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For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit
by coastflow 5y ago
For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”"
Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was:
1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem.
2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms.
3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made.
From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.
- hericium 5y ago> Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires No, Google made users passive to profit from controlling limited choices presented to them. > I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context Looks like it to me, too. It's Google's propaganda for "we made you need us".
- drivebycomment 5y ago
- aghilmort 5y agopretty much -- must users won't bother to learn search operators for same reason they didn't learn LaTeX and will resist learning markdown. sure it works and lot of work to recall something hard to master only use every so often. it's the layperson's version of recalling regex if only need it every few weeks -- lots of cognitive load for minimal return, easier to ask friends or reddit. yes, search operators seem intuitive to perhaps the average HN reader or SO coder, etc. That's a small set of people compared to 7B+ people attempting to recall oh, right ~term adds synonyms -- easy for most people here, mostly useless or not worth remembering for most of the world.
- shadowgovt 5y agoMost users weren't learning search operators before Google came along either. Google's goal is to make them ultimately irrelevant and just give you what you're looking for, meeting the user halfway on the search query. That may not be possible, but it's the right mindset to have for solving the problem... Making the human talk like a computer is a UI failure.
- aghilmort 5y agowe're attempting to tackle some of that at Breeze and it's hard / challenging / etc -- it's not sufficient to make it technically easy to filter results by topic, the user also has to rethink it's even possible to filter results beyond whatever default list that's returned. Giving users a UI that facilitates that is equally as hard as solving the technical aspect of making it easy for users to tune results and spend as much time there as coding. we ran smack into that with a special topic we released this week, Ladypedia, where we ended up added a dial to filter out male results on a sliding scale for Wikipedia results. Doing it by default was too strong, and so we ended up selecting for female gender and then letting user dial in how many male-related pages to filter out. 1. Breeze -> https://breezethat.com/ https://breezethat.com/ 2. Ladypedia -> https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia https://breezethat.com/p/ladypedia