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While I agree that Google's query interpretation as it works right now is annoying and frustrating more than it is helpful, that's largely owing to how inscruta
by marginalia_nu 3y ago
While I agree that Google's query interpretation as it works right now is annoying and frustrating more than it is helpful, that's largely owing to how inscrutable it is. If you search for cats and get dogs, it's not obvious why that happened and not obvious how to prevent it from happening. That problem is in no way intrinsic to synonym generation, but likely a result of leaning too much into embeddings to do the heavy lifting.
That said, skipping synonyms and other query variant generation is definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When it works well it massively increases the recall of the search engine at very little loss of precision, which is important given the scale and noisiness of web results.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago> That said, skipping synonyms and other query variant generation is definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I disagree, I want control back. They've neutered almost every query narrowing option they used to have. They don't care anymore they just want to give you results. I'm not saying the, lets call it 'query automation', is always bad, I just want the option to turn it off to some degree. Apparently we can no longer be trusted with that.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThere's really no reason why you couldn't still have control with e.g. a verbatim mode or quotes. This is a Google problem, not a search problem.