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My native language is Dutch. Google handles it poorly. As a result people have adapted to either search in English, or to morph the original search (that google

My native language is Dutch. Google handles it poorly. As a result people have adapted to either search in English, or to morph the original search (that google does not understand) into sometime that has a higher changes of yielding good results. I'm pretty sure Dutch isn't the only language that fares this way. Now the main reason (at least, I think it is) it's handled poorly is that Dutch has an infinite number of words ( * ) and order in compositions matters a lot. This conflicts with the typical precomputations that try to reduce the number of words etc. ( * ) take any 2 nouns A & B. you can concatenate them into a new noun AB or a new noun BA (with completely different meaning). German has this concept too.

dtech 6y ago
Google does a pretty decent job for me in Dutch; Duckduckgo and Bing are awful to the point of being useless. Don't agree with your hypothesis either, results are bad even for short simple sentences with common non-combined nouns. They aren't that common in Dutch anyway unless they have evolved into a more or less standalone noun. Dutch nor English people really think of a flamethrower as a thrower of flames, it's just another noun.
yorwba 6y ago
> take any 2 nouns A & B. you can concatenate them into a new noun AB or a new noun BA (with completely different meaning). German has this concept too. This is also how it works in English, except the concatenation may be written with a space as "A B". If anything, writing it as "AB" should make search more accurate, since you're less likely to get results with "BA" than getting results with "B A" when searching for "A B".
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Only if your NLP models actually decompose words. Simpler ones don't. But while it's technically true that English also has compounds, it just writed them apart, it is also the case that German (don't know about Dutch) uses compounds, and especially long compounds with more than two nouns, a lot more than English, where you might more often use a whole sentence.

dtech 6y ago

Google does a pretty decent job for me in Dutch; Duckduckgo and Bing are awful to the point of being useless. Don't agree with your hypothesis either, results are bad even for short simple sentences with common non-combined nouns. They aren't that common in Dutch anyway unless they have evolved into a more or less standalone noun. Dutch nor English people really think of a flamethrower as a thrower of flames, it's just another noun.

yorwba 6y ago

> take any 2 nouns A & B. you can concatenate them into a new noun AB or a new noun BA (with completely different meaning). German has this concept too. This is also how it works in English, except the concatenation may be written with a space as "A B". If anything, writing it as "AB" should make search more accurate, since you're less likely to get results with "BA" than getting results with "B A" when searching for "A B".

Tainnor 6y ago
Only if your NLP models actually decompose words. Simpler ones don't. But while it's technically true that English also has compounds, it just writed them apart, it is also the case that German (don't know about Dutch) uses compounds, and especially long compounds with more than two nouns, a lot more than English, where you might more often use a whole sentence.