The Dirty Secret of 'Secret Family Recipes' - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-family-recipes-copied <comment><USER3> I can do them one better: my family has a _meta_ -secret recipe. It didn't used to be secret, but it became secret through no effort or intent of our own.

For a long time, decades at this point, my mom has been known for the brownies she brings to events (and, by extension, that my sister and I bring to events). People would rave about them and demand the secret, which my mom, my sister, and I would all freely give out: it's from a box, Betty Crocker, make sure you get the "Supreme" kind and don't overbake it. That's it.

But. But! A while ago, maybe 3-4 years at this point, my mom noticed that the brownie box had changed. She had a stockpile (being known for the brownies, you see) but tried the new box before exhausting the stockpile. And it was _not the same_. The new recipe had different amounts of every ingredient and it just did not come out right. At all. She called the company to complain and actually managed to escalate the call far enough to get someone to admit a dark truth: the recipe on their end for the _mix_ hadn't changed, but for various reasons to do with what they wanted to put on the "Nutrition Facts", they had changed the instructions of how to prepare them and the amount of the mix that was in each box.

My mom, not leaving this to chance, did a little bit of kitchen science and verified that what came out of the old box (from the stockpile, following the recipe) was either identical or a very close match to what came out of the new box (but following the old recipe), albeit a little inconvenient as you now needed roughly 1.25 boxes' worth of mix to make one batch of brownies. But this was but a minor hurdle for the truly devoted; and it meant that we now had, wait for it, a bona fide _secret family recipe_. The easiest one ever, since it _still_ involved just making brownies from a box. (And keeping a jar of "remainder brownie mix" for use in the next batch.)

The epilogue to the story is that although the good recipe had been stable for a really long time, we were evidently not the only ones to notice a problem with the new one, because the box recipe has changed on several occasions since then—each time, as far as we can tell, without changing the blend in the underlying mix (because if we follow our Secret Recipe it still turns out fine). Really, I'm just waiting for them to throw up their hands, give up, and return to the original recipe, which would sort of deprive my family of a good story, but everybody would get better brownies so it's a win overall. :)

<comment><USER4> Good on your mother for persisting until she got to the bottom of the brownie mystery! It's a bit of a pity the company tampered with such a successful recipe!

My brownie recipe is from a cookbook and I tried a lot of variations on it and then had to concede that the person who wrote the recipe got it just right. I make it with high quality chocolate and butter and then am very careful not to over bake it and they turn out deliciously decadent every time!

<comment><USER5> I recently discovered that you can cut moist brownies with a plastic knife and avoid them sticking and falling apart.

For those moments you just can't wait for them to cool, although, even cooled a good moist brownie tends to stick to the knife.

Your welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember reading an old parable about a woman who always cut off the ends of her meatloaf before serving it. At one point someone asked her why she did that, and she said that her mother had always done it that way. So she went to ask her mother, and got the same answer. The two of them went to the woman's grandmother who said that the serving plate she cooked the meatloaf was too small, so she cut off the ends to make it fit. I have many doubts that this is true, but also I think it does illustrate a good point about how these things get started.

Most of my family's "secret" recipes come from a big Soviet cookbook, but adapted for limited availability of products (cooking in Moscow where the book was published was always very different than cooking in Soviet Ukraine).

I actually wonder how many of the Blue Apron/HelloFresh recipes will wind up being "secret family recipes" in a few years.

<comment><USER7> Primo Levi told a similar story about tracking down the source of a lacquer recipe when he was working at a paint factory. There was a point in the recipe where the instructions called for adding half an onion into the vat of lacquer. As a chemist, he was fascinated by this because he could not think of any way the chemicals in the onion, in that quantity, could affect the end product. He eventually found a retired employee living nearby who was able to explain that the onion was used to check the temperature of the lacquer. When the onion started to bubble, the mixture was hot enough to proceed to the next step. By the time Primo Levi was working at the plant in the 1940s, the plant had upgraded to modern equipment with integrated temperature gauges, but the onion remained in the recipe.

<comment><USER6> That's very clever. Reminds me of doing plumbing with copper piping and using bread to stuff the pipes before soldering them in order to not have the leftover water flowing to where you are soldering, making it impossible.

<comment><USER8> You're a genius. Absolutely. That's such a good solution! I had considered using a rag or something, but I was concerned about it getting stuck around a bend, as well as the awkwardness of rolling it up _just right_. If you overheat the pipe, the bread will just burn off harmlessly, and if it gets stuck, you could just turn the water on and it'll dissolve it or pop it out.

Thank you. There's an awkward pipe in my bathroom whose shut-off won't quite close enough. My wife will be so thrilled.

<comment><USER6> Oh I'm no genius. This was a trick someone told me _after_ I spent 6 hours on a single horizontal joint. (Fortunately?) I haven't had a chance to try it. I also don't know what would happen if the bread headed straight for your water heater. But aside from that, I do think this is a valuable trick. Hope it works for you!

<comment><USER8> Luckily, the joint I've got to deal with, the worst case is that the bread would end up inside the faucet and might require a bit of cleaning. Seems like just running some water through it aught to dissolve the bread and let things carry on. I'll use crappy white bread to make sure it's easily dissolvable :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-flame My mom made the best pie crust anybody who ate it ever tasted. Her recipe came from a Crisco label.

One of the steps specifically said to slowly stir a liquid into the mix with a fork. Everybody else who attempted the recipe used a spoon and didn't get anywhere near the proper texture. So her difference was simply that others wouldn't follow the directions exactly.

<comment><USER9> It's more than that.

I have an amazing chocolate cake recipe--I'm _SURE_ it's cribbed from some magazine, chocolate container, or something. I have stopped giving it out as people simply can't get it right.

There are three classes of failure:

The first class of failure is in not following directions. When it says "1/2 teaspoon", they mean it. Baking is like lab--small things often make big differences. "Helping" one of these people is frustrating--"Um, try actually following the recipe."

The second class of failure is that a lot of people don't have basic cooking skills. "My chocolate is weird"\--yeah, water does that to melted chocolate. "I can't whip this meringue"\--yeah, you can't get even a _trace_ of yolk in that or it's not going to work.

The third class of failure is that people don't seem to pay attention and learn. Hmmm, that cake recipe doesn't seem to like humid days. Uh, oh, there aren't any bubbles in my batter--my baking soda/baking powder are probably bad. Sniff, sniff--that doesn't smell right--did you use margarine or butter to prepare that pan?

One of my favorite for this was reconstructing my grandmothers kalach recipe. It just never smelled right. Until I remembered that she used to have a container underneath the cabinet that she used for the recipe--as a kid that never meant anything. As an adult, I was like "Hmmmmm, I bet that was _lard_." Sure enough, that made it smell right.

Cooking requires paying attention, but baking, especially, is in the details.

<comment><USER10> On the first class of failure, sometimes people take it a bit too far. I've watched people stress about how they level off their 1/4 tsp because if it's too heaped, it will be too much, or if there is a divot, it will be too little. As a percent error, there really isn't a real difference. Just the differences in brands and batches of ingredients will cause more error in your recipes than a slight miss-measure.

There's definitely a need to measure well, but that third class of failure you mentioned is probably better to pay attention to. If you know your ingredients and operating conditions, you'll definitely fair better.

On the topic of measuring, I do wish more new recipe books went back to using weights. Baking with a scale is so much easier/faster/less clean up. It surprises me how many people I know who think it is too much work to use a scale until they see me do it and how little effort it really is.

<comment><USER11> I find it amusing you downplay the importance (not that I disagree) of precision, and than advocate for measuring by weight for entirely different reasons. Precision is the typical argument people make for scales.

<comment><USER10> I see the similar behaviour with measurement on scales though. There is this need to make it EXACTLY 2.50 pounds. If it is 2.52, well that just unacceptable, and the seesaw of removing and adding begins. I'll admit, I occasionally fall into this trap until I consider what the consequences are (pretty much nothing in terms of what I'm baking, but a decent waste of time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's an opposite example: I have a friend who has amazing grit[0]. One time he figured that the cheesecake he's making would use some improvement so he experimented with a sort of an evolutionary algorithm where he would change one or two things, note the results and combine some of the changes on another try(or that's how I understood his process).

After over forty instances he has perfected the cheesecake. It's now much better than store bought in terms of taste and also usually better looking. The recipe itself isn't secret, but you'd be hard pressed to replicate his work. Apparently it's rather the _skill_ than the _procedure_ that makes it so great.

[0] He rewrote "The Hobbit" in Tengwar several times using a fountain pen.

<comment><USER13> When you say Tengwar, do you mean English transliterated into Tengwar, or Sindarin/Quenya?

<comment><USER12> Transliteration only, since most of his works were meant as gifts, so he wanted them to be readable.

Also this wasn't done in english, but that's just a minor detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For me, the most important part of the "secret family recipe" is the element of curation. There's surely hundreds of recipes for almond kringler out there, but I _know_ that the one my mom uses at Christmas is extremely delicious. If your family has decided they really like the sugar cookie recipe in the 1985 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, perfect! The "family" part of "secret family recipe" means that it's the recipe your family likes best, and the fact it came from such-and-such a cookbook can be the secret.

When I go online and search for a recipe, I'm taking a chance that it may be awful. That's why when I find an online recipe I enjoy, I write it down in a special notebook. This also has the advantage of letting me cut out all the prefacing garbage ("my husband and my 3 beautiful children LOVE coming home on a crisp winter afternoon to a delicious bowl of this yummy soup blah blah blah") and trim down the directions to the sort of terse and informative stuff you'd find in a real cookbook. Then if I ever want to make it again, I don't have to deal with the absolute garbage of modern recipe sites popping up notifications about how butter is on sale 2 miles away, and how I can sign up for the email newsletter, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> On the "fudge guy" who was using the recipe from the marshmallow container, or the Toll House cookies winning 2 of the top spots: there's a lot more to good results than just the recipe. Equipment, skill, the idiosyncratic ways you _don 't_ follow the recipe or fill in where it's underspecified... Don't necessarily give in to the temptation to ascribe the phenomenon merely to irrationality or sentiment.

Plus, it must be said, the Toll House recipe is pretty darn good. Not what I use myself but sometimes the classics are classics for a reason.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, my mother (unsurprisingly) uses exactly the same recipe as my grandmother did for chocolate chip cookies (I suspect it also came from the side of a chocolate chip bag). The cookies turned out very differently, however, depending on who made them.

<comment><USER17> Oooh - we have this. Where some of my family members refuse to include the salt, or prefer butter that melts like crazy, and they get harder, flatter versions of the cookies. My aunt (who married a chemist) pointed out how the salt actually means something, and I started including it again, and the cookies got so much better (in my opinion.)

<comment><USER18> Butter handling is key in my own chocolate chip cookies, I've found. Let it soften too much, or overbeat the batter, and you'll end up with Frisbees. Ideally you want to cream the butter and sugars until just combined; they'll get more thoroughly mixed as you add flour and other ingredients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's another interesting angle in this, which is a demonstration of how important memory and emotion is in food. The restaurateur who had created Michelin Star-winning restaurants thought the standard Hellman's potato salad recipe was very good. Now, I'm not _that_ much of a chef, and I'm not going to say it's a _bad_ recipe, but a chef of that caliber ought to taste even a very-well prepared instance of that recipe and immediately come up with half- a-dozen ways to improve it. I could do that in my kitchen, which is really not _that_ well stocked with that sort of thing. There's _classes_ of improvements; use a more interesting vinegar, use a more interesting oil, use more interesting herbs, make your own mayonnaise, use different potatos, each of those representing half-a-dozen options on their own, to say nothing of the work you can do with combinations.

If you served the Hellman's recipe to a Michelin reviewer, you're not getting a star. And I'm sure that Danny Meyer would know that instantly, were he not influenced by his memories and emotions.

Also, to be clear, I am by no means being _critical_ of him for bringing his emotion into the dish. If it's anything, it's a positive thing, in my opinion. I'm just showing this as a very clear example of how complicated reactions to food can be.

<comment><USER20> You are right about the role of emotion in the enjoyment of food, but I think you are actually underestimating its effect on the hypothetical food reviewer.

I think it actually is very possible to earn a Michelin Star serving a Hellman's recipe. If the atmosphere is good, the service and presentation of the food high quality, and the overall experience classy, that potato salad is going to taste really good to even the most critical of food critics. They are susceptible to the emotional parts of the food experience just as much as anyone, and is in fact part of the review.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Book recommendation, if you're into this stuff... _The Cooking Gene - <USER2> Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South_ , by Michael W Twitty. I'm currently halfway through, and it's fascinating. It delves deep into the roots of pre-20th century recipes and food traditions, and how African, European, and Native American cooking techniques and ingredients (along with the social structures of slavery) joined to create what became Southern cooking.

Take that Thanksgiving standby, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. That dish can be traced directly to slavery in the Caribbean! Yams were a big part of the diet (a food from Africa), and on sugar plantations, they would take cooked yams to the boiling vats and ladle boiling sugar juice directly onto the yams. This came to America via the slave trade (many American slaves came from the Caribbean rather than directly from Africa), and evolved into new dishes that preserved the flavor without easy access to giant vats of boiling sugar.

The tracing of family recipes back to their origins is amazing.

<comment><USER22> I'll also add the recommendations I usually make.

Anyone interested in learning to cook, _Americas Test Kitchen Cooking School_ (And also _Cooks Illustrated Cooking Science_ and _Science of Good Cooking_ ) would probably be good for much of HN's audience. It is much more of a cooking "textbook" than most cookbooks. It explains what you are doing and why you do it instead of just a big list of recipes. There is also _Modernist Cuisine_ but those are really pricey.

These books tackle the "science" side of cooking rather than your recommendation's history side. Both are, of course, excellent approaches and are much better than your standard cook book's vomit of recipes with no context.

<comment><USER21> Certainly, _The Cooking Gene_ is not just a straight cookbook - it's barely a cookbook at all. Instead, it's a history book more than anything, using the evolution of a cuisine to trace the cultural history of the African diaspora in America, and its broader impact on American culture. The appearance of certain foods, of ingredients and techniques, is a map of history. Fascinating stuff! (I got it on recommendation of a friend in the State Department, who called it the best book she read in 2017.)

As for learning to cook... yeah, the more I see "recipe" books completely decontextualized, the more bizarre they seem to me. Cooking is cultural, and arises from available ingredients, available tools, and known techniques. The idea that you can just make dishes completely in isolation from their cultural context is weirdly postmodernist.

<comment><USER23> So I'm making weird, postmodernist curries, pho, and tacos? Fun!

<comment><USER21> One could argue that the ready global availability of ingredients, plus YouTube and blog recipes, has itself created a new cuisine. But without a coherent form, it's hard to say what that actually is. So yeah, postmodernism...

I wonder how this ties in with the observations about Green Revolution agriculture and its impact on obesity and other modern dietary diseases? Like Michael Pollam's research?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A few years back, I was backpacking through Central America and spent a few weeks in the highlands of Guatemala staying with a Mayan family while taking Spanish lessons.

Part of the deal was you ate dinner with the family, and they cooked for you.

One of the first nights I was there, she made this amazing rice and meat dish, which I assumed was some kind of traditional Mayan thing, so I asked her what it was. After a few minutes of her struggling to understand my Spanish, she hopped up, walked into the kitchen and came back...

With a soy sauce bottle — on the side was a recipe for 'stir fry'

</comment><comment><USER25> This brings back some great memories. My mom made fantastic home made jams. All through my childhood family members and friends would clamor for her jams she made at Christmas.

This year I finally got her to give me her recipe....it was basically the recipe on the packet of Sure Jell :-/ She did note that the important part was to by fresh fruits for the jam and not frozen so I guess there was that. Regardless it was a huge let down to know the secret was the recipe on the box of pectin that was $.50 each.

<comment><USER26> To be fair, if the jams are canned it's important to make sure you have the right amount of sugar and acid to make it safely shelf stable. I make jams every summer to give to family and friends and I still follow the recipes in the box of Pomona's pectin. The thing I've been perfecting over the years is finding the best fruit at the farmer's market and then processing it (peeling/blending/cooking) it in a way that yields a pleasing jam.

<comment><USER18> The processing is key; the prime example for me is peach jam, where if you just chop the fruit up, you end up with peach suspended in mostly-clear gel. If, on the other hand, you blend the peach mixture, you end up with a delicious consistency that's flavorful all the way through and easy to spread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This might be biased because a "secret recipe" doesn't hold very much of its secret in the ingredients or instructions (all chocolate chip cookie recipes are quite similar) but the little tricks.

Adding a bit of something, or the timings of certain steps might be undocumented and make the secret recipe better than the famous one.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have a recipe that I know is original (since I developed it myself) and I do my best not to keep secret. Good recipes are way better when shared.

Date chicken:

Cut two pounds of chicken breast into thin strips and marinate in red pesto [0] (one jar) for at least an hour. Bring two cans of coconut milk to boil with a pound of dried stoneless dates. Reduce heat and let simmer for half an hour, beating with a whisk to break up the dates. You should end up with a sauce that you can easily pour on the chicken later. When you start the sauce, start heating an oven to 250°C. Put the chicken in an ovenproof container and grill the slices for about 15 minutes, turning the slices over at least once. Pour the sauce on top and top off with feta cheese cubes (use dry feta, not the olive-oil drenched salad cubes). Grill till golden brown.

Serve with brown rice.

[0]: [https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Filippo-Berio-Red- Pest...](https://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Filippo-Berio-Red- Pesto/50083011)

</comment><comment><USER29> My grandmother found some old family recipes from pre-independence India. I've never made any of them because they're sometimes denominated in units that no longer exist (a "viss" for example), and some of them are even measured in _currency_ ("buy 10 rupees of x"). Maybe I could try and account for inflation and local prices 100? years ago but...I'm not optimistic.

<comment><USER30> You might want to talk to the editor of the website _India of the Past_ [0] who collects not only old recipes [1] but also interesting facts on how much money bought how many items [2][3].

[0] [http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute- memories](http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories)

[1] Recipes | [http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contr...](http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contributions/cooking)

[2] Old Lahore | _You could buy up to 25 seers of flour for one rupee, and gold was only Rs 17 a tola._ | [http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute- memories/read-contr...](http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute- memories/read-contributions/life-back-then/361-old-lahore)

[3] Pindi Memoirs by a Sikh Son of the Soil Part 3 | _Asli ghee was Rs. 14 for a tin. Eggs were two annas a dozen, and bananas were eight annas per dozen. Gold was Rs. 22 per tola (about 10 grams)._ | [http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contr...](http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contributions/life-back-then/452-pindi-memoirs-by-a-sikh-son-of-the-soil-3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My wife and I have a the simplest, silly "secret" recipe.

Many of her girlfriends don't work and some are really amazing cooks, but my wife who works full time doesn't feel like she has time to bake cookies or make three-bean salad or whatever. She simply knows the best places to pick those things up around town, transfers the food to plastic containers for transport, and labels it with a piece of tape that simply says something like "Paige's chocolate chip cookies".

Even though our friends by now have figured out the "secret" it still makes everyone happy. (Including me. I find cooking for others interesting, but I don't do it much anymore.)

<comment><USER32> That sounds kinda shallow. Why bother with faking, as obviously no one cares ?

<comment><USER33> Especially chocolate chip cookies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My takeaway from this is whoever came up with the idea of including recipe ideas on/in the packaging of staples or kitchen products was a goddamn genius.

Because a common theme among many of these mistaken secret family recipe stories is that the concoctions are taken from those marketing materials, and I'd expect whatever they picked to feature would be tasty and hard to screw up to put that product in a good light.

If it's a hit with the family, they're making it frequently, and pretty soon the aunt or uncle or grandparent who makes it for the holiday gathering can do it from memory and so it's easy to assume they made it up themselves.

I bet if you were to ask that cook about their "secret" recipe to this day they'd make sure to emphasize that you have to use So-and-So brand chocolate chips for it to come out right; the very same from which they got the recipe in the first place, and without which it probably doesn't come out right (maybe intentionally)

Goddamned brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER35> I once asked my grandmother (RIP) how she makes such amazing dumplings:

"First, you go and find a nice fat goose..."

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't know if any of the things my grandmother has made were once from a recipe, but a few years back I spent some time with a digital camcorder recording her making them. Since she eyeballs most of it... it's really hard to imagine having properly captured this any other way.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like the story --I don't recall where I heard it or perhaps read it. Someone recounting the story of finding out their grandma's delicious marinara sauce was not made with tomatoes from the garden but rather plain old store bought canned tomatoes --but prepared just right.

<comment><USER38> A note for people using tinned tomatoes: buy the whole ones, not the diced ones, and dice them in the can yourself. Makes a large difference in flavour, the quality of the tomatoes they use for whole is better than for diced :)

<comment><USER13> It's actually more complicated than that. Here's the Serious Eats analysis about different types of canned tomatoes: [https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/canned-tomato-types- and-...](https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/10/canned-tomato-types-and-use-what- kind-to-buy.html)

TL;DR: Pre-diced canned tomatoes are bad because calcium chloride (a firming agent), combined with a larger surface area, makes it not break down properly when cooking.

<comment><USER39> Different tomatoes taste quite different too. One brand which is great for pasta and pizza is Mutti. (I am unaffiliated, just a happy customer.)

[https://www.mutti-parma.com/us/#!/our-tomato-fields-and- your...](https://www.mutti-parma.com/us/#!/our-tomato-fields-and-your-kitchen)

<comment><USER40> Pretty much every blind taste test you'll find done in America of grocery store canned tomatoes has brands grown in California vastly outperforming imports.

<comment><USER33> Blind taste test of people near California?

<comment><USER40> Cooks Illustrated (subscription required) is based out of Boston, and they prefer the domestic brands:

[https://www.cooksillustrated.com/taste_tests/231-canned- whol...](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/taste_tests/231-canned-whole- tomatoes?incode=MCSCD00L0&ref=new_search_experience_3)

Splendid Table is based out of Minnesota, I believe:

[https://www.splendidtable.org/story/the-6-best-brands-of- can...](https://www.splendidtable.org/story/the-6-best-brands-of-canned- tomatoes)

Epicurius picks an Indiana brand, with California brand Muir Glen at #2:

[https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/best-canned- tomatoe...](https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/best-canned-tomatoes-san- marzano-italian-taste-test-article)

One of the issues is that supermarket imported Italian tomatoes tend to be packed in puree, not uncooked juices. If you're looking for fresh tomato flavor (and if you aren't, just buy crushed tomatoes), you want to buy an American brand that seals the cans at lower temps for longer times to keep the tomatoes fresh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The best cooks I know all have an excellent sense of smell and rely heavily upon it to get the timing right.

Try putting that in your official recipe.

<comment><USER42> My mother in law has taught me a bunch of her recipes, and a lot of them have a step that she describes "...until it has a smell", like "fry the spices until they have a smell", which is actually a specific aroma, but I have no idea how to write down an aroma in my notes.

<comment><USER43> We need to develop a stink-line-based notation system for aromae.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I bake a few cakes regularly. Most of the recipes can be found online, but I usually have found some tweaks that make them taste better (subjective). So I make notes of them in my little book.

I think most recipes are derivative. You have to start somewhere when you make cornbread. So why not start with a standard recipe. Then you substitute some ingredients because you're missing something at home. You find it either tastes better or worse. Then you can improve the recipe.

In the end my cornbread recipe only has 2 different ingredients that give it better texture and better aroma. It's still almost the same recipe.

<comment><USER45> The little book is the real secret weapon of a baker. Where you put the details that make the recipe stand out or adapt to your preference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Alternative hypothesis: most 'secret family recipes' are in fact original. However, the average SFR never get passed around, because it produces average- tasting stuff.

The recipe on food labels come from companies that know the product inside- out, have incentive to help you optimize the taste/effort tradeoff, and maybe have spent time and money on research. They tastes better, so they're the ones people remember.

tl;dr: people remember a disproportionately high number of plagiarized recipes because those are the good ones.

</comment><comment><USER47> We've got a few family recipes. They're mostly not really secret, and at least in our recipe book their sources are referenced if known. But a big part of what makes the end result good is the practice we have in making them.

The real "secret" recipes tend to be for things that build on a public recipe, or are simple enough not to need one. If you asked us how to make it (and we'd be happy to share what we can), we'd only be able to give you the base recipe, or perhaps not even that, but what makes them good is the local tweaks, ingredient selection and experience in cooking that gives consistent (or at least consistently good) results.

If you want a Hollywood example, consider Po's Dad's "Secret Ingredient" soup in Kung Fu Panda.

</comment><comment><USER48> Specially in America, with only recent History of course family recipes are adapted from books.

On the other hand my family(in Europe) holds recipes that are more than one hundred years old. Most books recipes came from taking the knowledge of grandmas on villages on places with culinary History.

Those books serve as text books over which modern cuisine has evolved.

But is a kind of food that most Americans will consider strange. They are sophisticated stews that take forever to make or have flavor that they are not used to.

When I went to China the hardest thing to get used to was all the flavors of their food, which is very rich, but most Westerners do not know it(note:Chinese restaurants have very little to do most of the time as real Chinese food is not commercial in the West).

</comment><comment><USER49> I find that most of our family 'secret' recipes are the result of trying several recipes for a given dish, picking the best one but incorporating lessons learned from the others. Its not uncommon for a page in our family book to consists of a photocopied page from a published cookbook + notes like "fully mix in the spices 1 at a time in this order:" where the recipe just says "mix in the spices".

Additional notes like "[cousin] likes this with more cinnamon, but [uncle] will always try to add more sugar" are helpful for holidays.

</comment><comment><USER50> My mother, and actually her mother before that, made modifications to the Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe. Specifically, replacing butter with shortening and using just a bit of extra flour, while whipping the eggs a bit more in mixing. I watched an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats where he made that exact set of modifications to get puffy/cakey chocolate chip cookies, some 20 years after Grandma started baking them that way. It's always amusing to see your old school process be supported by proper food science.

</comment><comment><USER51> Both my wife and my family have these instances regarding Betty Crocker recipes / Southern Living cookbook recipes. Although, I will say, our attempts at following the recipes are still not the same as our grandmother's. What I've noticed is our grandmothers are just better cooks; allowing them to eyeball measure, adjust temps to conditions, time things out better, and generally solve problems as they arise.

In a sense the recipe is just an idea, the cook still needs good execution.

</comment><comment><USER52> A century ago, my family swiped a recipe by spying on another family. I suppose it could have come from a molasses bottle or even from an 1800s cookbook, but good luck finding such an origin at this point. It makes lovely gingerbread men.

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Molasses_Cookies](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Molasses_Cookies)

</comment><comment><USER53> I remember this... from nearly half a century ago.

The February 7, 1976 episode of The Jeffersons ("Louise's Cookbook") had this plot. A publisher asks Louise to write a cookbook of her ghetto recipes. (spoiler alert) It turns out her family recipes were all from a previously- published book that her grandmother (mother?) had been using.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've been fascinated with the story of the original olivier salad for years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad#History)

</comment><comment><USER55> My mother was famous for her Yams and Stuffing she made every Thanksgiving. Everyone always wanted to know. I finally asked her for the recipes and found out it was from a newspaper clipping. I laughed pretty good finding out.

</comment><comment><USER56> If your mother's secret recipe calls for Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, Velveeta processed cheese, or Jello mix, here's a hint: It probabally isn't original.

</comment><comment><USER57> What I want to know is where does the recipe on the side of the box come from? The robots who came up with that are the true heroes, imho.

<comment><USER58> My mom always would use recipes from the sides of containers. She said "they're going to try 100s of recipes to find one that will make their product look good, so no need for me to try a dozen recipes that they have probably already tried"

Often the recipes were customer submitted (though I believe the Toll House cookie recipe came from a restaurant chef), and companies would test and/or tweak recipes before putting them on the side of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I have an opposite story.

Once upon a time in the French countryside, there was an old pastry chef who was well known for her unique creation (of which I forgot the name), that, even 40 years later, my father still praises.

The recipe was only known by the pastry chef, even though the famous local restaurant chef (Georges Blanc, now 3 Michelin stars, at least 2 stars at the time) begged her to sell him the secret, whatever the price. She said, "my recipe will follow me into the grave". And it did.

TL;DR: come in Bresse, best food ever.

</comment><comment><USER60> I got a secret salmon recipe from my aunt only to see it on the salmon wrapper.

</comment><comment><USER61> My grandmother's pīrāgi were made with Poppin "Fresh" dough.

</comment><comment><USER62> Obligatory Onion article: [https://local.theonion.com/italian-grandmother- doesn-t-have-...](https://local.theonion.com/italian-grandmother-doesn-t-have- heart-to-tell-family-a-1822927180)

</comment><comment><USER63> The recipe is the easy part. The execution and getting the right ingredients is all important.

Granma X was awesome not because of the recipe but because she practiced her whole life making it.

</comment><comment><USER64> In other news, water is wet.</comment>


Show HN: A weather forecasting app that plays the right tunes for your weather - <AUTHOR> http://weathertunes.com <comment><AUTHOR> I left my job last year to work on this. A few days ago I released the first version I believe is worth spreading the word about. Please take a look and let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy it!

<comment><USER2> So I've been using the app for an hour or so now, and I like it! I don't really understand how this music has changed with the weather (mine is 'clear' at the moment, so maybe not the best representation). However, I like the fact that I can choose a genre and it'll shuffle songs, and that I can choose whether or not I want to see the video. It's kind of like Pandora, but with videos. Or like youtube, without the ads in between songs. Nice interface!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying! The type of music it plays goes beyond just it being clear outside. It also factors in things like humidity, precipitation, wind speed, time of day, time of year etc. If it hot and humid out, its likely to play more peaceful music, but if its clear with a bit of a chill, could be energetic/gritty etc. But again, if its morning, it'll probably try and play music not as energetic, but slowly ramp up as the day progresses. Glad you're enjoying it!

<comment><USER2> That's actually super cool. I tried it when it was raining, and it was on point. I probably wouldn't use it as my primary music app (because I subscribe to Spotify premium), but I would definitely use it from time-to-time!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I definitely put in a l to of time making sure it picked the right moods.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/an-inconvenient-truth-intel-larrabee-story-revealed.aspx

<comment><USER2> The common trend here seems to be a concern over not cannibalizing existing markets. Two examples are the case of flash memory being delayed by a decade or more, and also Microsoft releasing a bloated Vista with the expectation that faster processors were on the horizon. Too bad there can't be some legislation to encourage a synergistic effect.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully, netbooks and FLOSS can free us from this x86-only world. I would love to have an 8-core ARM in my netbook.

I remember my IBM z50. It used some parts that were used in a Pentium notebook sold in some markets. Because of this part sharing with a Pentium notebook, the MIPS processor in it could run for 10+ hours on a single charge.

<comment><USER4> Why do you prefer ARM over x86?

<comment><USER5> No ball-and-chain of Windows compatibility holding you back.

No possibility of being lazy and using a traditional PC BIOS + ACPI etc. architecture. x86 doesn't even have mature alternatives: EFI doesn't really help anything, and OLPC's OpenFirmware approach was implemented poorly. With ARM there's already a bunch of well-implemented variant architectures from multiple vendors with full support in dozens of operating systems.

<comment><USER6> Yep, on ARM you don't have those problems; you have different ones: every system has unique firmware and requires a special bootloader and kernel, making it impossible to create one OS image that will boot on many ARM systems.

<http://lwn.net/Articles/364654/>

There is hope, but I doubt it will arrive in time for the first wave of ARM "smartbooks": <http://lwn.net/Articles/367752/>

Also, Ubuntu and Chrome OS seem to have divergent plans for firmware.

<comment><USER3> If OLPC pulls the XO-1.75 off, there will be a reference design for ARM-based notebook that is open-source from top to bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The print version was covered here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980927>

</comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, the January 6, Stanford EE380 is about Larabee. See <http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/>

Yes, it's open to the general public and will be webcast. (The latter may, or may not, work on "not Windows" machines.)

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Can it be made available for download after the event?

<comment><USER8> With few exceptions, all EE380 talks are available for download "indefinitely". Often the slides are available separately.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. It's great to know. I will schedule it so I can see as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> With or without Larrabee, the number of cores and threads per core on x86 processors will not decrease.</comment>


Show HN: Nebula Bliss – Stunning Interactive Nebulae in 3D/VR, 6Months to Create - <AUTHOR> http://www.nebulabliss.com/explore3D.html <comment><AUTHOR> It's taken us 6 Months to create this website. Nebula Bliss was create to see the beauty of the most well-known Nebula up close and in 3D. Each nebula is a procedural generated using complex 3D math, which means the models are generated in your device. They have been painstakingly retouched with color and mathematical anomalies. The models try to be as accurate to NASA/Hubble images where possible but some nebulae have more complex inner structures that are not well understood.</comment>


TechCrunch Review: Google Nexus S - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/06/google-nexus-s-review/ <comment><USER2> "Google's voice search/input applications and Google Navigation continue to make Android phones in general significantly better mobile devices than the iPhone."

3-4 mentions of "apps" in the entire review, and all of them focus on Voice and Navigation. Are we going to pretend that third party app selection is a non-issue on mobile platforms, not even worth mentioning?

<comment><USER3> Yes, we are, because for the most part (in my experience owning both an Android device and an iDevice), there are more options on the iDevice, but most of them replicate functionality of already existing Apps.

An example, if you have a working VNC client, you don't need 9 other working VNC clients that do the same thing but look slightly different.

<comment><USER2> I'm not talking about quantity. I'm talking about quality. Utility and polish. Diversity is the cherry on top.

<comment> brown9-2 As an undecided/prospective iPhone/Android customer, would you mind elaborating on which apps in specific (for which platform) you are thinking of when you make this statement?

<comment><USER2> Judge for yourself:

<http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/paid-apps/> <http://www.android.com/market>

Some iPhone apps that I personally use daily: Things, Beejive IM, Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha, Audible, Pulse for RSS, Tipulator, Weightbot, Nike+, Stocks (Apple's own, admittedly) and this isn't to mention the games library. If you'd like more elaboration you can email me at my handle at gmail.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately those links just tell me that browsing the appstores on the web (both of them) is pretty much unusable.

But the apps you list, almost all are available on Android aren't they, or something nearly equivalent. The only I think may not be on Android is Nike+.

UPDATE:And apparently many people use "My Tracks" as a Nike+ replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> no microSD expansion slot... interesting</comment>


Speeding Up Our Build Pipelines - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.skroutz.gr/blog/speeding-up-build-pipelines-with-mistry/ <comment><USER2> To summarize:

1\. Your build pipeline has a lot of hermetic actions.

2\. To speed it up, you execute these actions remotely on isolated environments, cache the results and reuse when possible.

Pretty neat.

You might want to look into [https://goo.gl/TB49ED](https://goo.gl/TB49ED) and [https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/google/...](https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/google/remotebuildexecution.googleapis.com) if you need a managed service to do just that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suggest a documentation cleanup. The initial README should have blurbs about who should use it, what it's for, how it does it, and links to example use cases. A quick start guide steps a user through accomplishing a simple task, and links to extended documentation. Extended documentation is the reference guide to the latest code, and should be generated from the code. I would not suggest splitting documentation up into multiple places (a readme here, a lengthy blogpost there, plus discombobulated Wiki); all documentation should be accessible from a single portal, with filtering capabilities (search is incredibly difficult to make accurate, whereas filtering is easy and effective).

This whole solution seems like a very custom way to use docker. You can already create custom Docker images with specific content, use multi-stage builds to cache layers, split pipelines up into sections that generate static assets and pull the latest ones based on a checksum of its inputs, etc. I think the cost of maintaining this solution is going to far outweigh that of just using existing tooling differently.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions, we'll improve the documentation soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> in Docker that would be something like

      COPY Gemfile Gemfile.lock /src
      RUN bundle install

even if they don't use docker to run application in prod, it can be [ab]used to perform efficient build layer (build step) caching and distribution.

<comment><USER5> Problem with docker is there if something early on changes then everything after needs to be rebuild.

However with a build you might have A and B feed into C. If A changes and B hasn't you want to just build A and get B from cache.

<comment><USER6> One solution in Docker is multistage builds where A and B can be separated into intermediate images with results copied into C.

A pattern that I like to use is two multistage build Dockerfiles- `dev` and `prod`.

The `dev` image has 2 stages. The first stage copies only files required by the package manager, such as `package.json` into another directory using a combination of `find` and `cp --parents`, then restores dependencies. The second stage copies the dependencies from the first stage and overlays source code. The `dev` image is then instantiated to run all tests.

The `prod` image also has 2 stages. The first stage starts with the `dev` image and publishes a production bundle to a directory. The second stage starts with a clean image and copies the production bundle from the first stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Curious what the HN community feels is a "slow deploy". I scanned the article first to find time reductions and still couldn't see how much time was actually taken at the end of it.

11 minutes is a great time reduction. (11*30 builds a day = 5.5 hours saved in total).

But I still am not sure what constitutes as a slow builds. I assume at some point there's an asymptotic curve of diminishing returns where in order to shave off a minute, the complexity of the pipeline increases dramatically (caching being a tricky example). So do y'all have any opinions on what makes a build slow for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> For us, when assets had to be compiled, a production deploy would take 15-17 minutes. After mistry (when asset compilation time was shaved off), deployment takes ~5 mins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first point isn't so much a change in build pipelines as much as it is avoiding the build pipeline altogether and deploying prebuilt artifacts; I can't think of a reason to re-run your build for prod if you have run it for another environment already. In other words recognizing that deployment and build stages are different.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. It might sound obvious to some, but if you're an organization from the Rails 0.x era (~2011) you have a lot of legacy code and infrastructure that albeit not fancy new tech, it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's actually touch a point very close to my work.

We definitely need much more speed in running our pipeline.

The software is mostly C/C++ with a lot of internal dependencies.

Do you guys have any experience in that?

What is worth the complexity and what is not?

<comment><USER10> The main difficulty with C/C++ is making the build steps "hermetics". The build system is frequently unaware of what files the preprocessor will touch/lookup before hands.

Build systems like Bazel are providing some way to ensure some level of isolation that provides correctness guarantees. It also provide an easy way to statically build a superset of the files needed for each step of the build, allowing to integrate with a distributed service. Some related documentation/discussions can be found starting from [https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/remote- execution.ht...](https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/remote- execution.html) Another good source of information is online videos from BazelCon: [https://conf.bazel.build](https://conf.bazel.build)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is basically parallel-make as a service.

This has been an increasingly difficult problem as more and more pipelines move to containers for testing and building. What other solutions have folks come up with?

<comment><USER12> I'm usually really obsessed by build speeds because I know how long build times can suck the life out of a team. Slow builds cause a lot of negative behavior and frustration. People sit on their hands waiting for builds to finish; many times per day. It breaks their flow and leads to procrastination. If your build takes half an hour, it's a blocker for doing CI or CD because it's not really continuous if you need to take 30 minutes breaks every time you commit something.

Here are a few tricks I use.

\- Use a fast build server. This sounds obvious but people try to cut cost for the wrong reasons. CPU matters when you are running a build. This is the reason I never liked travis CI because you could not pay them to give you faster servers; only to give you more servers and they used quite slow instances. When your laptop outperforms your CI server, something is deeply wrong.

\- Run your CI/CD tooling in the same data center that your production and staging environments live in and avoid long network delays to move e.g. docker containers or other dependencies around the planet. Amazon is great for this as it has local mirrors for a lot of things that you probably need (e.g. ubuntu and red hat mirrors).

\- Use build tools that do things concurrently. If you have multiple CPU cores and all but one of them are idling, that's lost time.

\- Run tests in parallel. If you do this right, you can max out most of your CPU while your tests are running

\- Learn to test asynchronously and avoid using sleep or other stop gap solutions where your tests is basically waiting for something else to catch up while blocking a thread for many seconds where it does absolutely nothing useful whatsoever. People set timeouts conservatively so most of that time is wasted. Consider polling instead.

\- Avoid expensive cleanups in your integration test. I've seen completely trivial database applications take twenty minutes to run a few integration tests because somebody decided it was a good idea to rebuild the database schema in between tests. If your tests are dropping and recreating tables tables, you are going to increase your build time by many seconds for every test you add.

\- Randomize test data to avoid tests interacting with each other. So, never re-use the same database ids or other identifiers and avoid having magical names. This helps you skip deleting data in between tests and can save a lot of time. Also, your real world system is likely to have more than 1 user and the point of integration tests is also finding issues related to broken assumptions related to people doing things at the same time.

\- Dockerize your builds and use docker layers to your advantage. E.g. dependency resolving is only needed if the file that lists the dependencies actually changed. If you are merging pull requests, you can avoid double work because right after merge the branches are identical and the docker will be able to make use of that.

For reference, I have a kotlin project that builds and compiles in about 3 minutes on my laptop. This includes running a over 500 API integration tests running against Elasticsearch (running as an ephemeral docker container). None of the tests delete data (unless that is what we are testing). Our schema initializes just once.

A cold Docker build for this project on our CI server can take 15 minutes because it just takes that long to download remote docker layers, bootstrap all the stuff we need, download dependencies etc. However, most of our builds don't run cold and typically from commit to finished deploy takes around 6 minutes and it jumps straight into compiling and running tests. Our master branch deploys to a staging environment. When we merge master to our production branch to update production, the docker images start deploying almost immediately because it already built most of the layers it needs for the master branch and the branches are at this point identical. So a typical warm production push would jump straight to pushing out artifacts and be done in 2 minutes.

<comment><USER13> 15 minutes to pull an image is crazy. Run a "docker pull {image}" followed by a "docker build —cache-from {image} ..." to speed up your pulls by 10X.

<comment><USER12> Not pull an image, build an image from scratch.

<comment><USER13> Ah, that makes more sense then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> JavaScript bundles are often a bottleneck in web builds. I wish there were better ways to speed this up.

<comment><USER14> Yarn plug-n-play (pnp) is a mechanism developed to speed up yarn install (up to 70% faster).

IIUC, angular is considering (working on?) using Hazel under the hood to parallelize angular builds.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I'll look into those.</comment></comment></comment>


We Need Viable Search Engine Competition - <AUTHOR> http://peebs.org/2014/01/04/we-need-viable-search-engine-competition-now/ <comment><USER2> The comments here about building search engines that viably compete with Google in terms of quality are hilariously wrong. _Hilariously_ wrong.

The dominating cost is not hiring smart people to work on the problem, it's hiring _enough_ smart people to work on the problem.

Consider. Here at Microsoft, we employ a search relevance staff of -- what, 20% the size of Google's? And Google's engineers are rock solid. MS might be able to make up a small margin, but our search relevance staff -- good though they are -- cannot compete with a brilliant workforce that is 5 times larger than them. If we are going to actually compete with Google, the problem is not hiring smart people, it's hiring _5 times the current number of smart people employed for this task at MS_.

Never mind _buying_ such a team. MS can afford that. How do you even _find_ that many people in 2-3 years?

When you consider the rest of the data, the case for building something like Google really begins to look grim. For example, how much does it really cost to build a search engine? We've poured _at least_ tens of millions of dollars into _just_ search relevance (I'm not even counting infrastructure). That's good mileage, considering that this way is littered with the corpses of companies like Cuil, who made investments in this area and failed miserably. Still, while this has been a great deal for us, we're still not there yet, and it's not clear we will be in the very near future. And so it's worth wondering: if MS can't buy something like that, realistically, who can? DDG? lol no.

In the end, this is the true dominating cost of building a search engine: people capital. Other bottlenecks, like engineering debt, politics, _etc_. pale against the sheer, awe-inspiring investment of Google in people capital.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know what? I really can't get behind the idea that MS is somehow the stirling example of engineering prowess and discipline. This is the organisation who fails their way through every other operating system. One of the poster children for missing the boat on the internet, tablets, operating systems, cloud services, and more.

I also reject this idea that Google's got a lock on every smart person ever. That they don't have any politics or wasted effort. That they're the snowflake they think they are. This kind of thinking is pathetically misguided, and a huge part of their marketing. Google is not perfect. They are staggeringly weak in the face of real competition (witness Facebook vs. G+ and Apple vs. Android).

Your argument is a replay of the prevailing attitude in the mid nineties regarding operating systems (from the same company, surprise!). And then some college student named Torvalds pushed out the most influential operating system ever, and did it for free, with the help of the world.

Nobody and nothing is invincible, and people who say that a situation is unassailable are always, categorically wrong, given enough time.

<comment><USER2> Hi OP. Your points, as I understand them, are the following. Correct me if I'm wrong.

* MS is not a good example of a strong engineering org. Further, it is not a good example because Windows sucks.

* Google doesn't employ every smart person ever.

* Google can't actually compete. (ed note: in any field, or just against iOS and Fb?)

* My argument is like the argument that no one would supplant Windows.

* Given enough time, everything dies.

Points 2 and 3 are about Google. Let's start there. You're right that Google doesn't employ every smart person ever, but then, who said they did? :) But there are a limited number of search relevance engineers, and finding enough to keep up with Google is a monumental, and maybe insurmountable feat. If you want to compete with Google, you will need to have a serious advantage that supercedes this. That is just a fact.

Point 3 is about competition. I'll grant you that G+ is no Facebook, but Android is the most widely adopted mobile OS on the planet, and by a _huge_ margin -- iOS is basically not even competitive, except for the top 5% of the market. Further, a billion smartphones will be bought this year, the most of which will be Internet enabled _Android_ devices, and most of which will be bought in developing countries by people coming on the Internet for the first time. You tell me who's forward thinking there, because when that market comes online, it will be huge. The fact that you mention this as being non- competitive indicates to me that you might not know what you're talking about. :(

Point 1 is about the MS org. What can I say, OP, I work here, so maybe I'm not the best person to have this discussion with. But FWIW I _chose_ this place over some much sexier jobs because the team I work with is arguably the best of its type in the world. There are bad neighborhoods, but the disparity between a good team in MS and a good team at Google is basically negligible. Also I think Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS, so ... :| (Note that I still use UNIX at home.)

Point 4 is probably the result of confusion. I don't think no one can compete with Google. Bing has 20% market share! Clearly we can. But I do think it will be hard to compete with Google on _search quality_. I don't see how you can argue that.

And point 5 is obviously true but not relevant.

EDIT: Actually I now see your point 1 as saying "MS couldn't pull this off because they're not a good engineering org, but someone else could". Maybe someone else can build a better search engine, but I think what MS has pulled off with Bing is a _monumental_ feat.

For starters, we built the entire Bing stack from scratch. No OSS. No common platforms like the JVM. Nothing like that. We started from nothing, and invented the server infrastructure, the data pipeline, the runtime that would support the site, the ML tools, everything. The fact that the site runs at all is a small miracle, but the site does not "just" run: the most remarkable thing by far is that the quality of our tooling is quite incredible, generally an order of magnitude better than the OSS equivalents. For example, the largest deployment of an OSS NoSQL datastore seems to be a few thousand nodes. The small NoSQL cluster backing our MapReduce implementation is stably deployed on a cluster _an order of magnitude larger than this_. This is something you only really see at companies like Amazon, Google, or MS.

I understand that the consumer market is not something MS is strong at, but I am hoping this gives you a taste of the scale and quality of what's happening behind the scenes. Happy to talk more about this if you drop me a line or skype me at `mrclemmer` :)

<comment><USER3> You make some good points but you lost me there:

>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS

Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.

I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine- bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.

<comment><USER4> You could point out all the lame exploits and bugs, but only if you want to spark a long argument that you will end up losing. There are a variety of things I don't like about Windows, and I avoid using it. But the idea that it's somehow less secure than other operating systems is for the most part a Linux advocacy myth. The fundamental security architecture of WinAPI is just not that different from that of Linux or OS X (which also has a legacy compat issue that complicates its security).

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)

Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by _famous general instability of Windows_? Windows is perhaps my 3rd choice for OS, but almost all my clients use Windows and among the problems they deal with, instability is not one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chestnut-tree My biggest concern with Google is the phenomenal amount of data they track and record about users. They have no self-restraint when it comes to tracking the online behaviour of users. Now they can track across devices (phone, desktop, tablet) giving them unprecedented knowledge of your online activity.

Companies are collecting more data about online behaviour than ever before. And no-one has the same online reach as Google. From analytics, to apps, to fonts to jquery - there's barely a site that doesn't link in one form or another back to Google in some way. Google's digital fingerprints reach into every corner of the web.

I've said this before, but I was hoping that 2014 would be the year we become more privacy-conscious, but I don't actually think that will be the case. Google get an incredibly easy ride on the subject of privacy and online tracking from the tech community. They're probably salivating at the prospect of capturing even more precise user behaviour through an OS (Chrome) that potentially captures _everything_ you do online. Google aren't capturing this data anonymously either. The tech community's response to this seems largely to be - so what? For anyone who cares about privacy, that's pretty depressing.

<comment><USER6> I didn't and still don't particularly care. The arguments to why this is bad always seem to be of the slippery slope / what if somebody does something untoward with the data variety.

The first one is a easily-dismissed fallacy, the second is not limited to Google or any other company. I have yet to see a convincing argument that Google is misusing this data or doing anything bad with it.

On the other hand, a service that knows you intimately enough can provide some very cool things _that are otherwise impossible_. The cards on Google Now, for instance, rely completely on the search history on your account and the location data from your phone. I get up in the morning and my usual route to work is plotted out with an ETA. I search for a nearby restaurant on my computer and the directions appear on the phone complete with ratings. Things like that.

My philosophy is to deal with any abuses if/when they occur (and mitigate the forseeable ones), instead of walling yourself off from the ever-more connected world. I'm starting to think there's a fundamental shift happening in what "privacy" is, why it's necessary, and what it means nowadays. And as usual, the choices are hop on, get out of the way, or get run over. For better or worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Is PageRank really the indomitable tech of our generation? Nobody can do better algorithmically, or integrate some kind of crowd sourced feedback, or measure browsing time and habits, or simply hand tune some of the most competitive key phrases? I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but I wonder if we haven't all been hypnotised by the complexity, much of which is marketing hype..._

Actually, the tech _is_ extremely complex, and PageRank is only a tiny part of that. Try building a search engine sometime. To hackers inspired by this article: here be dragons.

DuckDuckGo took the only sane approach and aggregated results from existing search engine apis, then gradually mixed in some secret sauce. Even then, is DDG viable competition for Google? Will it ever be?

All the same, I join you in wishing for some Innovators Dilemma-style disruption here. A "toy" service comes along one day that's a substitute for Google search, but only within a tiny niche. Google doesn't take it seriously enough until it's too late...and we have a real ballgame on our hands again.

Thought experiment: what could that disruptive niche be?

<comment><USER8> > Thought experiment: what could that disruptive niche be?

Someone needs to write/buy a search engine and then build a really rich API into the internals of it that lets 3rd parties write customized search engines. How about an auto parts search engine, or a search engine for spanish-speaking people living in southern california? What about a Christian search engine, or a meme search engine?

When someone can empower 3rd party developers to make the same kinds of decisions as Google does, but with different tradeoffs, and they really put the full institution behind supporting that, I think:

A) Google will have a hard time competing because they won't be able to give the personal attention to the needs of what is, effectively, a community of modmakers.

B) This new company will capture the long tail of search. Only a sliver of that is covered right now, with a scattering of niche search engines (Google Scholar, etc).

C) The number of users could be VERY large. It could be the cable to Google's broadcast television.

D) Getting started wouldn't require any massive technological achievements. Just find an underserved niche where even a really _really_ stupid search engine would work better than Google. Write it, figure out how to make money off it it, grow. Start with something that requires only a small index. Slowly expand into additional niches according to what will help keep the company and the tech moving forward.

Google's bet is that any information you can glean from someone coming to a niche search engine can be reasonably approximated with contextual information in the query. That's proved true for many queries, but the key is to find the queries where it's really not.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like Yahoo Boss: [http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/](http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/) And that's been around for years already.

Essentially, you get the Yahoo results, and decorate, filter, reorganise, improve, combine as you wish. So you get the organic results, which you can then innovate upon.

And it has survived the transition from Yahoo-powered search results, to Bing powered search results: [http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-boss-moves-from- yahoos-ind...](http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-boss-moves-from-yahoos-index- to-microsofts-adds-pay-structure-64140)

Which means you have API access to the second most-used search engine in the industry. So what better way to voice your discontent with Google by supporting a competitor.

Running a successful search engine is expensive, it needs continuous investment into R&D. That's why Yahoo took a step back and partnered with Bing instead. The level of investment needed just to hold status quo with the existing market runs into billions of dollars a year, something Yahoo baulked at. Microsoft, however, were still strongly inclined to invest that every year.

<comment><USER10> Yahoo screwed up so bad here, read the research papers coming out of labs.yahoo.com back then and you realize they were onto knowledgraph before Google and actually had a head start, but they shattered their research division and lost a lot of those search people to microsoft and google. They just didn't have faith to create their own path and also lost their identity by deciding to become an entertainment company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The complaint seems to boil down to how Google deals with spammers. The question is, how is competition going to make it better? If we instead had five search engines that each had 20% market share, would people stop trying to game them? Would false positives in efforts to thwart spammers be eliminated? How?

The problem isn't even one that responds to market forces -- the "victims" (sites that should rank highly in organic results) are no one's customers. If you want to flip the script, they're the product. They have no leverage, and having more search engines leaves them with still no leverage. Only the users of the search engine have leverage because they can switch to another search engine -- but they can do that today. The problem is the alternatives are no better.

What we need is a cost-effective accurate way to identify spammers and exclude them from high rankings in search results. Someone who could do that more effectively could challenge Google, because there is a market for spam-free search results. But if that was an easy problem to solve then why hasn't Google solved it? They have the right incentives. It's just not easy, because spammers adapt. Whenever a search engine does something to thwart spammers, the spammers do something different.

Having more search engines doesn't make it easier, it makes it harder because each search engine has less resources to dedicate to it and they have to duplicate each other's work, and the cost to sites of legitimate optimization for a larger number of search engines increases which creates an even larger advantage for major institutions over small timers who can't afford the higher cost.

It's silly to say "why doesn't Google do X" and list some abstract thing you think would solve it which they've already considered and declined to do. There is probably a reason. Maybe manually curating every website is too expensive. Maybe arbitration proceedings would be overrun with spammers trying to challenge legitimate removals of their spam. And if they're wrong, don't speculate about it on a blog, prove it by building a better search engine. So far no one has been able to do it.

<comment><USER12> You falsely assume a new search engine can only be "as good as Google". Google's search has become highly commercialized over the years, it used to be about finding the "best" answer to your search query (the "original" PageRank), but it has increasingly become the "best consumerist" answer to your query (where to buy something). This make it more susceptible to spammers, as their basic incentives are similar. New, different, search engines might try another approach, perhaps less personalized, less commercialized, and less mass-media oriented, and be less of a "petri dish" for spammers.

<comment><USER13> A search engine that didn't bury good quality results under vast amounts of recent ("fresh") blog spam would be a useful start...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think anything can compete with Google when it comes to search in English. I almost feel like Google can read my mind. With the adequate query you can find anything you've ever read on the internet if it's still online. Yesterday night I wanted to re-read a blog post about a guy that made a few bucks with QNX, but I didn't remember much I tried a few queries and I got the expected blog post with this:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=netherlands+blog+qnx+a+few+b...](https://www.google.com/search?q=netherlands+blog+qnx+a+few+bucks)

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-make-a-quick- buck](http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-make-a-quick-buck)

I just tried the same query with DDG and Bing and they don't even come close to giving me the link I want.

<comment><USER15> I feel the same. I wanted to find a video about a zombie prank in a New York cafe and did a Google search for it. The first result was the actual video that I needed.[1]

Needless to say, Bing fails here.[2]

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=telekinesis+prank](https://www.google.com/search?q=telekinesis+prank) [2] [http://www.bing.com/search?q=telekinesis+prank](http://www.bing.com/search?q=telekinesis+prank)

<comment><USER16> The 2nd and 3rd results on Bing the same as the 1st one on Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would say that Bing already is a viable alternative. Having used it for several months now, there aren't too many queries that it doesn't handle well, and usually when I check Google's results for those queries, they are equally bad.

<comment><USER18> So instead of an entrenched monopolist, I'm supposed to choose… Microsoft?

That just feels _wrong_.

<comment><USER19> It's 2014, times have changed.

<comment><USER18> I don't think _Microsoft_ has changed enough to earn my trust or respect. I doubt they could.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish more people would use and/or improve YaCy[0]. It's a decentralized search engine. Client is written in java. With the power of decentralisation hardware shouldn't really be an issue. It's just that the search result somewhat sucked the last time I tried it.

But I guess now is a good time to install it again, help scraping the internet, and maybe hack at the code.

[0] [http://yacy.net/en/](http://yacy.net/en/)

<comment><USER21> I love the idea of this stuff but I'm so scared things like this install a backdoor to our PCs. Is there any way to mitigate this? Run YaCy in a VM on VirtualBox?

<comment><USER22> Since it's open source, I doubt something like that would go unnoticed. You can check out the source here though: [https://gitorious.org/yacy](https://gitorious.org/yacy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >1\. Google is making arbitrary rules on how sites should behave, because they have a monopoly.

How are rules against paid linking scams or procedure generated content farms considered arbitrary? It's clearly trying to game the system, and the rules are explicitly laid out to tell you NOT to do it.

>2\. Google needs these rules, because Google's rankings are apparently trivial to game.

If this were true, you can make millions executing your plan for any number of websites. It's not.

<comment><USER24> _> How are rules against paid linking scams or procedure generated content farms considered arbitrary? It's clearly trying to game the system, and the rules are explicitly laid out to tell you NOT to do it._

The whole case with the delisting/penalization and subsequent(and extremely speedy) re-listing of RapGenius is a great example of Google's current arbitrary practices. I covered this is some details on another thread[0] in a couple of replies[1][2][3][4].

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7010997)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011063)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011111)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011356)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011597)

<comment><USER23> The rule they broke is clearly laid out [1]. The practice of manual penalties is as well [2]. They outline a course of action on how to remove the offending links [3]. How is this arbitrary?

[1][https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356)

[2][https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824)

[3][https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2700611](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2700611)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perfectly valid expectation with near impossible odds of coming true.

Google has gotten so rich, entrenched and popular that IMHO no competitor can dislodge it. I say this as a thoroughly-disappointed user who's tried nearly all the alternatives to Google in the various segments that it operates in. I've managed to stop using nearly all Google services except Android (running CM) and Search.

As others have pointed out in the thread, DDG is _nowhere_ near as good, especially if you're not in the US (I'm in India). After having forced myself to use DDG for a month, I've now resigned myself to Google searches with a couple of extra steps: \- all searches performed while logged out of all Google services \- browser plugins to rewrite all Google tracking URLs from search results

So sure, we need viable search engine competition. But don't wait up for it either.

<comment><USER26> "Google has gotten so rich, entrenched and popular that IMHO no competitor can dislodge it."

Isn't this the definition of a monopoly? And if so, isn't that reason enough to consider search as a public good or a publicly regulated means of accessing information?

<comment><USER25> The key word there is "IMHO"

Judging from the various anti-trust cases that have been brought on against Google around the world it's clear that _proving_ that is nearly impossible too. More so because Google operates in a sector (Internet software) that is theoretically open to infinite competition and zero switching costs.

<comment><USER27> That theory - infinite competition and zero switching costs - seems to be completely ungrounded in any kind of reality.

<comment><USER28> There's a whole issue of what the definition of 'using google' is to people. Even if I never search with Google, I'm still often using google stuff - or, more precisely, Google services are using/tracking _me_. And there's no obvious way to turn it off or opt out of it.

<comment><USER29> incognito mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Part of the problem is that Google's PageRank algorithm is patented and the patent won't expire until 2017.

Google insists that its current search mix is based on a lot more than just PageRank, but it seems that PageRank probably contributes the foundation of their business. I don't see a way of competing with Google's results unless we are allowed to use something like PageRank, which we can't do unless we pay royalties or wait until it expires.

I'm not saying that PageRank is the be all end all of search algorithms, and certainly someone somewhere could come up with a different method of ranking superior to Google's. Ranking pages by how many other pages cite them seems like a pretty fundamental insight, and where I would start with any new search engine.

<comment><USER31> The PageRank patent is owned by Stanford; anyone can buy a license. And BTW, it isn't necessary or even that useful these days to compute it.

<comment><USER32> I'd thought that Google had an exclusive license, but I just checked and the exclusive license expired in 2011:

[http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank- patent-12731.html](http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank-patent-12731.html)

So yes, anyone can license PageRank now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is one of PG's frighteningly ambitious problems and I believe it's an important (and really hard) problem. I think the answer is to focus on an important niche and grow from there. DDG has done a good job by focusing on privacy; they're currently at nearly 4m queries per day.

I'm starting by building the search engine I want to use while writing code, which does parallel searches of different parts of the web dynamically based on the query.

I have an initial (ugly and very limited) prototype here: [http://gigglebang.com/](http://gigglebang.com/)

I'm looking for co-founders. If this is an interesting problem to you, email me: email@example.com

<comment><USER34> Thanks, your prototype looks interesting; I'll try it out. The one-click redirection to DuckDuckGo, Python, etc. is very convenient.

It would be nice if you could add a privacy policy to your "about" page that disclosed what kind of data you collect about your users' queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The internet is now littered with badly written content linking to more badly written content, all in an attempt to increase inbound links and ultimately rank higher in Google. And since Google can't tell the difference between badly written and well written content companies continue to pump this crap out. A lot of problems might be solved with some healthy competition but I don't think this particular problem would be. It would require a new way of ranking that severely devalued inbound links and that seems like a really, really hard nut to crack.

</comment><comment><USER36> I agree with the article. I wrote last week ([http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-12/practical-internet- securi...](http://markwatson.com/blog/2013-12/practical-internet- security.html)) about using two browsers. Chrome with default security settings: used only for gmail, google search, facebook, and twitter; Firefox with ghostery: all normal web browsing, search using duckduckgo and bing.

My setup encourages me to at least use duckduckgo and/or bing when I am using firefox.

<comment><USER37> FYI: I would keep tabs on Ghostery, there's a for-profit company behind it that works with Ad Networks - They don't do anything bad now but experience shows that a massive user-base that you make zero revenue off can be a tempting fruit when profits start falling.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism)

<comment><USER36> Thanks Andre, I will watch out for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One of the viable venues to compete with Google is not by developing "new, better search engine", but rather "better vertical platform".

What's the best search engine where buyers go? Not google.com and never really been google, it's amazon.com and ebay.com.

What's the best search engine to find answers on technical questions? Stackoverflow.com is approaching google very fast.

So the answer would be for sharp minds to develop sharper and better vertical portals/platforms and pick google apart piece by piece.

<comment><USER39> That's exactly what my startup is trying to address - how do you help users navigate 100, 1000 or even a million search engines? Ultimately, you need a way to browse search engines by topic and bundle them into custom lists for your specific needs. It's early going, but check Nuggety out if you're interested: [http://nuggety.com/](http://nuggety.com/)

<comment><USER40> I'm interested, but I've checked the front page and am still confused what / who it's for, could you clarify?

<comment><USER39> Sure. I know the site needs some more clarity and that's what I'm working on now. The basic idea is a Pinterest-type community where you can build a list of sites on any topic and share lists with others. But each list lets you search each website directly from the same search box (results come up in a new tab, like Kayak).

So what is it good for? Any subject where you want depth or breadth over surface results. So collectors and researchers can build a portal for themselves. And there are some interesting possibilities for specific needs, like a search list for many places to find a cached URL: [http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/cached- webpages](http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/cached-webpages) or a search list to search any of Google's 190 international websites: [http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/international- google](http://nuggety.com/u/nuggety/international-google)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Last year i wrote this: [https://medium.com/surveillance- state/32ba2b38c219](https://medium.com/surveillance-state/32ba2b38c219) \- and got a proper dollop of hate from certain segments in the webmaster community. They claimed it was 'sour grapes' \- I have 140k visitors a day, am doing great, better than great. The monopoly is bad for all of us, even though I'm benefiting as it is.

This Google thing is WAY out of control.

</comment><comment><USER42> [http://www.yandex.com](http://www.yandex.com) is a real competitor

<comment><USER43> On a whim, I asked yandex.com: 'k-d tree'.

Nine results were about the space-partitioning data structure. Also, there is a tree-trimming service on Long Island called K&D Tree Masters.

Surprisingly, pleasantly -- all ten items are useful to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is there any new information regarding the future plans for Bing? This article from a couple of months ago had it looking ominous:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-08/microsoft-ceo- candi...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-08/microsoft-ceo-candidate- elop-said-to-mull-windows-shift.html)

"Besides emphasizing Office, Elop would be prepared to sell or shut down major businesses to sharpen the company's focus, the people said. He would consider ending Microsoft's costly effort to take on Google with its Bing search engine, and would also consider selling healthy businesses such as the Xbox game console if he determined they weren't critical to the company's strategy, the people said."

</comment><comment><USER45> Yes, search is hard. Look how most websites that build a search for _their own site_ still do a worse job than Google's site search. And its not like people haven't tried to take on Google. Google always faces the threat of companies succeeding in smaller areas of search, but so far it's dealt with those pretty well too. The other threat it faces is a (big) company developing an alternative approach, e.g IBM Watson.

</comment><comment><USER46> Here's an idea... how about instead of using just one search engine website, browsers will have a functionality that allows you to search for something and have it query to 3 different search engine at the same time? Users can configure which 3 search engine he/she wants to use. That way, website owners won't be so affected when one search engine screwed him up.

<comment><USER47> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile)

I haven't used dogpile in forever - actually thought they were defunct, but your comment brought it to mind. Seems like what you're after?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> or: We need an inclusionist wikipedia - where every possible search term starts with an empty page/any possible search term would have an entry, even if it's just for redirecting a spelling mistake. Eventually every search term would grow its own little community of experts. Unfortunately, as pg said, "Deletionists rule Wikipedia."

<comment><USER49> Appreciate the lateral thinking. Several issues related to evil SEO-like behavior would need to be addressed as well:

* Blow away my competitor's links on the topic I'm related to

* Always put my links at the top on my topic page

* Sneak my link into other pages not directly related to my topic (viagra spam on comp.lang.*)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> DuckDuckGo provides better results than Google. We have viable alternatives.

<comment><USER51> You know their web results are from Bing, right?

<comment><USER50> Bing is one of many places that they get results from, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Alternatives:

[https://www.blippex.org/](https://www.blippex.org/)

[http://www.yandex.com/](http://www.yandex.com/)

[https://duckduckgo.com/](https://duckduckgo.com/)

And of course:

[http://www.bing.com/](http://www.bing.com/)

[http://www.yahoo.com/](http://www.yahoo.com/)

<comment><USER40> Oh and also:

[https://epicsearch.in/](https://epicsearch.in/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> We (meanpath) released[1] some crawl data which may be of interest to those of you hacking away on a search engine project.

[1] [http://blog.meanpath.com/meanpath- january-2014-index/](http://blog.meanpath.com/meanpath-january-2014-index/)

</comment><comment><USER53> as lot of people have said.. u cannot beat google at search. but, there is a way.. push information that users are looking for before they even think about it (similar to Google NOW). search is still a sophisticated operation for regular users. by showing the right information at the right time, users don't even have to search.

</comment><comment><USER54> You are so right. I agree with every word. Competition is very important and a real helper to the us the users.

</comment><comment><USER55> duckduckgo.com

<comment><USER56> I use it but for many queries it still isn't good enough.

<comment><USER57> Funny. I use DDG as my default. Frankly, I think it's results are way better than Google's. Yes, they are more simple-minded and less "intelligent", but then they are much more predictable as well. As such, it took some getting used to, but now I feel like I search more precisely than I ever would with Google.

Way too often, Google will try to be "smart", and search for some "intelligent" interpretation of my search, where no such thing was called for. Especially for technical, precise searches for "strange" strings, this can get really annoying.

Also, those bang-searches are just genius. I regularly search Wikipedia, programming language docs, or maps using those. And yes, sometimes Google as well, mostly for fuzzy "how do I" searches or searches that I don't know precise keywords for.

<comment><USER58> > "Way too often, Google will try to be "smart", and search for some > "intelligent" interpretation of my search, where no such thing was called > for. Especially for technical, precise searches for "strange" strings, this > can get really annoying."

Wow, so it's not just me then - I was describing my exact same feeling to someone (perhaps less eloquently than you!) just three days ago!

Even when I go and set it to 'Verbatim' search (which is well hidden), it still often gives me useless results for these kinds of technical queries...</comment></comment></comment></comment>