literally search for almost anything slightly unusual/rare [EDIT: on a viewport narrower than 1024px] and you get an entire page of something irrelevant and popular up top instead of your actual results. one example:
I expected to see the article I was looking for, not a giant info box about a 100+ year old novel.
there are at least 2 different kinds of searching, one where you want the url for a known webpage and one where you are trying to answer a question and don't know what kind of answer you're looking for.
I was trying to do the former today and searched "captains the we-ship" which is roughly the name of the article I was looking for. (technically it's "who captains the we-ship"). But when I looked at the results it seemed the search had completely missed what I was saying:
...at the bottom is the actual result but I didn't look down that far because I figured if it was gonna find it it'd be first. But the first result seemed totally irrelevant that I figured the search had failed, but then I remembered I knew the name of the blog, so I added that. But lo, more bullshit at the top:
Is wikipedia paying you to pick a random vaguely-related article of theirs to not just go at the top but take up an entire page worth of search result real estate? WTF?
I guess sometimes it's videos, as in this instance where I search the exact name of an article I wanted the url for (in this case one I wrote, that chose as a demo because I recently was searching for it to pull up the link to tweet it) and get a bunch of random other epcot-related stuff but that is OBVIOUSLY not what someone is looking for if they search the exact name of this article!
I left google because google failed to find this particular article at ALL when I searched the exact title, but yall's showing random bs first, while ultimately better (I get the link) feels bad in a different way, because it's clear you have the tech to find me the most relevant thing, and are just... not bothering.
I will leave if this bullshit isn't fixed. I'm not here to get spoonfed OMG VIDEOS when I'm looking for an article. that is the OPPOSITE of why I'm paying for a search engine.
Here's YET ANOTHER example! I'm looking for a particular song, as is almost anyone who searches a few words and the words "lyrics". Without the word lyrics, I get random other things, but it's at least results without a giant BAD first one. With the word lyrics... I get a GIANT INFO BOX about this popular song by Notorious BIG, which, SURE, has the word "bullshit" in the title............ but that's about it in terms of relevance to my query! Meanwhile, ONCE AGAIN, you FIND the actual result I'm looking for and you KNOW it's the best result since it's right there four times below that! But for some reason something is telling your results page to show popular bullshit up top.
Even here, if I search the word "superorganism", where wikipedia is a reasonable first result, there are lots of other good results (a band! a film! some interesting articles!) so why are you showing me so many words from wikipedia first?
My sense is that someone got so excited at the fact that you COULD make AI summaries that you forgot to ask if that would actually be helpful! Instead, you could use AI to help me clarify what I'm looking for. You could quickly show me a bunch of icons:
I think the way search should work in 2025 is that you should start by assuming that I AM looking for a specific url that exists, and then ask "do we think we've found that?" and if so show me that prominently. I used to use a special google-search in my browser bar. do you remember their "I'm feeling lucky" mode, which just takes you straight to the url of the first result? well, they had a special url that had hybrid behavior: it would redirect to the top url, ONLY if it seemed like a good enough match - otherwise you saw a list of results. Kagi could ABSOLUTELY bring that back. idk who would use it on google now that their results are so garbage - maybe they did that on purpose to sell more ads... but you guys don't NEED to sell ads.
Anyway, I'm unsubscribing. You can contact me at @Malcolm_Ocean on twitter if you fix all this stuff and want me back, and I'll seriously consider it! I like the idea of paying for a search engine that is on my side, but right now I'm paying and it doesn't feel like yall are! (I think it'd be cool to publicly @ me about taking in my feedback, but if you do then also DM me as I'm shit at reading my other notifications!)
Sincerely,
Malcolm "what if it were good tho?" Ocean
PS: Ohhhhh looooool after I'd written most of this I happened to resize my browser window and realize that this is partially a CSS issue — it's not nearly as obnoxious if my window is wider and this shows as a sidebar. But this is absurd on narrower screens, and you should just remove that widget altogether rather than dominate the whole page with it.
. And even so, the boxes are showing up very often when they absolutely shouldn't because they're only 1% related to my query. Which is partially a sign that whatever the fuck picks the content for your boxes is a bad algorithm, but also a sign that whatever decides WHETHER to show the box is a bad algorithm. Which is a sign that yall included a feature because it seemed cool not because you actually tested it in a variety of scenarios and found it helpful. It hit 0/5 even relevant for me. And like, earlier today I searched for this book by title and author, which would have been a perfect opportunity to show one of these boxes... and there's no box!
...probably in a sense this is "because" the book has no wikipedia page? but I just searched for a book that does have a wikipedia page and the info box was about the author, not the book. This is at least RELEVANT but still kind of unnecessary.
