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Building a hyper-personalized seach engine that isn't good

https://search.technomancy.us/why
2•fanf2•3h ago

Comments

PaulHoule•2h ago
A bit more than a decade ago I met two refugees from Google and Bing who were jaded about the failure of personalization projects at those companies. Both said that they these companies were not able to deploy deeply personalized search because they weren't able to evaluate deeply personalized search. A survey of the industry I did later showed that very few, if any, enterprise search vendors had a serious evaluation effort because such an effort requires a stupdendous amount of data and the vendors were motivated by the needs of people buying the software (who want 300+ "integrations") and not the experience of people using the software.

Bing and Microsoft, on the other hand, had enough data that they really could tune up search for everyone but not enough to tune up search for individuals, or to prove that tuned up search for individuals was really better for those individuals. So they didn't do it.

Googlers around this time would deny this and tell me "Google Search is highly personalized" but Google keeps Googlers in the dark about how search ranking works and almost all of them know less than middle-of-the-pack SEOs. At that time Google and Bing used cheap personalization algorithms that were so certain that they didn't need personalization, such as geolocalization ("thai restaurant" is "thai restaurant in your area") and reranking up results that you frequently click on (boy does it gaslight SEOs when they see their own results moving around!)

Today they can personalize because they just don't care if the results suck.

Hack, Hacky, Hacker

https://aneeshsathe.com/2025/07/17/hack-hacky-hacker/
1•boredgargoyle•1m ago•0 comments

What is an Entity Component System architecture for game development? (2012)

https://www.richardlord.net/blog/ecs/what-is-an-entity-framework
1•miiiiiike•2m ago•0 comments

Oura Ring – Personal Science Wiki

https://wiki.openhumans.org/wiki/Oura_Ring
1•stacktrust•2m ago•0 comments

Claude added working API keys in Cline

https://old.reddit.com/r/CLine/comments/1m2i952/wow_claude_temporarily_added_working_api_keys_for/
1•coderinsan•3m ago•0 comments

Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/
1•hassanahmad•5m ago•0 comments

What Is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? With Steve Huynh

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-a-principal-engineer-at-amazon
1•rbanffy•7m ago•0 comments

Automating Cantonese Romanization

https://canto.hk/2025/07/automating-cantonese-romanization/
1•Umofomia•10m ago•0 comments

Hush: Holistic Panoramic 3D Scene Understanding Using Spherical Harmonics

https://vision3d-lab.github.io/hush/
2•PaulHoule•15m ago•0 comments

Wii U SDBoot1 Exploit "paid the beak"

https://consolebytes.com/wii-u-sdboot1-exploit-paid-the-beak/
2•sjuut•17m ago•0 comments

Being Illegal: Ideology and the Law

http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2025/07/being-illegal-ideology-and-law.html
2•lr0•18m ago•0 comments

The new Beeper – mostly on-device withe full E2EE

https://blog.beeper.com/2025/07/16/the-new-beeper/
2•fariszr•18m ago•0 comments

Scientists make 'magic state' breakthrough after 20 years – quantum computers

https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/scientists-make-magic-state-breakthrough-after-20-years-without-it-quantum-computers-can-never-be-truly-useful
2•donutloop•23m ago•1 comments

The Control Group Is Out of Control (2014)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
6•Bluestein•23m ago•0 comments

The Return of the "Elderly" Pop Star

https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/why-are-pop-stars-getting-older
2•Michelangelo11•28m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Draggy – menu bar companion to clippy (better pbcopy)

https://github.com/neilberkman/clippy/blob/main/README.md
2•nberkman•28m ago•0 comments

NPM Phishing Email Targets Developers with Typosquatted Domain

https://socket.dev/blog/npm-phishing-email-targets-developers-with-typosquatted-domain
2•feross•31m ago•0 comments

Sam Altman Outfoxed Elon Musk to Become Trump's AI Buddy

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-donald-trump-musk-ai-198ae5d1
7•belter•32m ago•4 comments

The current technology is not ready for proper blending

https://blog.pkh.me/p/43-the-current-technology-is-not-ready-for-proper-blending.html
3•ux•33m ago•0 comments

Microsoft Confirms the Closure of Its Underwater Data Center

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-confirms-the-closure-of-its-underwater-data-center
10•Bluestein•41m ago•2 comments

'Landmark' study: three-person IVF leads to eight healthy children

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02276-5
2•voxadam•41m ago•0 comments

How AI Can Degrade Human Performance in High-Stakes Settings

https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/how-ai-can-degrade-human-performance-in-high-stakes-settings
2•nadis•46m ago•0 comments

Largest piece of Mars on Earth fetches $5.3M at auction

https://apnews.com/article/mars-rock-meteorite-auction-dinosaur-sothebys-01d7ccfc8dc580ad86f8e97a305fc8fa
3•avonmach•47m ago•0 comments

Multiplatform Matrix Multiplication Kernels

https://burn.dev/blog/sota-multiplatform-matmul/
6•homarp•48m ago•0 comments

Tidyhouse.io: A tool to clean up any real estate image in 10 seconds

https://www.tidyhouse.io
3•mitchoz•48m ago•1 comments

AI CapEx Is Eating the Economy

https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
49•throw0101c•49m ago•26 comments

Matt Dillon discusses the past, present and future of BSDs (2022)

http://web.archive.org/web/20220917171836/http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2022/258/Distro-Walk-DragonFly-BSD
5•cnst•54m ago•0 comments

Why Don't Liquids Splash in a Vacuum? [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXTcYa7u12k
1•mykarakus•57m ago•0 comments

Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1m000kp/trying_to_send_a_sticker_in_steam_chat_burned/
12•danso•1h ago•0 comments

AI and the Future of Work: Job Transformation and Skill Shifts

https://guptadeepak.com/the-ai-revolution-how-artificial-intelligence-will-transform-jobs-and-reshape-the-future-of-work/
1•guptadeepak•1h ago•1 comments

China Is Putting Data Centers in the Ocean to Keep Them Cool

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-powers-ai-boom-with-undersea-data-centers/
4•noleary•1h ago•5 comments