> I am looking for Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill.’ It appears, inexplicably, after two books not titled ‘Catch and Kill.’
This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should also know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.
In both cases in the article it's almost certainly down to "stop word" removal.
The titles contain "the" and "and". These kind of words get filtered out because they make indexing incredibly difficult, ie. you search for "the" and get every single book containing "the" in the title (and sometimes description, depending on how deep the search is). So they exclude extremely common words to get eg. "catch kill". Then they have to rank the results for "catch kill" by some other heuristic - like popularity - and you get a list of books that people weren't looking for. Not to mention the first two books in the list were actually exact matches, so maybe they were more popular on the site.
Big search engines do try to correct for this, but it's not an easy problem. Usually results in some hard-coded exceptions for names like "The Who", but it's not trivially scalable.
In the case of your google maps results, I imagine it'll be something like (popularity * distance), which isn't necessarily the best heuristic.
The problem is that you can't please everyone with heuristics. Give power users the option to adjust the search to distance-first, popularity-first or any other of a dozen different combos and you end up with a confusing mess of a UI. Simplify it and give them your nicely hand-crafted best guess and there will always be someone complaining...
In Google Maps, I go “Home” every second trip. Yet, when I type “Home” (or whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are “Home depot” and “Homeware shops”. I went as far as setting a “place” labelled “fghjk”. I still get other results, despite using “Fghjk” every second trip!!!
Also visible in Youtube. There’s a French guy who explained what it was to be raped by a woman, and I often refer people to it (and half a dozen other videos). When I search for his video’s title and his channel name, I systematically get 2 other results first, generally videos about how many women get raped, from the Huffington Post, often the ones with fewer views.
It really feels like Google is trying hard to dodge the correct answer.
I've noticed YouTube's been propping up mainstream media for sensitive subjects. Some of these MSM videos have hundreds of views where those with millions from independent creators are buried on page four.
I think this is to combat fake news but we all know CNN and Fox News all make stuff up from time to time to fit an agenda so they're hardly much better.
I don't know which came first, but that does appear to work in the same way. (Notwithstanding that you can't navigate to "Home" on the Android widget without enabling location history, but inputting the address manually seems to work fine.)
This seem like it should work around the poor "Home" search the previous poster was referring to.
You should see my library's search results. Trying to find People magazine (to enter a new copy) by searching for the exact title "People" means having to go half way down the second page of results. None of the previous dozens of results have "people" in the title at all.
This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should also know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.