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That's because we (the people who instinctly know which keyword to use for a search -- or at least we think we do) are the super minority. Most people are abso
by nolok 8y ago
That's because we (the people who instinctly know which keyword to use for a search -- or at least we think we do) are the super minority.
Most people are absolutely terrible at keywords based searching. Which is not very surprising since most people are terrible at spelling out what they search to begin with, and they're also terrible at turning a sentence into its important keywords, so doing those two things at once brings all the bad.
To this day, even with current Google helping them out a ton more, I'm still amazed at most people complete inability to type out what they search for in any meaningful way.
Pay attention to how people ask their question when looking for something and you quickly realize they don't ask their question in a logical way, or using the words you would expect. Pay attention to how many time when someone ask you something you feel like saying "What are you actually trying to find/do/achieve ? What is actually your issue, instead of the half-way mess you just said that made no sense ?". And people are also really bad at realizing that and taking a step back, and tech user are not exempt; something like half of stack overflow question are broken that way (totally made up stat).
Then add a layer of "this is a computer I need to computerize my query !" and you enter the land of weird.
PS: with that said, allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it activated at all time for my account would be totally awesome
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nkurz 8y ago> allowing a full verbatim mode AND an option to keep it activated at all time for my account would be totally awesome You can mostly solve this by creating a keyword search that launches a verbatim search. Depending on your browser, the syntax probably looks something like this (with the essential part being the 'tbs=li:1'): https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&tbs=li:1 Then add a single letter keyword (I use 'v') so that you can search type 'v verbatim' to do a verbatim Google search for 'verbatim'. I suppose you could even make this the default search, and use something else if you ever want 'normal' mode. Of course, this still leaves the problem that verbatim on Google doesn't always mean 'verbatim' anymore, but that part will have to wait until Google changes their ways (unless you put quotes around every word).
- scarmig 8y agoYou could create keyword that points to a site that takes a regular query and redirects you to a Google search with every provided word quoted. Though someone would have to create that site.
- username223 8y agoYou give "most people" (not yourself, of course...) both too much and too little credit. Pure keyword search was predictable: you typed in the words you wanted to appear on the page, the computer did a bit of stemming, and you got back results that all contained all of those words. It was simple and predictable, so pretty much anyone could figure out how to control it. "Power users" could learn some special syntax to do more. Current attempts to try to make everything a conversational AI are pure failure. Whoever is in charge of Siri/Alexa/Googlette/Whatever thinks people are saying "hey X, do Y" as if talking to a human. In reality, those people are trying to figure out the magical sequence of words and intonations that will make the thing do what they want, frustratingly and poorly reverse-engineering some inhuman and constantly-changing robot.
- lainga 8y ago>the super minority This is the same reason clicking once on the address bar in Chrom(ium) selects the entire text, and two clicks narrows it down to a single location - which seems the reverse of what usually happens. The design justification for this on Monorail was something like "most people use the address bar to perform new searches", instead of editing the URL they were already at, so it was better to save them that one click.