4 ms·
The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don'
by gonehome 5y ago
The best I can steelman is that they're sitting on data that shows users actually want the current behavior which is why it's there (which could be true? I don't know - I'm not the average user).
They'd have to disambiguate that from the obvious motivated reasoning that's likely to exist there too.
Even then, sometimes you know better than users when making long term bets about what you do, faster horses and all - it's part art and part science.
Average users are also not necessarily the best to optimize on. 99% of wikipedia users never write anything. Does that mean the users that write are relatively worthless?
- lovecg 5y agoSpeaking of Wikipedia, nearly 100% of the time when I Google something medical related I want to get the Wikipedia page for it. Not WebMD or Mayo clinic or whatever. But Google never includes the Wikipedia link (at least on the first page of results), so I have to append “… wiki” to the search. I can only assume this is intentional.
- glenneroo 5y agoMaybe one more reason to switch to DuckDuckGo with bang operators: !w <search> to search Wikipedia directly.
- lovecg 5y agoI mean “wiki <search>“ works on Google too. But I don’t want to type anything extra. My problem here is if we assume the search engine should be good at predicting what I actually want to see for a given term, Google is failing at that.
- glenneroo 5y agoSounds like you need a BCI like this: https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage (semi-joking... but complaining about typing 3-5 letters is definitely a 1st world problem ;)
- lovecg 5y agoIt absolutely is :) But so is complaining about Pinterest ruining photo search!
- glenneroo 5y agoFair enough! Then again the top-voted comment IMO invalidates the entire article's premise i.e. Bing image search works fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151512 That is to say that Google image search is the real problem and not Pinterest.