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>“I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet.
by bdz 8y ago
>“I loved Siri for years. I could ask it: ‘What are the five largest lakes in California?' and get an answer. That’s hard to do any other way on the Internet.
What does "hard to do any other way on the Internet" mean here? I'm honestly confused because say you Google it then you get the results instantly. Unless he is talking about the definition of "large" which can be the area covered or the volume but then that's up to the question itself and not Siri.
- TomMarius 8y agoYou still need to pick up your device, unlock it, open a browser and enter your query. Simply saying it is much easier.
- adrianmsmith 8y agoTrue, but picking up your device etc. is not really “hard to do”.
- TomMarius 8y agoIt is if it's in another room. But yeah, it's not really hard, I agree - but I think Woz used that word in a different sense - as in "it takes a lot of steps that need thinking", not "it'll exhaust you".
- tomhoward 8y agoGoogle will instantly serve up an answer to a question like that these days, but it hasn't always been the case. Until a few years ago it could take multiple searches and some manual collating/filtering/calculating of results to get the answer to that question. I think that's what he means.
- DanBC 8y ago+lakes +california +(largest OR "by size") vs what are the 5 largest lakes in California The first isn't hard, but remember those few years when people would think you're a search guru because you could use + correctly, or when people sold books about how to use Google search? https://www.amazon.com/Google-Hacks-Finding-Worlds-Information/dp/0596527063 https://www.amazon.com/Google-Hacks-Finding-Worlds-Informati...
- comboy 8y agoOnly that google now treats "+" and "-" merely as suggestions, if you want to fine tune your results, google got really bad at that. DDG and bing handle it fine. On google you usually have to find a link to click "yes, really only provide results with the keyword I explicitly provided" and even then you end up with 8 results where you would get hundreds of them a few years ago.
- lallysingh 8y agoUse quotes instead of plus. Plus was reassigned for Google plus
- afterburner 8y agoI just realized, they can totally assign it back now...
- eitland 8y agoGoogle now also treats doublequotes as suggestions now it seems. On bad days (I'm assuming some A/B-testing going on) it also ignores the verbatim option.
- comboy 8y agoIndeed. Sometimes I think that if I had a text collection of a few sources (like HN), I could do a better job just greping them on my own PC. This is in regard to highly specific queries e.g. when debugging.
- eitland 8y agoA trick I've found out, which strengthens my suspicion that the "bugs" are just stupid a/b tests: If you get worse results than you usually get, try reporting it (or reporting basically any problem) on the page. For me at least it seems that magically within hours the problem is now gone. In the beginning I thought they had fixed the issue I reported really quick. But after seing this happen again (and again) I think a better explanation is they have a systen that opts you out of the tests once you report a problem. Personally I have moved on to DDG (and I have one browser with Qwant as the default) but this trick helped me a few times.