:Simple

[CarlosM7]

Also, don't remove search terms, and I want all of them "anded", not "ored."

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that:
  * "Search instead" link. My typed search becomes a secondary alternative. And by the way google, a search which return no or few results generally carries more information than your rubbish interpolated mess of results.
  * Switching to a different language depending on my location. When I go to France, I don't necessarily want French results. And if I go to Germany or Poland, I will not automagically speak German or Polish. Duh!

Re:Simple

[swillden]

Search for what I type in, not what you think I want

I want a search engine that searches for what I want, not what I type, and not even what I think I want.

Re:Simple

[JMJimmy]

Search for what I type in, not what you think I want

I want a search engine that searches for what I want, not what I type, and not even what I think I want.

I can't tell if that's sarcasm, stupidity, or trolling... you actually want a search engine that when you search it ignores your input (ie: gives top results saying "missing: stormtrooper" from a search specifically for stormtrooper information), ignores what you tell it not to give you (ie: -books will still give Google Books results) and generally give you crappy results (ie: try searching for terms which happen to coincide with a syndicated news story - it's impossible to filter out every news outlet that picks it up)?

Re:Simple

[swillden]

Why would I want crappy results? I want it to give me what I want, which by definition isn't "crappy".

Re:Simple

[JMJimmy]

Why would I want crappy results? I want it to give me what I want, which by definition isn't "crappy".

And you think a system built by man can divine what you and everyone else wants at the moment you type it in? That'll be the day. Until then, assume I know what I want and not your system.

Re:Simple

[turkeyfish]

Evidently, this is akin to the SCOTUS definition of obscenity. I can't tell what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.

Re:Simple

[swillden]

Why would I want crappy results? I want it to give me what I want, which by definition isn't "crappy".

And you think a system built by man can divine what you and everyone else wants at the moment you type it in? That'll be the day. Until then, assume I know what I want and not your system.

I think systems built by man that knows a sufficient amount about me, my interests and my needs can. We're not there yet, certainly, but the question was what I want... and that's it.

Put it this way: Suppose you had a really bright personal assistant who knew pretty much everything about you and could see what you are doing at any given time, and suppose this assistant also had the ability to instantly find any data on the web. I want a search engine that can give me the answers that assistant could.

Re:Simple

[Bill Dog]

It shouldn't be about what you want, or what you think you want, but what you need. I want (need?) a search engine that will give me that.

Re:Simple

[Oligonicella]

False analogy. There's a huge difference between a personal assistant, who by definition *I* know personally, and a faceless business entity who I know not at all (read adversarial entity) scraping 'enough' information about me to presume it knows me sufficiently to second guess what I want and give me that instead of what I requested. Truthfully, why on earth would I trust such an entity?

That's the problem with hypotheticals. They don't reflect the reality we live in.

Re:Simple

[swillden]

False analogy. There's a huge difference between a personal assistant, who by definition *I* know personally, and a faceless business entity who I know not at all (read adversarial entity) scraping 'enough' information about me to presume it knows me sufficiently to second guess what I want and give me that instead of what I requested.

Not really.

I'd say there's a good argument that all of the information I give Google actually exceeds what a personal assistant would know about me. The real difference (thus far) lies in the assistant's ability to understand human context which Google's systems lack. But that's merely a problem to be solved.

Note, BTW, that I'm not saying everyone should want what I want, or be comfortable giving any search engine enough information to be such an ideal assistant. That's a personal decision. I'm comfortable with it... but I'm not yet getting the search results I want.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're talking hypothetically, then why can't I have my own digital personal assistant, a companion AI (almost like an invisible friend) that was assigned to at birth and grows up with me?

Humans might be better at interacting in the real world, and the AI would be better at interacting in the digital world.

Taken to it's furtherest extent, this would pretty much be a human-machine symbiont.

Re:Simple

[stoborrobots]

Reminds me of this old chestnut...

Re:Simple

[JMJimmy]

So you want a magic ball

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like the old features back! Like "exact search" and "exclude from" features that actually work!

Re:Simple

[JMJimmy]

That's my entire point... any algorithm might be able to show you what you want/need *sometimes* but they can never know what you want/need *now*. Just because you search for, lets say, "batman vs superman" several times does not mean that in this very moment when you search "super bats attack man" that you're looking for batman vs superman.

Just like a personal assistant won't know that today you're feeling like a spiced latte instead of your usual black coffee, neither will any predictive algorithm. If you keep asking your personal assistant for a spiced latte and they keep bringing you black coffee they'd be fired pretty quickly. On the other hand if you ask your assistant for the TSP report and they bring it to you when you really wanted the TPS report you can't really fault them for that now can you?

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so sick of having to change every search to "verbatim" because my search terms are being ignored.

Also, Google's version of 'verbatim' isn't. I'd like to be able to search for "~3.89#" for example, and it actually be verbatim.

Better protection against SEO.

[SeaFox]

What made Google so great when it was still relatively new was the results were more relevant, i.e. they weren't just a bunch of advertisements. With the rise SEO that is less the case now, and looking for something on Google for me now means adding "-buy -purchase -price -shop" automatically.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[JMJimmy]

What made Google so great when it was still relatively new was the results were more relevant, i.e. they weren't just a bunch of advertisements. With the rise SEO that is less the case now, and looking for something on Google for me now means adding "-buy -purchase -price -shop" automatically.

Google seems to ignore '-term' when it comes to certain sites/terms.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[rudy_wayne]

What made Google so great when it was still relatively new was the results were more relevant, i.e. they weren't just a bunch of advertisements. With the rise SEO that is less the case now, and looking for something on Google for me now means adding "-buy -purchase -price -shop" automatically.

Unfortunately, that's what happens when a search engine is run by a company that depends on advertising for 96% of its revenue. Google is not in the search business. They are not a technology company, no matter how many data centers and driverless cars they have.

They are an ADVERTISING company and their business model depends on getting you to click on as many ads and "sponsored links" as possible, using whatever deceptive methods necessary.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[SuricouRaven]

You seem to forget just how useless search engines were before Google. I remember using some, and they were utter rubbish. Google shot to success in their early days because they had the better algorithms: If you searched with them you'd probably find what you wanted on page one, not page twenty-five.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen an ad on Google for years.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[JMJimmy]

They were only bad if you didn't know how to use them. I found them to be infinitely better than what we have now - even Google of 3-4 years ago was better than now.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[afgam28]

If anything, being an advertising company provides an incentive to downrank ad-like results. Why would anyone buy an ad if their shopping site already appears at the top of the organic results?

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[Ksevio]

But they are also in the search business since they can't receive money from their advertising customers if they don't receive screenspace from their searching customers. Just because their money comes mostly from advertising, does not make them an advertising company.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are an ADVERTISING company and their business model depends on getting you to click on as many ads and "sponsored links" as possible, using whatever deceptive methods necessary.

No, they are a SURVEILLANCE company that just happens to engage in a bit of advertising to support their primary business of stalking people.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[Jack Griffin]

They are an ADVERTISING company

Mod Up!
I'm sick of Google being referred to as a technology company. They are an advertising company that uses technology. But at heart, advertising is their core business.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[Anonymous Coward]

I started thinking that they had disabled the feature, guess thats why. Also hard to know how many words have been reduced in possibilitie for meaning.

Re:Better protection against SEO.

[jones_supa]

I am not seeing any advertisements on Google search as well.

Pressing Enter

[snowgirl]

First of all, I would make it so you can press the Enter key and it conducts your search. Forcing people to either tab or navigate their mouse to the button makes it a little annoying.

Re:Pressing Enter

[hercludes]

First of all, I would make it so you can press the Enter key and it conducts your search. Forcing people to either tab or navigate their mouse to the button makes it a little annoying.

Isn't this standard for anything though?

Yay Ad Free

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy to see an interest in developing steps towards and advertisement free future. I know we are addicted to ad money right now, but we should not accept that forever.

Completely Open Source

[ModernGeek]

I'd like to see a completely open search engine that allowed people to download the search indexes freely so that they may create their own in-house appliances for search without the need for going through some proprietary site that may or may not be available in the next ten years or even months.

A site that promises to deliver you your privacy is not enough, because they could really be doing anything. Google promised us our privacy, and changed and deleted their old privacy policies even though they said that they'd always keep all copies of a privacy policy on archive. They went back on the word "never" and have continued to discontinue online services that people have become accustomed to with little to no notice.

A reasonably sized search index that is extensible based on what one is searching for would be great. Localizing URL suggestions, wikipedia caches, and other toolbar-suggestion searches in a networked work environment would all have benefits; the applications are almost endless. Freeing the shackles of search from a few could do so much for innovation, privacy, and security.

Re:Completely Open Source

[wvmarle]

There are two issues with this.

Search indexes are very expensive to make - lots of data to download and analyse to come anywhere near reasonable coverage of what's out there. Someone has to pay for it.

The amounts of data involved are huge. By the time you're done downloading such an index, even assuming you've got sufficient storage at hand, it's horribly outdated.

There is a reason there are no recent small search start-ups: you have to be pretty big to even consider this. When Google started, the Internet was a fraction of the size it's now, and even then Google's founders could use the massive computing resources of their university. Google's index nowadays is so big that they can not search it entirely themselves: different geographical locations tend to give different search results for the exact same query, as you're searching different subsets of the database.

Re:Completely Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't buy the size argument because bandwidth and processing power have both increased more than the rate of growth of the internet.

Not saying it's easy, but I think I have a fair argument that it would be *easier* to start an internet index today, than ten years ago.

For reference I refer to these pages:

http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

http://ipcarrier.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/law-of-internet-bandwidth-has-since.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Understanding what I am asking

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably 15 - 20 years ago I saw a news clip, possibly on Discovery Channel's Daily Planet, showing a group of grad students working on AI that can read a chapter of Shakespear, understand it and summarize it perfectly. I've never seen anything about it since and can't find any information about it online. I think they were at MIT.

If they can make the program understand paragraphs of text well enough to summarize it then they should also be able to make it be able to answer questions. I'd like to see a search engine with this type of technology. Feed it the whole Internet and have it directly answer your question rather than giving you ranked search results. Wolfram Alpha is the closest to that goal that I'm aware of.

The biggest challenge with a system like that would be separating the wheat (correct information) from the chaff (mainstream media government propaganda).

I am curious too

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been playing around with meta search concepts for years (after doing many more years in enterprise/public search), but can't find a significant reason to produce a new public web search. duckduckgo does meta really well and does all the open/privacy stuff decently. Other than possessing a much better domain name, I am not sure what I could bring to the table.

Cuil

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Cuil all over again. No. Just no.

Congrats.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best wishes for your project.
Take note on the lessons learned on the SlashDice Beta fiasco.

Buck Feta.

+

the only feature that matters

[Anonymous Coward]

When I search I want relevant results, with out this you are worthless.

Immediate minor pain points

[Anonymous Coward]

Above all, I want a search engine to not get in my way. You're the intermediary between me and my content. I *do not* want to stay on your pages, I want to find whatever I'm looking for and get on with my life

- Don't put the tiny search field at the near bottom of the page stuck right near to the button without padding. It's the only important element in your page.
    Right now your giant logo is what takes more than half the page.
- Don't require JS to use. It's a form, it has no business *requiring* JS. At least have a fallback.
- Nobody neads a "clean that field" button. Everyone who clicks that button is going to do so by mistake.
- Work on your response time. If I'm waiting >3s while nothing's happenning, I'm already getting bored and slightly annoyed. I'd almost have the time to google it while waiting for the results.
- Add a description of what I'm about to click on. The relevant extract of info that gives me some context, so I know if you found my keyword in some totally unrelated improbable thing, or the right website. Just the title and url won't cut it.
- You really need to work on your results. I know it's easy to say. But I searched "github" (http://i.imgur.com/HSuaHAU.jpg) and not a single result was even close to github.com. If there's a domain with the exact same name, it might be a good idea to give it a little boost, chances are that's exactly what I'm looking for. I tried with "facebook", same result. But plenty of people google facebook everyday, and you wouldn't find it. It's not just any small site. It's frigging facebook and github.

Good luck!

Exact searches

[Anonymous Coward]

Try searching for someone named "Beiber". Google might find him, but he'll drown in a million entries for some singer named "Bieber". But I did not search for Bieber.

There are many cases like this, where something rare has a name similiar to something more popular. Don't assume I mistyped! I rarely do. But if I mistype, I can search again. But I can't deal with a search engine that blatantly assumes I'm dyslectic.

And finally, let me search for source code snippets without turning up tons of irrelevant stuff. Spaces in an exact search is not separators - if there is no match, just say so. Don't assume I might want something completely different.

Re:Exact searches

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all easy to fix with specialized queries. If you want just "Beiber" and not the singer just use: "Beiber" -"Bieber"

Google builds results based on what people click on after their queries. Thus, most people are looking for Justin Bieber when they type in Beiber.

Re:Exact searches

[Jack Griffin]

This pattern was one of my main frustration with MS. They increasingly adjusted the interface for stupider and stupider end users, which is ok for that type of user, but FFS at least have the "I've used a computer before and am comfortable fiddling with settings" option for the rest of us. There's a lot of people that know what a computer is and don't need to be treated like imbeciles.

Re: Exact searches

[Anonymous Coward]

That is no excuse. I should NEVER need to negate mis-spellings for my search term. Those who really want Bieber when typing beiber, can search again.

Offering the lazy and the dyslectic a helping hand is NOT fine when it disrupts other searches. They can check the "close matches" box or something.

Consider if everybody was this stupid. "I changed your destination to Rome, it is a much more popular destination..."

Re:Exact searches

[Anonymous Coward]

Try searching for someone named "Beiber". Google might find him, but he'll drown in a million entries for some singer named "Bieber". But I did not search for Bieber.

If you include the quotes you'll find Beiber, but it will still only be pages which misspell Bieber.

Just search..

[Anonymous Coward]

..and don't mess with my query. If I search for "the best saerch engine", give me the pages that have that string, no questions asked and nothing else. Oh, and while at it, make one that does regex.

Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[schwit1]

And stop providing results that fail to have ALL of the search terms.

Re:Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[roman_mir]

Finding stuff I am looking for. I would put 'finding stuff I am looking for' on the top of the feature list for a search engine.

Re:Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[thegarbz]

I don't agree with this. Certainly results with all search terms should be promoted at the top, but once those run out the rest should be displayed. That allows you to easily find information when you don't know exactly what you're looking for. The term may be misspelt (on the website, not necessarily by user input), or there may be a different term for the same thing and the resulting website gets picked up on the rest of your search omitting the one word that is "wrong".

Re: Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[BlueTrin]

I disagree with you, also a simple Google search would allow you to learn that you can obtain this behaviour by prefixing the obligatory words with '+'.

Re: Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[RedWizzard]

I disagree with you, also a simple Google search would allow you to learn that you can obtain this behaviour by prefixing the obligatory words with '+'.

Not anymore. Google now returns results which don't always have all the obligatory words in the page, though it does tell you if some are missing.

Re: Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[Anonymous Coward]

google got rid of + because of searching google+ profiles woohoo

Re:Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[__aabppq7737]

this AND/+ thatfor those wanting to find exact matches.

Re: Be able to PERMANENTLY disable instant search

[shione]

I think the new way around this is to enclose them with ".

Searching

[Livius]

and nothing else.

Stop adding 'features' to things that don't need them!

Re:Searching

[thegarbz]

Why? As long as it doesn't affect searching why not add features?

Why is it such a problem that if I google "Where is my phone" that it brings up the option to call it along with search results for that search? Why is it a problem that when I type EUR-AUD I get a currency conversion screen along with results to articles and currency converters about the Euro?

Re:Searching

[Kjella]

and nothing else.

Stop adding 'features' to things that don't need them!

YMMV, but that's one of the reasons I really like google. For example converting units, what's 53F in C again? I could get a thousand hits that could give me the formula or a conversion table or whatnot but just "searching" for it saves me a step or two. I often use it instead of the built-in calculator just because it's already up. I suppose it could go overboard with Clippy-isms but I haven't felt that has been the case.

Re:Searching

[Altrag]

The trouble is, it does affect searching. When it works its helpful (but not required.) When it doesn't work its horribly frustrating.

To take your example, what if a popular singer releases a song called "What's your phone #?" Suddenly Google is "helpfully" readjusting your "Where is my phone" query and you end up the top 14 pages of results being about a song you're not interested in. Similarly, if a movie is released with a main character named "Euraud."

Now, if you're lucky, the search engine will provide useful ways to tell it to stop trying to outsmart you, and the onus is now on you to figure out all of the necessary hoops and jump through them in order to get a simple search to just bloody work.

And if they don't even provide hoops (or the hoops get too overridden by advertisers and SEO?) Now you're stuck trying to manually search through dozens or hundreds of irrelevant results and just hoping that the information you're actually looking for is obvious from the first 3 lines of blurb.

Re:Searching

[thegarbz]

Your scenario only applies if Google provides unlimited additional information.

In the case of "Where's my phone" If I'm searching for my phone it will be the top query. If I'm not searching for my phone the singer's song will be the next query down. Additional features take up little room in the search results and don't affect the normal results much at all which is to say regardless if one of Google's additional features is displayed or not the number of result from the actual search shown on the screen is the same. There is no need to outsmart, just to scroll one click further down.

But really I'm not sure I follow the logic of your argument. If a singer releases a song called "Where's my phone?" are you suggesting it shouldn't be the top 14 results if it's popular? Regardless of popularity search results do not take precedence over added features, so the end result of seaching for "Where's my phone" would be the additional feature on the top, followed by 14 results from the singer, followed by the iTunes link which would be almost identical if the feature wasn't present.

It looks to me as you're not complaining about "features" but rather about the algorithm deciding the results which is something else entirely.

True boolean search, ability to vote on results

[cowtamer]

In addition to Google-like relevance (which is a must if you are going to survive in this field), it would be nice to have:

1) Boolean search (cat or feline) and not (catwoman or cartoon or dog))
2) Date range which works (e.g., I want to search for websites talking about Enron BEFORE the scandal).
3) If I see a result that's obviously relevant, I'd like to be able to down vote it..

Re:True boolean search, ability to vote on results

[ADRA]

#3 Who has more time to manipulate an open source web engine index? A do gooder looking to relfect bad SEO in a search result, or an SEO not looking to pump their own numbers floating their own crap to the top (through whatever carrot/stick-like measures implemented).

Google had some extremely bad queries some years back due to every SEO on earth trying to game the system. The only reasonable solutions on the top of my head are:
1. some sort of real-id-type verification system that requires actual investment in an acocunt being considered having weight (even then, it makes compromized systems a lot more valuable to hackers)
2. Devise a systemic pattern manipulation which is known to specifically target and down-rate results (like results that only get linked through blog comments or reuse heavily from their referenced pages for instance) -- Google seems to do some form of this
3. Individualized / group based blackack-lists -- Pain in the butt to curate, causes false positives to be burried (forever?), relies on people with associations comparable to their own (eh, ban all GBLT/alternate religions / pre-xyz sites / etc..) and of course having individualized search curation is a butt ton of extra data that needs to be floating around on servers waiting for your specific user ID to hit said server. I think that is may have been one reason blocked sites died in Google. Its just a pain in the ass to distribute the user's search preferences to every possible hosting node (or having slower responses due to limited numbers of nodes being able to respond to them).

Re:True boolean search, ability to vote on results

[Jack Griffin]

#3 Who has more time to manipulate an open source web engine index? A do gooder looking to relfect bad SEO in a search result, or an SEO not looking to pump their own numbers floating their own crap to the top

So include a system to detect this. I'm sure it would be fairly trivial be pick out patterns and have some sort of human audit of major changes. Wikipedia already does something similar.

Re:True boolean search, ability to vote on results

[Altrag]

Wikipedia has a few million pages, all within their domain and (ultimately) under their control, the majority of which have minor or no controversy involved.

Google has many billions of pages that they have no control over at all, almost all of which are controversial (even if the controversy is "I want to be above my competitor in the results.) Human auditing would be immensely impractical, and crowd-sourced human auditing would be even worse due to the fact that the people most invested in breaking the system are generally the ones who can afford to put the most time/money towards doing so.

So they're relegated to using automated systems. And honestly, Google in particular has been really good at coming up with algorithms to beat overly aggressive SEO. Sure they sometimes fall behind a bit (its an ongoing battle after all,) but overall not bad.

Google's primary failures in the past few years have been their not-nearly-as-accurate attempts to outsmart their users' search terms. "Having" "to" "double" "quote" "every" "word" and still seeing your top result with a "Missing terms:" disclaimer is immensely frustrating.

Re:True boolean search, ability to vote on results

[monkeyzoo]

YESSS. Complex boolean searching!
This was the best thing about Alta Vista and why I still used it sometimes even after Google's relevancy came along and generally got your the best results intuitively.

Oh and...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are doing any crawling or indexing and putting it on a PostgreSQL backend, you are doing it wrong. It is fine for meta and website management, but please use a real indexing solution for any search query backend.

Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

...said the Anonymous Coward

Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like a feature that makes it possible to perform a search query without Javascript enabled, so I guess my needs are fulfilled by all other search engines than Trokam.

Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Search for the thing I typed in. Search ONLY for the thing I typed in. Don't search for the thing you think that I meant to type. Search for the explicit text that I entered, and nothing else.

2. Display only results that actually explicitly contain the text that I searched for.

3. Don't give me any of those SEO spam sites or ransomware sites where you have to pay to find the answer to a question. Shove those to page 99999 of the available results.

Egg Zact

[Anonymous Coward]

I want the old Google exact searches you used to be able to do +"exact keywords" so you can filter out all the sloppy, useless results Google has now. Since 2008, Google has been in a downward spiral. Any other search engine could have stepped up. Why didn't Bing or one of them fill the void that Google left when its search results got useless and sloppy?

Egg zact (hey, good name for a startup) searches are useful if you're looking up exact error codes. Sloppy searches don't work for that purpose.

Who needs links to websites anyway?

[sparkydevil]

I'm wondering what you mean by "Search Engine"? Do you mean a way to sort and rank websites? That's only part of what Google does. You may want to identify what is missing from Google before following the models of the past.

Re:Who needs links to websites anyway?

[Altrag]

Wow. That was a terrible article. Their example is searching for a person's name and then claiming the results didn't give them the information they wanted.

Except they don't tell you what they were wanting! They mention songs, stories, history.. well you could add those terms if that's what you're looking for and get results that are a lot more specific to what you want.

Bringing up the Wikipedia page is probably the _best_ possible option given how vague the query is. Sure the first 3 lines that get turned into the blurb may or may not say anything useful, but everyone knows what Wikipedia is and how it works. If you're just looking for random information about a topic, that's a great place to go as it will have at least a little bit of all of those categories mentioned above and you can go redo your search with more specific terms once you've decided what you're interested in.

And OK sure you can pull up countless examples of when somebody somewhere made a troll edit to the Wikipedia page.. but what on earth makes the author think that the (usually completely unreviewed and uncurated) articles from "way way down the list" will more accurate in any sense?

Same with the news stories. How is Google supposed to know if you're interested in the most recent news or the most controversial news over time?

If you don't even know what you're looking for, how the hell do you expect Google (or any other search engine) to know? A "story" is fine, but if all I'm looking for are concert dates, I just want a damned list of dates and cities I don't want a whole bloody "story," whatever that even means given the lack of context.

Deja vu all over again...

[kackle]

Amen, brother. Similarly, I switched from Lycos a decade+ ago because they dropped Boolean searching (some of us are power users!). I used Yahoo! next, but it was painful on dial-up with all the extra junk on their home page. Then I came across this new, misspelled site called "Google". I loved it; but lately it has been wearing on me as it panders more and more to the masses.

Note to Google: We nerds might be in the minority, but it is WE who direct the non-nerds as to how to set up their digital devices, avoid online trouble, choose their search engines, etc. Don't ruin it for us. I already started to keep one eye open for another search place, because I fear it'll only get worse.

Re:Deja vu all over again...

[JMJimmy]

If you find a good one let me know. I've tried Bing, DuckDuckGo and a smattering of others - they all seem to have the same results or lack any sort of depth which is highly disappointing. My next to try is Blekko - I like the concept of /topic and more of a command line concept.

Re:Deja vu all over again...

[JMJimmy]

oops.. never mind. Blekko is already gone... hrm... maybe Ark? Seems more social than geek though.

Re:Deja vu all over again...

[Mantrid42]

Perhaps it's a ploy to keep us in power, as only we can wield the strongest google-fu.

Accuately read my mind

[PineHall]

To give me search results that accurately are what I meant to type and not what I did type. And a bonus would be if it would accurately know better than me what I am looking for an give me those results. In other words read my mind and correctly anticipate when I am wrong and still give me the correct answer.

best wishes !

[swell]

It wouldn't respond to my request. I had to allow a jquery script. Then it searched but couldn't find 'Benghazi'.

Things have been lost from search. Alta Vista allowed search for 'word1' NEAR 'word2', which proved very useful. Google used to give information about its finds such as date, size, ('cached' is still there, but hidden) and some things so long abandoned that I can't remember them. You know why date is important; size is also important because a very large page containing your terms is probably clickbait. A great sadness for me is that Wolfram Alpha is so wrapped up in fancy scripts that I've never been able to use it with my fairly secure Firefox (oh, it's better today).

Accurate reporting would be nice. I'm looking at a Google result that claims it found "About 54,100 results (0.46 seconds)" when actually there were only 245 unique results.

Location would be nice (maybe a flag icon from that country). An opportunity to vote the relevance of a result up or down and maybe indicate something inappropriate. Wildcards would be incredible. Apple's Spotlight search engine can now search the internet as well as local files- maybe your engine could take advantage of some sinister simpatico surreal symbiosis.

We need a fresh approach after a long period of stagnation. Who knows what clever innovation has been missed?

Re:best wishes !

[Bill Dog]

Google: The IE 6 of Internet search.

Maybe Mozilla could make a search engine and re-light the competition fire and user focus in this space. (Bing just seems to be a clone of the stagnating leader.)

Re: best wishes !

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate when Google does that.. "1 of 540,000 results" then you click to page 2 and it is the last page of results. Huh?

Regular expressions

[John.Banister]

Also, filter out all the pages-of-links search spam
If you want to charge a fee, you could include a link to someone who is better at searching for stuff than I am, or maybe Watson.
Finally, include all the internet that Google hasn't indexed.

Have you seen this list of some of the few alternatives?

Re:Regular expressions

[flopsquad]

This!! For various technical reasons, I don't think a regex-capable, public-facing search engine is feasible right now :(

But I'd beg, borrow, and bite to get some sort of "regex lite" capabilities (we could start by excluding the stuff that's np-hard, like lookbacks).

Re:Regular expressions

[Altrag]

Ugh. Yes this so much!

Also those "answer" sites that are all just word-for-word carbon copies of each other. Even if there's useful answers on the page, we only need one copy of each answer set.

I have no idea how Google could manage that (more from a legal perspective than a technical one) but its certainly freaking annoying from a user's perspective.

Word proximity

[GerryGilmore]

Being able to say "find 'blah' when it is within X words either side of 'bleh'......"

Actually visited your search engine

[stephanruby]

When I open your search engine, I want the focus of my cursor to default your search form.

After I found out that you didn't even have this, which requires no more than one single attribute in html, I didn't have the confidence to go to any further. Usability testing is cheap. The idea that you would forgo any kind of basic usability testing, before asking for feedback from Slashdot users, tells me you don't have the experience, nor the real desire, to make a decent halfway usable search engine.

Grouping results

[Anonymous Coward]

Often, I'm searching for one thing, and I discover that the words I'm using match something else, like a band or celebrity's name, that swamp the results I'm looking for.

To the extent your data model does clustering, it would be really nice to be able to show clusters of results so I can find what I want among the substantially-similar.

For example, if I search for something commonly sold, I'd like "sites that sell it", "reviews", "how it works", "how to make your own", etc. Labels seem difficult to automate, but if you can just manage the groups, I can figure out which ones are of interest to me pretty well.

The same problem comes with Wikipedia and the dozens of sites that crib from it. From a user point of view, they're all the same result. Perhaps I want to find "who's copying from wikipedia" and explore that cluster, but I'd rather they all get grouped together so I can skip over them.

Culling

[Moof123]

Make it easy for me to specify I am looking for technical information, or looking to buy something, or what have you. All too often I am trying to do a search for technical information, but if that acronym has also been used by Beiber lately I am SOL. I would love it is I could weed out the pop culture hits when I wanted to omit them.

Similarly I would like a search engine that I could easily specify if I also want hits for related words, or just EXACT match, and whether to ignore capitalization or not. It is maddening when an acronym also happens to be a common word and I get flooded with useless crap.

Re:Culling

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be happy with the ability to provide a context. Or even select a context from a drop down. Try search for go or C or other such hard to search for terms. You get so much crap. Yes "the game of go" and "c programming" work, but it would be nice if I didn't have to figure out the manual triggers to get what I want.

Re:Culling

[snowgirl]

...but if that acronym has also been used by Beiber lately I am SOL. ...

What does the Skilled Occupation List have to do with this?

Re:Culling

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget twitter hashtags and IRC channels.

I think it would be nice to search old results. Maybe I only want results before a given date, not after a given date.

Some ideas

[grahammm]

1. Return first the results which exactly match the search terms.

2. Do not include results where one or more of the search terms only exists in an advert on the page.

3. Re-introduce a feature which an early search engine (I think it was AltaVista) where you could specify a search term to be 'near' another.

4. (more important in languages other than English) Allow you to specify that any tense, person or case of a search term be matched (eg if searching in French, *aller would match any of 'vais', 'vas', 'va', 'allons', 'allez', 'irai', 'allâmes' etc)

5. Allow you to restrict the results to those where he search terms are actually rendered on the page when you follow the link.

Re:Some ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Google and Yandex do 4. for Russian.

Re:Some ideas

[flopsquad]

I believe google may have (had?) some undocumented "near"-type feature.

Yellow pages, huffington post... both gone!

[EmperorOfCanada]

First I want a toggle that I can never ever ever ever ever see that domain in my search results. So ask.com answers.com experts-exchange.com huffpo and especially Quora you fucking turd pile of shot Quora; I never want to see Quora again in my life.

When I want a little pizza joint or some place that hasn't hired an "SEO" guy all I get are page after page of directories derived from some government database or some crap like that. Their actual page is bottom ranked. I don't want review sites. I don't want anything that was assembled by a machine.

So a simple rule of thumb is de-list any page that offers to "upgrade" someone's listing. Full stop. Also I want a toggle that will remove listings that have any version of "upgrade to our pro service" Literally they could cure cancer but offer to cure it 1 minute faster for 99 cents and I don't want to see that page.

To me right now nearly the entire search results are like going to a dating site and only finding hookers. Some people would argue that they "need" to make money but they don't. There are lots of pages that exist for a specific reason and many of those pages are commercial, as in they offer a specific service such as a pizza places where the page is about their pizza place. Short of the recipes the page is 100% free. But I don't want some shit "Just Eat" website. Maybe they can link to the other page but I really don't want to see it ever again. For instance I loved allrecipes.com. But now it is just upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade. Some will argue that they should be allowed to make money but quite simply the site existed before some MBA took over and "monetized" the site that's fine, I no longer want it to turn up in my search results. Don't ban it from the entire search engine, just ban it from the search engine when you tick the "No upgrade sites" option.

The other thing that I would kill for is a negative feature option. So any site that uses discus would vanish from my search results. Those scumbags need to burn in hell and I would love any search engine that sent them there.

To me there is a huge opportunity for some new search engine to do to Google what they did to all the others 17 years ago; completely make them irrelevant by brutally ignoring the wishes of the larger websites and completely focusing on the needs of the average user.

couple things

[Anonymous Coward]

able to find more results by ignoring robots.txt
does not / technically impossible to remove or censor results e.g as result of DMCA request

No "preferential" treatment of results.

[Jane Q. Public]

Google has been ever-more pissing me off with its "sponsored" results in which I am almost never interested... I have to go further down the page to get the things I want.

Related to this: Google's recent proposal to post "truthy" results before others. Just no. I don't want or need a nanny-search. I'll judge the results for myself.

As far as I am concerned, results "filtered" or sorted according to Google's idea of "truth" is little more than a rather transparent effort toward censorship.

no bs

[Anonymous Coward]

no bullshit on the search page
an "i feel lucky" button

now, if anybody could satisfy both of those...

The Best Feature

[JimSadler]

Google!!!!! Do not reinvent the wheel. Google can be a wonderful search engine. How in the heck can a new product provide the variety and depth of search that Google can with their enormous data base and ample hardware?

Give me the option to disregard...

[Godwin O'Hitler]

...all meta shopping sites.
I'm at my wits end when alibaba or ali express or kelkoo or tengo or whatever is in the top five of EVERYTHING I search for. I don't ever want them to be even in the top 1000 unless I explicitly type "Meta shop" or whatever.

Apart from that one filter, just search for what I fucking asked for, not what you think I might have meant.

Search

[Anonymous Coward]

Syntax language must be clear and present, google does this but hides it abit. Others place documentation in other out of the way places on the page, difficult to find.

Option to search with/without commercial interference. Option to search encrypted against NSA (et al) spying.

Option to search via Artificial Intelligence or via literal string search (like the different between a general "show me a duck" and a litteral "nodejs npm commands"

Search results for ALL (voice, video, files, text, EVERYTHING) on one page and categorized with thumbnail previews.

Removal of any and all filtering. It is time we looked straight into the brown void of humanity instead of pretending we are a collection of sitcom actors, people controlling my mind piss me off something fierce.

Search that actually goes into the page instead of just reading the text that's there stock. Web developers right now create very inefficient sites because they want 'SEO' which is a stupid buzz word for a search ranking. Sites must be hard coded into server file directories so that bots can read it, a proper site would have the pages as an array of javascript memory objects because it's hundreds of times faster, but the bots cannot read it. Currently the only solution is to hard code a chunk of your first page, create inefficient hard coded pages, or create dummy hard code pages not used that the bot can see. There are some solutions but the problem is writing code into the HTML in the first place.

Clean URL

[Nightlight3]

I find it most annoying with Google last several years that they mangle the URL they send me to so I can't easily change it to the parent or higher level URL.

Ads are not the problem, SEO is.

[barfy]

When I search, I don't mind ads. I mind malevolant ads. But I mind malevolant sites more. One is solveable. Generically the site that has the most to gain through advertising pays the most. And I generally benefit from those. But SEO is more insidious. They are trying to gain my attention from generally more appropriate sites by gaming the system. If the system is evolving correctly the best most appropriate sites get selected automatically. The major search sites recognize these things. Because if they stop providing relevant sites other sites will come along and become more relevant. I am not going to use your site if there are no ads. No ads means less relevant searches for me. The site with the most relevant search wins. Hands down. Everything else is meaningless.

Execute JavaScript and CSS

[jb_nizet]

Nearly all search engines still think web pages are static, or generated at server-side. That is less and less true, and many web sites are now single-page applications fetching their content dynamically using AJAX requests. A search engine should search in pages as a real person sees them, not as a robot ignoring JS and CSS see them. It's a shame that all SPAs on earth have to generate a static version of the app using their own robot just to please stupid search engine robots not able to do the same.

Re:Execute JavaScript and CSS

[Altrag]

There's a bit of a practicality issue there. Static pages are very well defined in terms of how they're requested and shown.

Dynamic pages are all over the map. There's a handful of popular frameworks, a larger handful of less popular frameworks, and a huge number of roll-your-own solutions. I mean sure to some degree there should be enough commonalities to make a best effort attempt but its never going to be perfect and frankly, Google's more important to your site than your site is to Google so its not surprising that the onus is on you to make your site work with Google rather than the other way around.

Being able to filter results

[Dixie_Flatline]

So say I'm searching for something with really common words in it. I can't think of anything specifically right now, but this is my most common search failure.

I get back a bunch of results. They have all the words I'm looking for, but they're all about two or three more popular topics. I'd like to be able to select a search result and tell the engine that results like this are incorrect for some semantic reason. Maybe it's a band name and I'm looking for a book titleâI should be able to say I don't want anything related to music. No bands, albums or songs. I'd be willing to tag results with some context to provide hints to the algorithm.

Things like 'windows' tend to mess up results; Google assumes that I either mean the Microsoft kind or the house kind, but sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a particular application window. I run into this sort of thing surprisingly often.

Selectable search.

[SuricouRaven]

Specify search areas:
[X] Public internet index.
[ ] Torrent sites only.
[ ] File database of dubious legality.
[ ] Archive of device drivers that actually work.
[ ] The Dark Web, whatever that is.
[ ] Data sheets and manuals.

Parens+AND/OR,NEAR,exclude nav,NEW

[Anonymous Coward]

• Constructs like ((dog OR cat) AND food)
• Flag non-exact matches
• NEAR so I get fewer pages which just happen to have the terms, unrelated to each other
• Reduced priority of terms in navbars and menus, so I don't get pages about only one of the terms that happened to have another in a navbar
• Some way to specify that I want (or don't want) newer or more recently changed pages

a query language

[Anonymous Coward]

a query language would be nice. Ex. Find all pdfs with author names that also show up on page x.

Category trees and branches

[sleepypsycho]

I would like a search engine that could show me the top categories for my search for results. This might be beyond your goals but it is what I would like

For example I was search for program that would deal card
If the I had the word "deal" in the search I got 1000 shopping sites in a row. But I was not looking for shopping. All my search terms were common and could be used in conjunction. So card and deal together would get business cards or greeting cards. If an engine could provide some sort of organization. I could then drill towards what I am interested.

How the engine would be able to do this I am not sure. Obviously semantic web is one avenue, but the search might recognize lots of links in common or it might look at supplied key word or common terms on the pages

Google had something a bit like it (in labs only I think) but it was buried and not a simple choice about how to present results.

Good results

[Lord Crc]

Without good results, it doesn't really matter about the bells and whistles. I use a search engine to find information, so it better do that extremely well. For example, I just couldn't stand using DuckDuckGo (aka Bing) because of this, and went back to Google. Bing consistently failed to find information the information I wanted, while Google had it on the first page.

So, after your engine returns as good or, ideally, better results than Google, you can start thinking about other features.

One feature I'd really like is to be able to tweak my result set. Something like if I search for "AC DC", I get a bunch of results about the band "AC/DC". That's not really a bad result given the input, but in this case I was after an explanation for the electrical terms.

So I'm thinking some ability to mark one or more of the results I don't want and say "not pages like this", and it would cull those talking about the band, in a weighted manner. Or some other way to help me find the information I want when I search for some ambiguous terms.

Re:Good results

[Anonymous Coward]

No, duckduckgo isn't Bing, they have their own algorithm and bots, and also use the Russian Yandex search engine.

I'm a developer, and I haven't used Google for at least 6 years.
I switched to Bing for about 2 years, and then to duckduckgo.

I love duckduckgo's open source community platform and that anyone can code for it, especially "instant answers".

Re:Good results

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed some kind of clustering algorithm, that when you search on a term gives you something that says "there's x categories of results with this search, which did you want?"

Advanced Image Search Features

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like advanced image searching features. Searching images by the text contents of the page they're on is bogus and probably google's biggest weakness. Images should be searchable by content. The means recognition of image contents (non-trivial, unsolved problem), but it also means some easier to realize stuff. For example, good OCR would go a long way, bonus for handwritten characters or characters on a noisy background. Search for webcomics based on words in the dialog or image macros by caption. Image searches that accept images as input. Google does this now but very poorly. Recognizing when that input image is part of a larger work, either a cropped section of a larger image or a frame from a video. Suggest similar images based on that info.

GEOIP transparency; User hosted crawlers;

[bug1]

Search engines should shine a light on sites that show different results to different users, maybe its for commercial exploitation (GEOIP blocking), or political propaganda or whatever.

Search engine show allow users to run crawlers in coordinated distributed manner, this helps users have privacy, it adds extra noise to surveillance systems, it might give users deniability as to their intent to access subversive material. It it should help with the first problem.

Good image search

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not filter porn even without safe search off!

Time Sensitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say Linux kernel 4.0 just came out. If I search Linux then my top result will be a previous kernel version. What I'd like is a search engine that could put the most recent result first, not just the one with the most links to it.

Re:Time Sensitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what the "News" search can be abused for

minus

[pen-helm]

I would like to be able to indicate that a search term should not produce a hit, but should not disqualify the page either.

This is point 1

[Anonymous Coward]

A search engine must not rely on javascript for simple things like submitting a form.

Re:This is point 1

[fisted]

It does not

Simple regular expressions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I realize it would probably be combinatorially explosive and break the search engine's platform, possibly even the Internet, but I have long wished I could submit a regular expression as a search term on Google.

Re:Simple regular expressions.

[X0563511]

It would be interesting to filter the results of a search with an expression - but as you say I think using the expression itself to drive the search is probably not something you'll see happen.

Focus on expert sites

[gman003]

I've started drifting away from using Google/Bing/whatever, in favor of loading a bunch of site-specific search engines into my search bar.

So if I'm looking for, say, a specific Magic card, I don't let Google search the entire net, and find everything that happens to say "elvish mystic", giving me a ton of irrelevant stuff (even searches like "mtg elvish mystic" bring up pages to buy one instead, which usually don't have the info I'm really looking for). Instead I click an extra button to go straight to Wizard's own database page for it.

Repeat that idea for about twelve different gaming wikis, plus Wikipedia for general knowledge, and you'll have the contents of my search bar. If I were into different hobbies, I might have similar search engines for those.

A single search engine that can figure out the context of the search, then go straight to the experts for that context, would be one way to do better than Google.

Re:Focus on expert sites

[Anonymous Coward]

site:www.wizards.com "elvish mystic"

I would like for it to...

[adndgamer]

...read my mind.

Seriously: words suck at describing or conveying a lot of things. And half of these comments are just people who don't know how to use a search engine properly. They can't read your minds [yet] and we are using the equivalent of charades to try and explain to a computer what we're looking for.

Until we can directly share a mental image with a computer, we're going to have to deal with crafting search queries.

Microdata and RDFa Lite extraction

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the tool google uses for extracting meaningful terms from pages with Microdata or RDFa Lite attributes:
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Get rid of the crap sites

[E-Rock]

Get rid of the sites that have a single paragraph and then a registration or paywall blocking the rest of the content.

Get rid of the sites that are just copies of other pages with ads.

Or let us easily block a site from appearing in results in the future. Enough users vote a site off, have a human take a look to see if they should remove it for everyone.

Privacy, and symbols

[X0563511]

Privacy goes without saying, of course... but if I put a period or a comma in my search, I damn well meant it to be there. Pay attention to it.

JUST SEARCH

[Anonymous Coward]

What features would you like in a search engine?

From a (new) search engine i would like to be ONLY search (NOT a "recommendation" or a "search and recommendation") engine (like the -very- old search engines)... and booleans, and fucking apostrophes/quotations/parentheses/bracket! Just that please: A FUCKING SEARCH ENGINE is just enough!
Thanks.

A genealogist's lament

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm looking for information on someone who lived and died in the 19th century, I'll end up with a bunch of results that are from "people finder", "background check", "white pages", etc. sites. I'd like an "exclude this and all similar results" button to clear all of them out and get to results that are actually relevant to me.

Clean up search results

[david999]

When I do a search on just about anything then not to see x rated material show up.
Also want results by date.

Less

[Snufu]

evil.

... and ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they could use a much better name

That "trokam' moniker does not make any sense to 99.999% of the users

Source details

[mango9]

Want to be able to specific more about the source e.g. newspapers only, blogs only, academic only, published in 2007 and so on. Ads I can ignore.

The dotcom is back!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, look!!! Another geek with a napkin to write a business plan on, with one exciting feature that completely rips out any possible profit, and no other usable resources, especially workable webcrawling tools, scalable databases requiring petabytes of storage, servers scattered around the world to do the actual web crawling with so local bandwidth doesn't swamped, security of the systems, or any of the 47 other problems a real business would have to deal with.

The Dotcom is back! Woohoo, I made *so much money* cleaning up after those clowns!!!!

Regex & Boolean!

[Anonymous Coward]

Regex & Boolean!

this would solve a lot of complaints noted above

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same complaint that a lot of the complainers above have: results that attempt to "correct" your terms, and you end up getting a lot of irrelevant results. Thinking about the issue, I think and am pretty sure that some search engines end up giving the most "searched for" results. They lean toward 'popularity.' Thus, you get results based on mass population hysteria. On possible solution to this problem would be the ability to turn off or on "similar searched others have made."

Here is another problem I have. I search for basic information on cooking. I want to know the baking time for pork chops in an oven. A lot of the results, the vast majority, are recipe sites with lots of fancy recipes, and finding out how long and at what temp to cook pork chops in the over, you have to weed through 40 other ingredients and sauces.

This might help. When the results are displayed if you have bar or box on the screen that gives you some simple options, that you don't need to be a nerd about. Something like" "results are too technical" or "more technical" or "exclude News reports and current events". Again, the idea is that these options to better aim the search can be given both before and after the search is started, bit presented in plain language everyone can understand. (Yes I understand Boolean search, not that it helps much anymore!).

How about

[Anonymous Coward]

A home page that doesn't take 15 seconds to load while it shoves analytics and facebook and ads down my throat?

Re:Simple (my wish list)

[Anonymous Coward]

Search for what I type in, now what you think I want. I'm so sick of having to change every search to "verbatim" because my search terms are being ignored. I'd switch to someone else but they seem to be carbon copies.

I'll second this, if I type in FORD THUNDERBIRD, chances are I am searching for information on a specific automobile type and not native American mythology.

I also don't want every F-ing web site that has the word FORD on it somewhere. Low quality click-bait sites (mainly porn, dubious finance, spamvertiser, or driver-by malware pushers) are notorious for this, having a block of text at the bottom with common search terms so they show up in searches they shouldn't.

Likewise I don't want to see the same site listed more than once, If I search for "cats with hats and bats" (it's a video poker machine) I don't want to see the same Vegas hotel web site come up a dozen or more times, once is enough.

An "expert" mode that accepts regular expression searching would be a nice touch as well, so I can search for "this AND that BUT NOT this OR this".

Limits on searches would be nice for some people as well. If I'm searching for information on current tax laws, those change every year so if it is five years old it is probably worthless.

I would also like support for blacklisting (I'm surprised that modern browsers don't have that as a plug-in). If I run across a scam site (like ancestry.com which advertises free info that actually costs you $20/month) I want to click a box and NEVER see that site displayed again, EVER. Unless I delete it off my blacklist.

Highlight other sites of dubious value. There was an old search engine, I can't remember the name, that prefixed all pay sites with $$$. Highlighting ad sites and known malware pushers in red would be nice as well.

Some of this is probably not even technically possible, but some of it is. I'm sure highlighting known malware pushing sites would probably be legally risky, and blacklisting would probably require help from the browser.

My requests

[Anonymous Coward]

Standard Stuff exact String Search within quotes fuzzy word search, specific site search, filetype search limit result to date range
DO NOT TAKE THE PHRASE APART Just return no results
Query websites not well connected to the main commercial internet
Special requests
I have a machine crawling 24/7 using open source web crawler just for my specialized scientific, epigenetic , and materials searches

 

ungoogle

[nospam007]

I'd like a search that actually searches exactly what I type and not what it thinks I might mean.

Including punctuation exactly as I type it instead of ignoring it.

Being able to be more precise

[Misagon]

Search features I depend on:
* Non-English characters. Handle multiple encodings of web pages and URL-encoded characters in search queries.
* site: to search only within a domain. This is often a national domain, such as "site:co.uk" to search only British sites.
* Minus: Begin able to block certain words, or sites.
* Plus: A word prefixed with a plus is required.
* Quotes/hyphen: Searching for exact phrases. "Java class file" is different from "Java File class".

Where current search engines are lacking:
* If there is a period between the words then they do not belong to the same phrase. (A search for "Hello Google" should not return "Say Hello. Google for it." as its top result)
* Use word order in search query to weigh how important a search term is. Rank pages higher wihen those words are closer together.
* Don't correct my spelling by default, assuming that my search query is in US-English. (I am speaking to you Duck-Duck Goo!). I can spell, and I do not always write English. If I misspell then that is my mistake, and sometimes I search for a brand name that was misspelled intentionally.
* When indexing a web page, identify what is the important text on the page and ignore the rest. For instance, on an internet news site, the text in the articles is most important. On a forum text inside the comments. On this forum, articles followed by comments. What people have written in their signatures is not important. Slashboxes are not and ads are definitely not.
It is aggravating when you use Google on a collecting site and you get every other page on that site in every search result because members have listed their collections in their signatures.
If I search for the word "review", I don't want every page on every web store that has a Reviews tab.
Pages on a site often follow a certain pattern - find that pattern to find which text on each page that is the most unique.

Re:Being able to be more precise

[__rze__]

Totally agree with this. :)

I've been using DuckDuckGo for 2y now and can see a lot of improvements, especially in QoR. Some things I don't like, but it covers my needs mostly. Had some problems with things like mentioned in the parent, but worst case I pulled a !g and still got the info I needed without tracking.

There is also another one called www.qwant.com which promises the things that everyone wants, will be trying it out. It is based in the EU, so other laws apply ;-)

Re:Being able to be more precise

[Anonymous Coward]

Answering as AC as I've modded. Re word order, it's not so simple. A bit like the save button, sort of: users have been trained to use bad UX in the past, and we've no good workaround yet. What should be occurring in the long term, though, is natural language search: "How do I fix/solve [XYZ]?"

Oh McScrooge. Dear, sweet McScrooge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you not see what the Crashcourse guys did? Make a donation if you can afford it and if you want to, but they understand many people won't/can't, and that's fine with them.

For example, I'm not paying you to read your post. And you're not paying for this reply. Not everything that happens in the world requires silver to cross palms.

Money, money, money. With you it's always with the money. There are other ways, McScrooge.

Re:Simple (my wish list)

[Kohath]

Why won't this useless search engine tell me the best place to ford the thunderbird river?

2D navigation for search refinement

[iMadeGhostzilla]

Think of Google's search as your type as 1-dimensional suggestion list. I'd like as I type to see around the search bar a matrix of categories: news, videos, documentation, blogs etc. Then as I hover over a category with a mouse I zoom into a matrix of subcategories for that category using the mouse wheel. I zoom out back one level if that's not the branch I'm thinking of.

In addition, I don't want to click until the very end, and maybe not even then. Hovering over a set of results shows me what's at the deeper level, and when I'm looking at a one or a handful of pages that match the criteria as I refine further, it is also shown as a cell. Hovering over it will give me a preview -- from the search engine, not my browser fetching an actual page. Only when I'm certain I want to go there, I'll click.

That would be a search engine of the future. Or, idea #2: make it like google, but when I control-clik on the link for the page it opens a sanitized copy of the page, provided by your server, so I know there are no scripts or malware and crap. And if possible give me that sanitized preview when I hover over the page so if I'm lucky I don't have to click on anything at all.

I know sites wouldn't like it but just saying what I'd like to see that I think is technically possible. Thanks for listening!

Search 'intelligence' is great

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

Suppose I type in a phone number Google understands I live in the UK. The same goes for wanting to buy a mattress. So far so good. That's helpful intelligence.

But if I want to view the poems of Emily Bronte I don't want 100 gazillion results from Amazon.

Just like I use NoScript and AdBlock+ so I want to cut out the shop windows. If I want info from the web then I don't want canned waffle.

My phrase to appear on the page

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not want the search engine to try to figure out what I mean. I want it to find pages that have the terms I typed in them. It annoys the piss out of me when results pop up that don't contain the terms I had searched for. These results are completely irrelevant to me.

Also I HATE it when a search engine says "oh did you mean blah blah?" NO. I AM NOT STUPID. DON'T QUESTION ME AND MAKE ME ASSERT MY ORIGINAL QUERY.

decentralized search (p2p?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern search engines are darn good. The problem is not that they lack features. Almost all requests I ve read so far CAN be achieved with Google provided someone RTFM. Moreover suggestions, basic natural language processing and even search 'bubbles' are convinient and DO help the majority of people find the intented result in the first few results. The problem IMHO is the existence of single point of failure by lack of diversity. And as Murphy law goes, if something can go wrong it will eventually go wrong

How do you plan on financing an ad free search..?

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers and internet access cost money. While we would all love an ad free search experience, it is impossible to make that happen. If you think it is possible then you are just an idiot or need to remove your tinfoil had and take a real look into reality.

As far as the original question. I would like the ability to adjust my search/ad preferences. Sometimes I search for a one time need or maybe a need for a partner/friend. This sometimes incorrectly defines what I am looking for and I would like the ability to say so. That ability would lead to better search results and more correctly targeted ads.

Regular expressions

[jlockard]

I'd love to search using regular expressions, failing that, at least a much more precise way of indicating what must and must not be in the returned results.

Stop trying to guess what I'm trying to do

[dackroyd]

It would be very useful to be able to control what the search engine thinks I'm actually searching for. Taken from: http://unqualified-reservation...

A more intriguing question is whether the Graffiti approach can be applied to full-text search. Many modern search engines, notably the hideous, awfully-named Bing, are actually multiple applications under the hood - just like WA. If Bing figures out that you are searching for a product, it will show you one UI. If it figures out that you are searching for a celebrity, it will show you another UI. It may also switch algorithms, data sets, etc, etc. I'm sure Google has all kinds of analogous, if more subtle, meta-algorithms.

While generic full-text search, unlike generic data visualization, remains a viable application and a very useful one, specialized search might (or might not - this is not my area of expertise) be an even more useful one. If the user has an affordance by which to tell the algorithm the purpose or category of her search, the whole problem of guessing which application to direct the query to disappears and is solved perfectly. A whole class of category errors ceases to exist.

My guess is that if there is any "next thing" in search interfaces, it will come not from smarter UIs, but from dumber ones in which the user does more work - the Graffiti effect. If a small quantity of user effort can produce a substantial improvement in user experience (which is a big if), the user will accept the bargain. Hey, it made Jeff Hawkins rich.

A UI that doesn't change every two years.

[Anonymous Coward]

This goes for all programs and websites.

Original AltaVista....

[gweihir]

"Near" keyword, logic constructs, all those nice features AltaVista (which was just a hardware-demo) had, and Google never managed. Google is borderline unusable these days and you strongly notice they do not care about good search but only about placing their adds and profiling you.

Predictive searches

[Anonymous Coward]

Google by now should have ton of data on its users. Why not list about 3 possibles searches that user is predicted to search for on the home page. For example it is almost lunch time and I usually look up menus of near by restaurants. Google can predict which restaurants I'll choose based on previous searches and location data. Google does something similar to this with Google Now but they can build on that more.

Regular expressions

[penguinoid]

I'd like to be able to search for regular expressions, or at least boolean. I'd like to be able to specify the context of a word, eg Java (geography), Java (coffee), Java (programming), or similarly the context for the search.

More Robust Search Criteria Formatting

[JimMcc]

1) Exact string matching. As an example, if I search for " 'x.25' " don't give me hits for something with dimensions of 45mm x 25mm.
2) Allow more complex search constructs . For example I'd like to be able to specify the search term " 'x.25' near protocol -handbook ". You can sort of do that with Google's Advanced Search, but it's extra steps and you still don't get terms like 'near' or exact match.
3) Bonus points for boolean constructs such as " (lions or tigers or bears) near woods ".

In short, provide a robust search engine that will support meaningful search terms that can be used for more than shopping for a new TV or figuring out who stars in your favorite reality tv show.

Dear Santa, all I want for Search is...

[Demonoid-Penguin]

a search engine that searches the internet. Not parts of the internet, all of the internet.

I'd also like the search engine to do Boolean and regex.

P.S. I couldn't give a flying fuck if it:- has ads; tries to profile my search queries. I can at least attempt to get avoid those things. But if it does not index the entire internet it's as useful as a range of shoes that consist of one size and one style only.. And no, I don't care if it doesn't come with a free set of steak knives and is 100% dolphin free and kind to puppies, as long as it indexes everything

I don't care if Bill Gates wrote the back end, hell, I'd use it even if it was run by the scumbag behind DuckDuckFuckADuck.

Thanks

Re:Dear Santa, all I want for Search is...

[Z00L00K]

That search engine will be hunted down and convicted of breaking the DMCA.

Re:Dear Santa, all I want for Search is...

[Demonoid-Penguin]

That search engine will be hunted down and convicted of breaking the DMCA.

1. and?
2. so?
3. what?

Re:Dear Santa, all I want for Search is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if it was neither run by a US citizen/company nor hosted in the USA.

add results to a blacklist

[gront]

Ability to right-click (or whatever) on a listed result and mark it as "I never want to see this site in any search I run on any topic ever" (useless result) or right-click on a listed result and mark it as "The content of this result isn't relevant to my search, block this page and all others like it from this search so I can find what I'm looking for" (irrelevant result/bad context) and re-run the search.

Re:add results to a blacklist

[Z00L00K]

That's an interesting idea, and then we can get rid of all those useless "experts-exchange" links and similar.

What I also would like to have as a feature is the ability to search also for "special" characters. Google today seems to see "+" and a lot of other characters as spacing characters, but sometimes I really want to search for "a+b" as a term.

Re:add results to a blacklist

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting idea, and then we can get rid of all those useless "experts-exchange" links and similar.

I don't feel comfy in needing google to preserve my personal preferences on a server beyond my control, especially when I rarely use their mail and often forget to sign out after quick email checks.
You can probably concoct a greasemonkey script with hardcoded strings, but it'd be nice if the code were able to keep track of your desired strings without going into JS in the middle of the night to add more undesirables.

Decentralized like Bitcoin or at least Bittorrent

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

An open DECENTRALIZED search system would be way better than a system that's simply built on open source. Hell, for all we know maybe even Google is completely on open source. But the data sets that seed the search engine, without which the algorithms are simply crunching meaningless strings of letters, are kept close to Google's corporate bosom.

What we need is a search engine where everyone that searches can have access to the entire data set if she or he chooses to do so. This is similar to the way the Bitcoin blockchain works. Everybody can choose to have a copy of every Bitcoin transaction ever made, or if they're lazy or don't have the computing resources connect to a full Bitcoin node using something called a light wallet (which downloads only the relevant parts of the Blockchain related to the transactions made using a certain Bitcoin address).

So let there be a basic light version of your engine and a full version. If that's not feasible, maybe you can make an advanced client that processes only parts of the complete data set, but is distributed in such a way that the parts can easily be combined into a complete data set.

Stop 'enhancing' the links!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of google adding referral parameters to all the urls that I click on from a search. It often adds 10 seconds or more (sometimes a link never comes up until you click it again). For that reason alone I switched to Bing, which I though I would never do. At least Bing doesn't fuck with the links.

Different context switches

[See Attached]

How about a context switches? One for purchasing/acquiring, one for history, one for technical details, One for and people related to an object? When I search now, I have to search between buying opportunities and buying opportunities and more.

Re:Different context switches

[See Attached]

Hey, not for nothing, but does anyone remember Usenet and Dejanews, where you could search up on any technical string and you would find -help- with things, but now, its all about -buying- things.... It was a big part of the value of a search engine to me anyway. Search is all about money which is fine when I want o buy something. i just want a switch to select Buy/Learn/History/people etc...We need a way to filter the search results.

Black jack and hookers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll make my own with blackjack and hookers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e35AQK014tI

What Google doesn't

[jtgd]

Just look at all the features that Google keeps removing and add those in.

How about a token at the beginning (perhaps "++") that declares that every word must appear? (implied +word +word...)

How about a token at the beginning that declares that every word must appear in that order? (but not adjacent)

One thing I know I'd like to see, regular expressions, is probably prohibitively expensive, but it sure would be nice.

add business listing to addressbook

[davemchine]

I frequently search for a business and google displays the name, address and phone number in a very nice box in my browser. There is no way to move that information to my address book though. It seems like google could have a button to push a cvs file to me.

I know the feature you all REALLY want...

[Yosho]

The "anti-safe search" image search, which filters out all of the things that aren't porn.

Come on, be honest.

Relivant results

[Anonymous Coward]

I want results that make sense for me. If I search for 'AWS' I want Amazon Web Services. If a professional welder searches for 'AWS' they will want the American Wielding Society. If I search for a the name of a place I want the place near me, not the small US town that copied its name. If I search for an error message I want the latest results first, I don't want email list posts from 10 years ago.

Also I want the search engine to care about my privacy, which sadly contradicts what I just described.

Only what is visible on a page.

[magic_user]

I want boolean searching on -only- what is visible on a page. None of that metadata stuff. That alone should bypass all those search conglomerators. I don't mind advertisements on the side, but not mixed with the results. I also want the results based only on what I searched for, no paying for higher rankings. That sounds simple enough...
 

features

[l3v1]

"features that I would like to find in a service: respectful of user rights, ad-free, built upon open source software, and with auditable results"

Well, well, well. For me there's only one single feature of a search engine that makes it a go or a no-go: have a damn good indexing engine that can provide relevant results in a timely manner. Everything else is just a load of crap that I will never care about. If I can't find what I'm looking for, that I couldn't care less how it protects your rights or whether it is open source or not. Oh yeah, about that auditability... forget that. I don't want to find what other people think I should find, I want to find the best match for my queries. That said, good look, develop away, maybe you'll indeed make a better indexer and ranker than Google's and we'll be all better off.

Rank original content above harvested content

[bsdpanix]

I posted a request on Google Groups, years ago that Google implement a blacklist of sites, sites that I don't want to see in search results.
I despise results from other search engines, such as ask.com, scribd.com, and a dozen others that harvest other's answers and barrage me with a second layer of ads.
Google did implement "blocked sites" but eventually it removed it. Personally I would think the blocked sites list would be invaluable on a server side "page rank" algorithm. The more users blocking a given site, the lower the sites rank.

Other than the obvious features you've mentioned in your article, simply stop returning other search engines and rank original content higher than harvested content.

blog search

[Anonymous Coward]

Ability to search all blogs would be good.

currently there's restrictions on time and range of coverage

google-

[Anonymous Coward]

a) stop tracking my browser and devices everywhere we go on the internet. Stop it already - google, doubleclick, analytics, facebook, twitter, inst-fuck, whatever.

b) I'd like for my searches to work for other people. The same question should return the same results.

c) privacy. If I search for the anarchists cookbook, show the results and forget my search.

d) never search social anything. I simply don't care about that drivel. Let me blacklist websites that I never want results from - you know them - the sites that are just too hard to use like cnn, fox, abc, cbs, and 99% of the old tech magazine websites.

country, date, sequence

[Anonymous Coward]

Privacy. Search by country, by date, by site. Enable quotes to force searches of "text in an exact sequence". Ads are OK.

Results

[Anonymous Coward]

I have come to dislike Google... the ads, the product placement, the why aren't you using chrome and signed into Google Plus? But Google still has better search results than Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo. And when I mean better I mean they actually get me relevant results. For example search for "Kyocera FS-#### driver" on Google you get the Kyocera product page on the first page of results, on the competition you get a page of driver collections ladden with viruses. Search for "Cat Climber Plans" heck search for any kind of DYI plans on any search engine and look at the garbage that shows up. So good results are what would get me to switch.

Filter by language(s)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't google allow me to search for pages in some languages only?

Time search

[jbssm]

Seriosuly, I keep trying to use DuckDuckGo as my main browser but I constantly have to switch to Google because of this.

For most subjects, the time of the creation/indexing of the page is not that important, but if you are programing or if you are doing scientific research, you really need to be able to filter the most recent results.

text vs meaning

[ancient_nerd]

There are two different ways I would like to search:

• Text
  • keywords, boolean combinations, verbatim, special characters, etc.
• Meaning
  • stemming of words (e.g. ignore singular v plural)
  • synonyms (e.g. car = automobile)
  • types (e.g. i want an address, an algorithm, a definition, an event)
  • constraints (e.g. i DON'T want to buy one - that should be a tick box in Google anyway!)
  • time (e.g. this year, before the industrial revolution)
  • attributes
  • relationships

This is what the semantic web is supposed to bring us, but we can do much more with what already exists.
A great deal has been achieved in AI and natural language understanding over several decades.

No doubt Google are working on it all right now...

classified by type of search

[jbolden]

1) Exclusions = in a search on X don't give me anything about Y
2) More control on match criteria (i.e. words must appear in sequence vs. can appear anywhere, frequency of word matters, title or keyword bonus up or down), data ranges or data range weighting...
3) I'd like to be able to indicate type of search: news, shopping, academic (i.e. give me papers), physical location...
4) Better handling of non-English words (give me English articles with this Italian phrase vs. give me Italian articles with this Italian phrase)

Oblig

[Hognoxious]

I'd like it to have an integrated init system. Or the other way round. Whichever you prefer, Herr Poettering - you're the boss.

Usability

[dackdel]

Allow me to hit enter to search instead of clicking on the search button. And dont sell my search data. And make it work well

Recognize regions, languages

[MoarSauce123]

One of the biggest annoyances of searching in English is that the results are coming from gazillion places. Sometimes that great, but when I look for lumber yards I really don't care about the ones in England, Australia, or New Zealand. They all might be fine businesses and a pleasure to deal with, but I doubt they deliver to the northeastern US. What also would help bilinguals as myself is to set two (or more) preferred languages. I speak and read two languages fluently and I don't mind and often want search results in both languages. Lastly, making it easier to search within results will be great. I know it is already possible with some search engines, but it is not easily achieved.

maximize control by user

[arctother]

How about: search for exact word or phrase (eg. "within quotes") it is so frustrating that duckduckgo etc don't allow this. No padding results with false positives! Toggle as many options as possible, eg searching for alternate forms or spellings; numbered results; let the user have maximum control over the results.

Err, duckduckgo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, bit of a stupid post isn't it?
He's saying everything that duckduckgo already does!

* completely privacy orientated;
* It's open-source search engine allowing anyone to build upon it ( http://duckduckhack.com/ ).
* no ads, or basically non-intrusive, and respecting the users privacy;
* and a ton of add-ons that the community has build for "instant results".

https://duck.co/

Feature Request

[Dragon Bait]

I numbered my "features", but they really are in random order.

1. Don't assume that I entered a partial word or that you "know" better than I do what I want to search for. Specifically, if I use the search term "ord" I do not mean "order".

2. Give sufficient context into the results that I know how the page uses the terms. Having the context be part of the links going off the page is of very little value. Specifically, back to the "ord" search above, returning "http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/%sitename%/blog;pos=%pos%;ord=123456789?" is useless.

3. Only index relevant stuff. See above ad.doubleclick.net example that should never be counted as a hit when searching for "ord".

4. Use https

5. We're addicted to speed. Results need to be returned in a reasonable time frame.

6. If I type in my search results and hit "Enter", take that as hitting the submit button.

7. Renaming the "reset" button "clean" seems like a needless change in terminology.

8. Advertisement that is relevant to the search THAT DOES NOT TRACK ME is tolerable as long as it is clear that it is advertisement. If I type in "tents for sale" I'm kind of asking for advertisements.

9. Don't track me. Don't remember me.

Order by date

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can filter by date, but it would be much easier for me if they could order by date, or at least put a greater weight on timeliness when deciding relevance. (This might have saved them a lot of bother with that whole right to be forgotten mess).

I'll also add another vote to being able to filter out the shopping sites when I'm looking for technical info

What the internet needs is a way to focus searches

[GoodBuddy]

...on knowledge domains.

When Google first came out it was a wonder. It saved me an enormous amount of time (=money) in locating information I needed. But it rapidly deteriorated. I remember when there would be people who rejoiced that X billion new pages to their database. I found that with each massive growth of the site it became harder and harder to find the information that I wanted.

I am retired now, but at once upon a time worked develoing applications in Cold Fusion. It was often easier to location a bit of information by enterin a description of what I wanted in a search engine and finding the answer as opposed to pulling out multiple books and checking the indexes. Data when searching the term Cold Fusion clustered in three areas - the application programming language, articles about nuclear energy, and long dissertations that were basically crackpots babbling. For a while it was possible to narrow the search by doing searches of comp Usenet newsgroups, but Google killed the facility of that when they smashed their Google Newsgroups into the mix, and the New York State attorney general then killed Usenet.

But the idea of knowledge domains impicit in the Usenet heirarchy would be very valuable if it could be applied to the internet. Usenet kept control of which groups could be added to 7 of its top levels and alt was free-for-all. Instead of searching the comp.lang.coldfusion Usenet group it would be good to have a search engine at http://coldfusion.lang.comp./ [coldfusion.lang.comp] Whatever organization controled the site could determine what web sites were worthy of being included in the searchable database. All of the automated spam was a major problem on Usenet. Having control on what sites to cover would go a long way to alleviating this problem.

Of course, I have no power or influence about setting this up. All I know is that as far as I am concerned, the internet is fundamentally broken.

"HOW TO" problem-solving, user-teaching searches.

[JoeTechie]

Not a web-page retrieval search, but a solutions retrieval.
I'd like to start with a query and have the engine then ask me some questions. More than disambiguation, I want it to discern the breadth and depth of my knowledge along the answer line. Then have the engine teach some basic (missing) foundation and fill in my holes up to the topic.
We could dialog back and forth, exploring solutions and arriving at the best ones for me.

Examples:
"How to provide a smart power grid for distributed 2-way customers?" Which would work into monitoring and anticipating power generation/draw, placement and sizing of transformers, capacitors &, conductors, surge and safety, redundancy, weather, balancing, and even pricing models.

"How to minimize crime?" Which would work into size and type of scenario (home, business, city, country), laws. Models of culture, education vs crime. What do you mean by "crime"? Minimum levels of freedom, police, education. Even neonatal nutrition and care and their impact on crime.

Re:Simple (my wish list)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why won't this useless search engine tell me the best place to ford the thunderbird river?

It would, in English there is an actual difference between a small f and a capitalized one.

Anti safe search

[GuB-42]

Many search engines have a "safe search" feature to hide NSFW material but no way to do the opposite (NSFW only). This has to change.

New widow/tab for resultant links as default. Plea

[asjk]

nt

switch off personalized search

[Gunstick]

Today's search engine like to optimize results for you. So you get the results based on past searches and clicks.
This puts you into your own personal bubble. You only find stuff you already know because you only get links relevant to your personal knowledge field. But what you actually search is a different view on the world, not your own view.
To escape that, you would need to remove all cookies and even change to a completly different PC or ISP or country.
This should be a user user accessible feature. Sort of "amnesia search".

No personalization factor in search algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see the search engine not use any algorithm to give me my "PERSONALIZED" search results, as I feel that will create a technological bubble and I,the user will be limited to that bubble and not be exposed to anything that I object or do not agree with(which is basically all websites today).

no slideshows

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to be able to filter out any results that have their content spread across multiple pages. I'm sick of slideshows, sick of having to click through pages. If the content isn't on a single page I just go for the next result.

Search algorithms that are not weighted by ads

[whitroth]

Google is far worse than it used to be, signal-to-noise ratio. Part of the time, it does not appear to respect quoted search terms, even with a "+" in front. I now frequently see part of a word that was quoted, bolded in the non-sponsored results.

It also refuses to allow explicit literal searches: I have an artist friend who uses a period as part of her name - google says "nope, not gonna look for name. lastname, I'll ignore it and look only at name lastname".

Finally, I've found too many times in the last year that one of my search terms isn't even mentioned on the page from the results.

                      mark

All Tips & Tricks

[mundlapati]

https://www.google.com/insides...

You may want to reuse

[mundlapati]

https://github.com/trivio/comm...

Most frustrating thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have type ahead/search predictions/whatever enabled, and I type half of my search query then you predict the other half, then I continue typing *exactly what you have in your predictive search result* it should NEVER remove that predictive search result.

How is matching what you were suggesting more exactly lowering its predict score? how?!

privacy and nature

[Anonymous Coward]

It should respect my privacy, like DuckDuckGo, it should set by default don't track me and should not keep my cookies. It should also devolve part of his profit to the nature like Ecosia.

Not always the most popular links!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can be uncanny when it comes to finding what I'm looking for based on what I ask for. But I miss AltaVista and some others with which I could find seldom-visited sites in the dark corners. I want a search engine that will return the best matches to what I ask regardless of their popularity. I realize that it was getting hard to avoid all the spammy sites, but maybe the search items returned could be accompanied by a trash rating. If during it's spidering, it finds a lot of trash-looking links or malware from the site's pages, that number would be high. If there are no links outward and no signatures of malware from the sites pages, that number would be very low.

anything

[gblankityblank]

(almost anything) would be better than the ad-driven nonsense that passes for an Internet search these days

Why are Disqus scumbags?

[tepples]

So any site that uses discus would vanish from my search results.

Did you mean Disqus? So I guess unlike a lot of other users who have complained in comments to this story about Google's, you want a web search engine to correct your spelling.

Those scumbags need to burn in hell

Could you explain why Disqus are more "scumbags" than other comment section hosts? Or could you explain why all comment section hosts are "scumbags"?

Re:Why are Disqus scumbags?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I misspelled it so that that Disqus PR drones wouldn't find the comment. So I will reply with a question, does Disqus aggregate customers' data and sell any of it?