4 ms·
But that is not true of any other human activity. Every human activity is learned. And most of those learned activities are eventually replaced by better ones.
by shpxnvz 16y ago
But that is not true of any other human activity. Every human activity is learned.
And most of those learned activities are eventually replaced by better ones. People learned that the right way to portion food was by tearing with their hands until someone invented the knife. People learned that the right way to draw was with a stick in the dirt until someone invented paper.
What you think is the right way to do anything is only that because you haven't discovered or been taught a better way to do it, and that includes searching the internet.
Yet you argue that the correct way to use a search engine should be "how you do it when you first try it and don't know anything about it".
Actually, I think the argument is that a good way to be successful in business is by offering your customers more perceived value than your competitors. In search engines, it's more valuable for your users to not have to learn how your algorithm works in order to craft a search query that will satisfy their needs. It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search.
Right or wrong, the business that refuses to provide that value because they disagree with it is going to fail miserably.
- bambax 16y agoI totally, completely and unconditionaly agree with your last point: it is absolutely in the best interests of Google to respond to every query with relevant results, however it's formulated. If 99% of Google users ask Google questions like they would a person, then Google should be able to provide answers; that is true even if only 10% of users used it that way. My point however is not about Google: it is about the user. The user would gain from learning how search engines work, and formulate their queries accordingly. It's often stated that users shouldn't be bothered to learn how to use your service, because "they have more important things to do" and "there are other services to choose from". This is good advice for businesses (common sense, really); it is bad business to expect users to dedicate time and effort to use your system. But I have a hard time accepting that this is an excuse for users to ever learn anything. At the same time as it is Google's responsibility to serve users as best it can, it is each user's responsibility to try to improve their mastery of such tools.
- tripzilch 16y ago> In search engines, it's more valuable for your users to not have to learn how your algorithm works in order to craft a search query that will satisfy their needs. Well, yes. But in this case it's not an algorithm. You just ask it for documents containing your search terms. It's about as straightforward as it gets. It's not computer programming, it's not even doing long divisions or whatever. You can't seriously assume that method of searching is going to completely stump anyone. > It's valuable to be able to use natural language to search. Maybe you're forgetting here that not the entire world speaks English. Unless your natural language search engine is able to understand nearly every language in the world, you're still forcing the users to formulate a query in English. And I'm willing to argue that for, say, your average middle-aged German, formulating a query in English is going to pose a much bigger problem than doing a conjunctive term search, as the latter carries transparently to most languages in the world. (not all of them--I should check which ones btw--but even in those cases it's not nearly as difficult to find a fix for that than it would be to somehow port your brilliant semantic context analysis engine to be able to speak yet another completely different language). Give it a couple of decades, maybe we'll have usable NLP then, but before that time, I am convinced that even for the layman, searching for documents to contain certain terms is a lot more straightforward, likely to yield desired results and in quite a few ways actually easier to use than what has to pass for NLP currently.