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It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last we

It's a bit of both. The company I work at has a pretty big SEO department, and it's definitely frustrating how they're able to game web search. But also last week I was trying to Google something about earbuds (I don't even remember what exactly), and searching for ("earbuds" -headphones) still brings up headphones as a bolded result because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms. Edit: just remembered a better example from earlier this week. Searching for "clock in a box paradox" gets results about schrodingers cat, or twin paradox articles. Searching for "clock in a box paradox -cat -schrodinger -twin" gets stuff about a video game called Cube Paradox. It's only when I search "clock in a box paradox einstein bohr" that you actually get results about Einstein's 1930 thought experiment.

oblio 5y ago
> because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.
- mwigdahl 5y ago
  Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
  - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
  - getcrunk 5y ago
    Thank you. The rebuttals were good but fail to address this main point. Which was explicitly stated.
- pb7 5y ago
  Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences. A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music. Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > They needed to help the less educated, too. Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox? Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it. I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.

oblio 5y ago

> because of how aggressively it tries to use synonyms That's a double edged sword. One of the main reasons regular people fail to find stuff on Google, or at least failed in the past, was that you'd need to be a walking thesaurus to do it effectively (which techies generally are, for example). They needed to help the less educated, too.

mwigdahl 5y ago
Does it help the less educated to flat out ignore exclusion terms that are _explicitly_ provided?
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  Doesn't seem to ignore it for me -- on the first page I only see "headphones" word in the search string itself, in "related searches" and in google maps listing shops that sell them.
- getcrunk 5y ago
  Thank you. The rebuttals were good but fail to address this main point. Which was explicitly stated.
pb7 5y ago
Bingo. In the past, you needed “Google-fu” to find what you were looking for. People that didn’t understand how the search was done under the hood (non-techies) would search with poor terms and get poor results. Nowadays, you can’t “game” the system with precise keywords but millions more people find what they’re looking for. Overall, it’s an improvement.
cratermoon 5y ago
Even educated people don't have the ability to hold every possible taxonomic schema in their heads. Don't even get me started on multi-lingual, cross-culture, jargon, creole, and dialect differences. A cool example I read recently noted that the English word "son" has two different meanings in Spanish: son, a conjugation of the verb ser, to be, and son, relating to sound and music. Edit: as an aside, I just did a search for son and the first page was almost entirely about the recent horror movie, with one hit for the Korean footballer Heung-min Son
rightbyte 5y ago
> They needed to help the less educated, too. Like squeaky-clean trying to read up on a paradox? Google could have an advanced mode for search or something. Instead they put other information aggregators out off business but did nothing to replace their value. We were better off with the paper version of Yellow Pages for some queries -- at least it was moderated and effort was put into compiling it. I don't think it is a good business move for Google in the long turn to be a search engine for Wikipedia and Stack overflow and for people that are to lazy to type to top domain for the URL. Forwarding non URLs to Google search in Chrome might be the smartest dark pattern from Google ever.