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OK Mr Literal, you're saying when you search for "Las Vegas hotels" you want the results to exclude the entirety of the Strip, "Dallas football stadium" to excl

OK Mr Literal, you're saying when you search for "Las Vegas hotels" you want the results to exclude the entirety of the Strip, "Dallas football stadium" to exclude where the Cowboys play, and "American airlines reservations" to provide the web site or phone number for Delta (which is, technically, an American airline.)

trehalose 7y ago
Could you explain how you got this from the comment you're replying to? Are you assuming a search engine can't find things there are ads for except when serving the ads?
- listenallyall 7y ago
  Please check a map. It's an "annoyance" to SquishyPanda23 when he doesn't get a precisely literal result. If Kissimmee != Orlando, then Strip hotels != Las Vegas (they are all in unincorporated Clark County, NV) and AT&T Stadium != Dallas (it's in Arlington, and the old Texas Stadium is in Irving). But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
  - cousin_it 7y ago
    You can be in favor of the search engine making the best guess to what you wanted, but still consider ads worse than search results. The reason is that ads aren't optimized only for relevancy, but for relevancy multiplied by commission. When an advertiser pays more per click, their ads will show on less relevant searches. If that effect didn't exist, I think people would be more ok with ads.
    - listenallyall 7y ago
      I've never claimed that ads are better than search results. I'm only stating that some ads, in certain contexts or situations, do provide positive value. 'Grawprog' summed up his comment by stating "they're all shit," and I disagreed and gave examples of when they might offer positive value.
SquishyPanda23 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand your response. Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements. Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot. But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.

trehalose 7y ago

Could you explain how you got this from the comment you're replying to? Are you assuming a search engine can't find things there are ads for except when serving the ads?

listenallyall 7y ago
Please check a map. It's an "annoyance" to SquishyPanda23 when he doesn't get a precisely literal result. If Kissimmee != Orlando, then Strip hotels != Las Vegas (they are all in unincorporated Clark County, NV) and AT&T Stadium != Dallas (it's in Arlington, and the old Texas Stadium is in Irving). But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
- cousin_it 7y ago
  You can be in favor of the search engine making the best guess to what you wanted, but still consider ads worse than search results. The reason is that ads aren't optimized only for relevancy, but for relevancy multiplied by commission. When an advertiser pays more per click, their ads will show on less relevant searches. If that effect didn't exist, I think people would be more ok with ads.
  - listenallyall 7y ago
    I've never claimed that ads are better than search results. I'm only stating that some ads, in certain contexts or situations, do provide positive value. 'Grawprog' summed up his comment by stating "they're all shit," and I disagreed and gave examples of when they might offer positive value.

SquishyPanda23 7y ago

I'm not sure I understand your response. Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements. Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot. But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.