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

Posted by timothy on from the esp-heads-the-list dept.

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?

6 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Simple by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Simple by swillden · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  2. Culling by Moof123 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:privacy? by jenningsthecat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  4. Being able to be more precise by Misagon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
  5. 2D navigation for search refinement by iMadeGhostzilla · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!