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Previous: Discount lunch special | Main | Next: KFC "Bowls"
August 16, 2006 06:14 PM
Broken: New York Times search results
Why can't the NYT fix its search results? It's one of the most popular sites in the world, it's the year 2006, and its search is still broken.
Just today I searched on the article title, "A Food Website Spiced with Attitude"...
...and got a strangely worded error message ("in all fields returned 0 results"), sandwiched in between three other links, one of them asking me to "search paid death notices" (?!) for the article:
And when I removed a single space character, changing "website" to "web site", then it found the article...
When I search for "A Food Website Spiced with Attitude", the NYT's search engine should take a wild, off-the-wall guess about what article I might be looking for, and not return zero results.
For a site that can afford whatever search engine it wants, this is totally broken.
(Yes, I covered a similar issue in this post last June. And over a year later, it's not improved, so yes, I'm bringing it up again.)
Keywords or or whole phrase, it's broken either way. If I choose 'food website attitude' as keywords, it will still trip over 'website'...
"Keywords or or whole phrase, it's broken either way. If I choose 'food website attitude' as keywords, it will still trip over 'website'..."
Yes, but the old Walmart search engine that was posted here was much worse. Seems like TIB is a bit nit-picky with their newer entries.
Have you ever done a search on the internet?? I mean, if I type pineapple in google, I want the search engine to return results of pages with the word pineapple in them. Not the pages with pineapple or pine or apple or whatever other part of the word it might suits itself.
That's the way a search is done on a search engine, otherwise we would get an insane amount of documents returned even if we did a specific search.
I do agree that for a human, website and web site are pretty damn the same thing, but for a search engine it's completly different.
Just because something doesn't return what YOU expected it to doesn't mean it is broken.
That's a really good point Gerrard! I was agreeing with everyone else until I read your 'pineapple' example- that's so true! I do still think it's odd that the search didn't turn up ANY matches though, it should at least show the closest ones.
"Have you ever done a search on the internet?? I mean, if I type pineapple in google, I want the search engine to return results of pages with the word pineapple in them. Not the pages with pineapple or pine or apple or whatever other part of the word it might suits itself.
That's the way a search is done on a search engine, otherwise we would get an insane amount of documents returned even if we did a specific search.
I do agree that for a human, website and web site are pretty damn the same thing, but for a search engine it's completly different.
Just because something doesn't return what YOU expected it to doesn't mean it is broken."
However, for some compound words, it should break it up.
Google website. First result?
"Microsoft Corporation. The entry page to Microsoft's web site"
Now, yes, I agree - if I search for pineapple, I don't want "Pine" and "Apple". However, if I search for website, I also want the words "web" and "site" included if they're next to each other, instead of having to search for "Web" and "Site" and having a billion search terms that have only one of those words, but not both.
The "pineapple" analogy doesn't work. If you Google "pine apple" you still get (a) hits for pages about pineapples, and (b) a suggestion that you might be looking for the word "pineapple". Considering that "website" is a pretty common usage, you'd think the search engine could still be tweaked to recognize it. Or at least, to bring up some articles containing his other keywords. Obviously it's not a very flexible engine!
"And when I removed a single space character, changing 'website' to 'web site'..."
"Aye, captain, our anti-matter character injectors are functioning at 100% efficiency!"
Slightly off topic, but anyone notice how easy it is to workaround pay-to-read sites like findarticles.com? I just do a search of their archives, results give a snippet of each article (headline & first few words), but you need to pay to see the whole text. If I think an article looks like it might be relevant, I simply copy the headline and paste it into google - frequently the whole article is available for free somewhere else on the web.
Try putting "A food website spiced with additude" in Goggle advanced search. Then put results to only www.nytimes.com. The first result will be the article.
Wafflecannon: I'm not sure if you did this on purpose but you misspelled attitude. But it points out something important about search engine usability. Google's search engine checks the spelling and provides a suggestion for what you might have meant; in this case, the proper spelling of attitude. I'm also fairly certain that Google (and many other search engines) have equivalences evaluating "web site" and "website" to be the same as well as others like "high school" and "highschool". The NY Times search engine is simply not very good, and these types of obvious failure lead to poor usability and poor customer experience.
>I mean, if I type pineapple in
>google, I want the search
>engine to return results of
>pages with the word pineapple
>in them.
>
>That's the way a search
>is done on a search engine
Having had to endure hours upon hours of lectures on search algorithms, I can tell you that you are utterly wrong. Search algorithms are absolutely capable of both splitting up words and also giving relevant results with regards to the actual "whole" word that you typed in.
The NYT site does a simple select looking for articles containing all words (I guess), which is just about the easiest and stupidest search "algorithm" you can come up with. I would guess that one of their site programmers wrote this because it was way cheaper than developing or buying an actual sophisticated search algorithm.
Obviously nobody else bothered to try it in google. If you type in "A Food Website Spiced with Attitude" the only thing google finds is this page. however if you remove the quotes Google does dissamble the word website. As I understand it search engines look for exactly what you typed when you use quotes, they assume that you are looking for that exact sequence of characters and spaces and don't make any changes. This is true for google as well as the NYT web-site.
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Previous: Discount lunch special | Main | Next: KFC "Bowls"
Perhaps you should just use key words instead of the entire title...
Posted by: ellipsis at August 16, 2006 06:59 PM