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A query string, by itself, is just a few words in a specific order. It doesn't say very much at all. A machine has very little idea of what you're asking for.

A query string, by itself, is just a few words in a specific order. It doesn't say very much at all. A machine has very little idea of what you're asking for. The more context it has for what you're talking about, the better chance it has at guessing what you meant -- that's all it can do, it'll never actually know. Google's often guessing wrong now -- how many times is the link you want not the top one? How often do you have to change your query? It's all a guessing game, because the situations where there's an obvious right answer (like exact phrases) doesn't give satisfactory results. Moreover, interpreting queries for those situations can often (even usually) give sub-optimal results, as the computer's taking the query too literally. As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux. A trivial scan of my email headers would say as much. For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos. And as for your friends, how about the people you follow? If I'm following really good programmers, and I type in a programming-related query, I'd rather get results biased toward what really good programmers like, versus the unbiased average. Even for my friends, I actually respect some of their opinions (gasp!). If they've +1'd something in the realm of what I'm looking for, it's probably worth considering.

ashishgandhi 15y ago
> As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux. My email isn't very useful because I don't subscribe to mailing lists. But somehow I end up being there and I keep trying to get rid of them with the "unsubscribe" and if that doesn't work I start reporting them as spam. But the point is, essentially, no matter if you do a scan of recent emails of emails from a longer period of time there's a lot of stuff that I WAS NEVER INTERESTED IN to begin with. More frequently I've been deleting these emails and the only emails that stay are photos (when your relatives don't quite use FB you do send photos over using Gmail) and other personal conversations. My friends and family don't program but I do, and enjoy doing so. But that never shows up in Gmail. Even if I WAS subscribed to mailings lists, when I'm mostly Python and PHP - I would love to hear about Node.js when that suits my situation. I've nothing against learning new things. In fact, that's my second objection to you learning how I behave _now_. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER NEW THINGS - DON'T TRY TO KEEP ME IN MY SHELL. (Sorry, had to use caps. I think there was a TED talk as well on this. Keep the world open - not limited - don't build walls around my current tastes to limit my future tastes.) > For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos. I like watching videos of lions and whatever little footage of tigers in the wild that's there. I love those kind of cats, yes. But I never really was interested in a jaguar. I like watching Top Gear but that doesn't happen on YouTube. But if I search for Jaguar, then most probably I'm looking for the car - but since you don't know what TV I watch you are going to get it wrong. Again, don't take this as a specific case but what I want to highlight is that you will never have enough information about what I consume because Google isn't the source of even, say, 70% of my consumption. I consume more from HN than from Google-originated sources for example.
bambax 15y ago
> The more context it has for what you're talking about, the better chance it has at guessing what you meant -- that's all it can do, it'll never actually know. Ask me! > I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. "Probably" but not "certainly". So what are you to do when you actually want to search about jaguar (the car)? Then you'll have to search for "jaguar car". But that is broken. The paradigm of (Google) search is that it gives back, as search results, documents that contain all of the search terms (implicit AND). In the query "jaguar car" the word "car" qualifies the word "jaguar" but is not necessarily to be found in result documents. The problem with this whole guessing game is that 1) it's UNPREDICTABLE and takes control away from the user 2) it forces the user to try to "unguess" Google ("what did it try to do, and what do I have to type to make sure it guesses right") -- an exhausting mental strain, which has a tendency to fail > If I'm following really good programmers, and I type in a programming-related query, I'd rather get results biased toward what really good programmers like, versus the unbiased average. How can you be sure you're already following _all_ the really good programmers that have something to say about your search? Why should I have to bother with setting up all of this "following" business? I expect Google to give me the most relevant results of the best quality, according to some general consensus -- or, if you want to go the AI route, according to actual textual analysis (for example, and at the minimum, spelling; let me filter out results where spelling mistakes are above a certain threshold, that would have value (out goes Yahoo Answers)). Giving more weight to results coming from people I know, or even people I've already heard of, does not help.

ashishgandhi 15y ago

> As for programming queries, my email's actually pretty useful. I'm subscribed to a few mailing lists, and it'd be nice to not get Perl or Win32 results when I'm mostly in C and Linux. My email isn't very useful because I don't subscribe to mailing lists. But somehow I end up being there and I keep trying to get rid of them with the "unsubscribe" and if that doesn't work I start reporting them as spam. But the point is, essentially, no matter if you do a scan of recent emails of emails from a longer period of time there's a lot of stuff that I WAS NEVER INTERESTED IN to begin with. More frequently I've been deleting these emails and the only emails that stay are photos (when your relatives don't quite use FB you do send photos over using Gmail) and other personal conversations. My friends and family don't program but I do, and enjoy doing so. But that never shows up in Gmail. Even if I WAS subscribed to mailings lists, when I'm mostly Python and PHP - I would love to hear about Node.js when that suits my situation. I've nothing against learning new things. In fact, that's my second objection to you learning how I behave _now_. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCOVER NEW THINGS - DON'T TRY TO KEEP ME IN MY SHELL. (Sorry, had to use caps. I think there was a TED talk as well on this. Keep the world open - not limited - don't build walls around my current tastes to limit my future tastes.) > For other interests, my youtube play list indicates a lot of what I mean. I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. Lots of other people are asking about the car. It's particularly obvious if they were watching a review of a car recently, and not watching cat videos. I like watching videos of lions and whatever little footage of tigers in the wild that's there. I love those kind of cats, yes. But I never really was interested in a jaguar. I like watching Top Gear but that doesn't happen on YouTube. But if I search for Jaguar, then most probably I'm looking for the car - but since you don't know what TV I watch you are going to get it wrong. Again, don't take this as a specific case but what I want to highlight is that you will never have enough information about what I consume because Google isn't the source of even, say, 70% of my consumption. I consume more from HN than from Google-originated sources for example.

bambax 15y ago

> The more context it has for what you're talking about, the better chance it has at guessing what you meant -- that's all it can do, it'll never actually know. Ask me! > I like cats, and I watch them on youtube. When I type in jaguar, I'm actually probably asking about the cat, not the car. "Probably" but not "certainly". So what are you to do when you actually want to search about jaguar (the car)? Then you'll have to search for "jaguar car". But that is broken. The paradigm of (Google) search is that it gives back, as search results, documents that contain all of the search terms (implicit AND). In the query "jaguar car" the word "car" qualifies the word "jaguar" but is not necessarily to be found in result documents. The problem with this whole guessing game is that 1) it's UNPREDICTABLE and takes control away from the user 2) it forces the user to try to "unguess" Google ("what did it try to do, and what do I have to type to make sure it guesses right") -- an exhausting mental strain, which has a tendency to fail > If I'm following really good programmers, and I type in a programming-related query, I'd rather get results biased toward what really good programmers like, versus the unbiased average. How can you be sure you're already following _all_ the really good programmers that have something to say about your search? Why should I have to bother with setting up all of this "following" business? I expect Google to give me the most relevant results of the best quality, according to some general consensus -- or, if you want to go the AI route, according to actual textual analysis (for example, and at the minimum, spelling; let me filter out results where spelling mistakes are above a certain threshold, that would have value (out goes Yahoo Answers)). Giving more weight to results coming from people I know, or even people I've already heard of, does not help.