> dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had

> dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!" > Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software