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> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they

• ravishi 5y ago
  It's funny to observe my stepson learning his way through Google. It's happening mostly through the assistants on TVs and locked cellphones. But he's learning to do exactly what you said: half-second thoughts and brute forcing many queries for the same subject. He's 7.
• narag 5y ago
  That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.
  • recursive 5y ago
    It's not idiotic if it's what the people (generally) want.
    • dylan604 5y ago
      You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" Babies must look at adults doing the googoo gaagaa, and think to themselves that these adults are absolute morons. The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites returned, and often think that the site's owners must be morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog search results. I think think about how moronic it is that Googs allows this.
      • recursive 5y ago
        "Googoo gaagaa" sounds like happy baby babble to me. Mine would more like "waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh" when they were hungry. Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.
        • kuboble 5y ago
          In my experience waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh meant wet diaper or something hurts. Leeeeeah, leeeaaaahhh was being hungry. Phonetically is similar to the beginning of a polish word mleko (milk)
      • narag 5y ago
        You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.
        • iainmerrick 5y ago
          Most people don’t literally say “goo goo ga ga” to babies; what they actually do is echo babies’ nonsense sounds back at them. I subscribe to the theory that this helps babies understand what they sound like, and therefore helps them learn how to produce the sounds they want.
  • iainmerrick 5y ago
    I don’t think this means anything for the point you wanted to make about search results, but please note you’re exactly wrong about baby talk! It’s not a good analogy. Baby talk (or CDS, child-directed speech) helps engage their attention and provides valuable feedback. Kids who experience less CDS develop language more slowly. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk (I heard about this research a number of years ago. Although I must admit, now I wonder if it’s affected by the science reproducibility crisis!)
    • brimble 5y ago
      N = 3, we intentionally never baby talked to our kids, and spent a lot more time reading them novels and other things without pictures or simplified language than (I'd guess) most people do (we did also do plenty of picture books), and their language development was in all three cases way ahead of schedule. Could just be luck (well, genetics, probably) I guess. Maybe they'd have developed even faster if we'd used baby talk. One shitty thing about parenting is it's really hard to tell what helped, what hurt, and what didn't matter at all.
      • erosenbe0 5y ago
        It's not genetics or a language strategy, just engagement. Compare a toddler living in a ghetto concrete jungle to one who takes daily strolls through Central Park or Suburbia. The enrichment of parents teaching about the trucks and the trees and the lady with a purple hat pays massive returns.
      • nsxwolf 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm not capable of baby talk. Too weird. I have always talked to my kids like they were adults. They seem fine.
        • flatiron 5y ago
          I did goo goo gaa gaa for the first 6-8 months since you can tell there’s really nobody home up there yet and it’s cute and engaged my other kids to play with the youngest. But yes. Mine seem fine as well so I doubt CDS is going to make/break a human being.
  • cptaj 5y ago
    I think this has proven to be false. Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just force perfect talk from the start. They do this instinctively. There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at home and documented this phenomenon
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yep. How many bug reports are useful vs how many are "the button didn't work"? Google is optimizing for that.
• Tempest1981 5y ago
  Right. Feels like it's optimized for common voice queries, in sentence form. They've sacrificed technical/HN users to focus on this.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • lubujackson 5y ago
    Ask Jeeves is back, baby!
• arketyp 5y ago
  This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics for GPT3, so I doesn't seem too unrealistic, even if it's all ML nowadays.
  • KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
    You can though, put quotes around it.
    • layer8 5y ago
      Google still decides to interpret that however they like. Even the verbatim option in Search Tools doesn’t always help.
    • amptorn 5y ago
      That's stopped working! Google is just ignoring them from time to time now. Did you even read the article?
      • bambax 5y ago
        I read the article, and the HN comment it links to, but didn't find an example in either, and it doesn't match my experience. Does someone have a concrete example when using quotes results in pages not containing the search terms?
        • adamc 5y ago
          I've hit this many, many times, but I'm not sure I can easily reproduce it. Tends to happen when there are more search terms, in my experience.
        • allochthon 5y ago
• reaperducer 5y ago
  Tons of people don't, though Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches. Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good, but they have to be shown the way. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet. I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they're giving up on Google entirely. Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources. When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it's not on the web. That's Google's failure.
  • Mezzie 5y ago
    > Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches. As someone who's been a public librarian, I can tell you that is not how people work.
    • ako 5y ago
      You can only be thoughtful with your search if you know what you are searching for. But oftentimes i'm not really certain what i'm looking for, or i don't know the exact terminology that should be used, so i'll just enter some related terms, in the hope that google leads me in the right direction.
      • Mezzie 5y ago
        At the minimum. A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of: - What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital) - How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see. - The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively. - Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search - What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'. Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.
• some_furry 5y ago
  Here's a perfect example of this phenomenon. https://archive.md/wwMY3 https://archive.md/wwMY3 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+is+linux https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dannysullivan 5y ago
    Fortunately, most of those web results give a pretty good rundown on the history of Linux. But yes, this is weird! I'll get it looked at.
    • some_furry 5y ago
      If you can publish a postmortem I'd be really fascinated to read what happened to produce this result
• cml 5y ago
  A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it? Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”? It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.
  • the_other 5y ago
    Wouldn’t it be remarkable if we found out that personalised advertising actually earned less than just auctioning off the obvious big keywords?
    • ThalesX 5y ago
      I worked for a healthcare recruitment company in a capital city with some large hospitals and a number of universities. I can't for the life of me understand why they chose to spend so much money on trying to track healthcare professionals online when they could just advertise it on-premise where they actually hang out.
    • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
      We already know that “personalized ads” aren't much netter than context one: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-... Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-bots-did-what/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-b... I can't understand why every company want me offer “personalized” service. It never works, and if I can't manually set preferences, then it's not personalized (because “personalization” means exactly that).
  • 5y ago
• robbedpeter 5y ago
  Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something, or consume particular content. They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.
  • samhw 5y ago
    Advertising is not 'market manipulation': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation. This dialect of 'Substackspeak' is starting to feel like SEO for HN readers.
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      I use market manipulation to mean just that, someone manipulating the market in whatever way. I'm not familiar with the legally-oriented meaning of this term.
    • robbedpeter 5y ago
      Market cornering is classic market manipulation. Google uses every asset at their disposal to maintain their 98%+ death grip on the search markets. The list of competitors bought, stifled, legally crushed, or absorbed is probably endless. The search market is thoroughly cornered. I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose. Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers. The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.
• coffeefirst 5y ago
  Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting it to bring back something useful is trained behavior. I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search. It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.
• mcv 5y ago
  But isn't Google supposed to know everything about us by now? Surely they know who types correct search queries and who keeps making typos?
• emodendroket 5y ago
  I honestly find it pretty helpful. You can type "russian murder painting" into Google and it will come up with Ivan the Terrible and His Son. All that hinting may be annoying if you know exactly what you wanted, but I'm not a specialist in everything I ever search for.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    Then again, both DuckDuckGo and Kagi also give that result for that search phrase. As well as being more generally useful for more specific searches as well.
  • mcv 5y ago
    What would be nice is if you could toggle this behaviour. Sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for, sometimes I don't. Assuming I never do is at least as silly as assuming I always do. Just give me the option. I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you to personalise your search like that.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      You can. Or at least you used to be able to, by putting your query in double quotes. Apparently it no longer works either.
    • emodendroket 5y ago
      Don't you just put words or phrases in double quotes when you want to tell it you know what you want?
• ultrarunner 5y ago
  This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue until recently.
  • siliconescapee 5y ago
    I don't have any recent information on how google search works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced searchers received advanced results (and more visibility into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the advanced features and also seem to be reducing personalization of results to save compute resources. It's horrible. You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."
    • dannysullivan 5y ago
      I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this. We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the results somehow.
    • rawoke083600 5y ago
      I as a programmer can't imagine anyone building a search engine like this ? As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.
  • dannysullivan 5y ago
    I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.
• beerandt 5y ago
  No, because they broke quotes. That's going out of the way to try and tell me what I think.
• datavirtue 5y ago
  I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I'm fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.
• userbinator 5y ago
  A less charitable interpretation --- and unfortunately one that could be true --- is that Google does not want you to think. It wants to keep you stupid because it's easier to deceive those who can't think and bend their thoughts in the direction that gives G more $$$. I'd say it's not merely optimising for the stupid; it's actively encouraging it. It wants to be your brain, control your thoughts and life.