Learning to search was a key skill growing up as a teen in the 2000s. How to use accurate keywords, quotes, the entire lot of search operators. Google-fu was a hard earned skill (yes, I read a book) and helped me figure out a surprising amount of life.

How to Do Just About Everything on a Computer, 2000

Search these days though is a bit of a dumpster fire. It has shifted from just retrieval towards relevance and recommendation and it sucks. I’m not just talking about web search, which has oscillated between “help me find the link for this product” to “somewhat useful if you can ignore the SEO spammers” [1]. No, I’m lamenting how poor search has gotten inside emails, online marketplaces, and messaging apps. I’m lamenting that the user has progressively lost control over what constitutes a search.

My beloved AV receiver died a few weeks back. No biggie (even though it’s EOL), let’s see if we can find the same model being sold for parts so we can try and replace some board components.

I’m betting you’ll get inundated with listings of the same brand, not the model you’re looking for, even if you put in the exact model number in quotes. It’s not limited to obscure AV equipment. Searching for any item that’s not in oversupply means the quotes get basically ignored while the search branches into anything that might make sense.

Searching on YouTube means scrolling over two entire rows of Shorts,"People also watched", "Explore more", with your actual results somewhere in between [1]. Time related filters have gotten lost too: not being able to choose a date range (unless you manually enter date operators into the search field), not able to sort by date at all, or just videos from the last hour for breaking news.

Gmail is a whole other story. An exact invoice number or name pasted into the search bar in quotes sometimes returns nothing. Is it a genuine tech issue, or did Gmail quietly switch me back to “Most relevant” again?

And yes, I know. I can’t fathom the scale these services run at. Full text matching across billions of inboxes is computationally expensive. You’re indexing billions of emails and attachments, keeping those indexes fresh, and trying to return an answer in milliseconds. At some point, I can see someone looking at all of that and thinking: what if we just show people the results we think they want?

The en-shittification angle is maybe too cynical, too simplistic. Maybe this really is the natural progression of trying to make search better. At some point, relevance became more useful than literal matching for most people and the defaults followed the metrics. The problem is that there’s increasingly no mode for people who know exactly what they're looking for and want just that.

So what exactly is the point of writing this? I want the random PM looking for ideas to know that I’d be very happy to pay for better search on platforms that help me get what I need instead of optimizing a metric. Give me a “literal match only” toggle. Kill the fuzzy suggestions, ignore the semantic guessing, and just run a dumb, reliable grep across my data, boss.

[1] I got so annoyed I just spun up a version of my decluttering app just for YouTube.

If you've reached this far, thank you for reading! :)

I thought retiring in my mid 30s after a few exits would be fun but I've just been bored and a bit undersocialized without morning Slacks and emails to wake up to. If you’re building something interesting and could use an extra set of hands to ship, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out. My inbox is open.