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I resort to "natural language queries" only in desperation, when queries that are lists of search-terms have failed. Actually, they aren't really natural langu

I resort to "natural language queries" only in desperation, when queries that are lists of search-terms have failed. Actually, they aren't really natural language queries. They are just ordered lists of search-terms. Goo provides no mechanism for saying "This is an english-language question". And even if Goo could parse my natural language, and rephrase it as something like "Are you looking for a list of books published by Douglas Hofstadter?", when you turn that into a query on the index, it stops having anything to do with natural language.

wizofaus 4y ago
A "dumb" search that just took a search phrase like "books published by Douglas Hofstadter" is going to return pages that have that phrase in it, or something close to that phrase. Google will prioritise results that actually contain such lists, regardless of whether the page contains a phrase like that (e.g. the word "published" is basically ignored by Google). That's all I meant.