What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google | Hacker News Reader

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google

predictablyirrational.com

262 pointsdavidw97 comments

If you pair the questions together, they solve themselves!

I thought this was just a cute flippant answer until I went back and re-read both lists.

The pairing isn't perfect, but it is surprisingly good.

I'll admit, it's a tad sexist, but it's still good for a laugh.

It is hard to say anything true about relations between the sexes without being somewhat sexist. I think that's because nobody really likes the naked truth on that topic.

How would you back up that assertion?

Is true to say "most relationships could be improved by both people listening better?" Is it sexist?

What if they are not improved by doing that? What if women actually respond "better" to not being listened to? If that's (empirically) true, is that acceptable? I think the parents are asking how we can go about wrangling with gender roles, when maybe we're just programmed to be shitty to each other. It's not a secret that our social interactions are still hierarchical, as disgusting as that is.

I believe the question is sexist.

Boys like talking about things, girls like talking about people. So the "listening better" actually becomes "understanding an alien mindset." I feel that this fact actually makes the above question sexist, because the two sexes involved interpret the action "listening" to mean two completely different things.

Here is a good example.

Let me observe that both men and women don't just want to find someone of the opposite sex, they would like to be with someone who is as good as possible. When you are with a person who is as good as is possible for you to land, that person will be someone you have difficulty getting to be interested in you like you're interested in them.

So, for instance, a man who dares say something moderately insulting to a woman early on establishes that he thinks that he could do better. If he does not offend her too badly and turns around and gives her some hope, that gives her the message that he's someone she has a chance at but has to work for. If she believes that message, she'll think of him as a good potential catch.

Going the other way, a woman who doesn't feel compelled to return a man's calls promptly, puts off sex, and who insists from the start on time for herself is demonstrating that she believes she is a reach for him. If he believes her, then he is more likely to work to establish the relationship, including making the commitment to take care of her and help raise their children. (Which is what marriage is.) No man likes those games, but most of us respond to them.

These parallel pieces of advice are both effective and offensive. You'll find the advice for men as part of the standard repertoire in virtually any guide for pickup artists. It is standard because experience shows that it helps get women in bed. Conversely the advice for women is straight from http://www.amazon.com/Rules-TM-Time-Tested-Secrets-Capturing.... That is sort of a female counterpart to the pickup artists guide and is about how to land a man who will commit. The polarization of the reviews is evidence of both offensiveness and the gratitude of women who found the advice effective. (Read the reviews and you can verify the reasons for the votes.)

So there is a concrete example for you. Landing someone of the opposite sex and getting them to do what we want them to do is of interest to the vast majority of us. (Yes, some people are gay or asexual, but the vast majority are straight heterosexuals.) Yet advice that is effective for that is quite offensive.

And, of course, when we're offended by advice about the sexes, we usually call it sexist.

Now, the rules are just pure bullshit. That way leads to immorality. We just need to be good men and good women.

* That is sort of a female counterpart to the pickup artists guide and is about how to land a man who will commit.*

It is not really, since "game" is not about relationships. The female equivalent of "game" is a push-up bra and control pants. Does it work? Absolutely. Will it get you what you want? Ultimately, probably not.

You are missing the important fact that in general men want sex and women want commitment. Thus the best female counterpart to a pickup artists guide is one that ends up with commitment, and not lots of sex.

No, the male equivalent to "the rules" is having a steady job and wanting kids.

The rules are essentially pretend to be someone you are not and don't reveal anything undesirable about yourself (children, prone to depression) until after a man is emotionally invested (that's Rule 13). The male equivalent to "the rules" is overspending to appear richer, lying about being divorced, and don't mention your vasectomy until after the wedding.

Rule 23: Don't tell your therapist about the rules because (s)he will tell you you are being dishonest and manipulative, and then you'll die alone.

(Yes, I read "The Rules", every guy should. Once you know the rules, you can downgrade rules girls from "girlfriend material" to "short term fun".)

Seriously, The Rules simply do not work if you're looking for a loving, equal partnership. It's all manipulation and games. Same with the "pua" approach. The vast majority of people do not behave this way toward partners or potential partners.

You are right that neither is a recipe for an equal partnership. Both are based on setting up a power imbalance from the beginning that makes what you want more likely to happen.

However I emphatically disagree about what the vast majority of people do and do not do. In our culture men generally prefer to date younger women of lower socioeconomic status who are physically smaller than themselves. And it seems like most women find this acceptable. How is that not a built-in power imbalance in the relationship? How does that square with having an equal partnership?

This is yet another example where an obvious truth about the relationship between the sexes offends people.

It's not offensive, it's just sort of incorrect. Most people date and marry those in the same age and socioeconomic bracket. You are greatly exaggerating the socially condoned differences.

Like any partnership, both parties bring valuable things to the table, some of which are less quantifiable and tangible than height and money - organizational and management skills, social benefits, etc. Depending on context, the partner with less physical and monetary power may still be the stronger party in a relationship. This is where trust and honesty and a will to please the other, rather than just take what you want, come into play to keep the power balanced and the relationship healthy. Any sufficiently imbalanced partnership, romantic or otherwise, is doomed to eventual failure.

Hehehe. Naked.

(just demonstrating the average male response)

There's an opportunity here for an Answers-like service...

Is it me or is anyone else surprised that people use Google this way? I don't mean the content, I mean the kind of query.

I generally type specific words or phrases (often with a 'site:' prefix when I know where I'm looking). I never type full questions (i.e., sentences) into Google.

Edit: My wife reminded me that there was a New York Times article in December about how children search this way automatically: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/technology/internet/26kids...

I've ran into the general public way too much to be surprised by such queries.

First, some people just search this way on a regular basis. Strange, but I've met several who do. Bless their hearts.

Second, often for queries of this type I'd expect to find hits on advice sites, Yahoo Answers, etc, where the question is actually in the text of the page.

Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...

> Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...

Right, and fair enough. But to me that's a clue to the real answer: don't ask a search engine to solve your romantic issues.

The search engine won't solve them for you, but it likely gives non-specific advice that is better than what most of your friends will manage.

They [the people typing these questions] aren't. They are asking a search engine to connect them to people who have been in similar situations and might have advice.

Perhaps - but I doubt that this is how the searchers actually view things. I suspect they just think "I want" and head for the Google box. Most of my students work this way now.

Even if you're right though, I know the internet well enough to know I would look there for people to give me advice on any of these questions.

I didn't search this way for years, but now I often do, especially when I know less about the area I'm searching in.

Sometimes I don't even know enough to know what keyword to use, and full questions seem more likely to give Google something to work with in that case.

I often search this way first, and if I don't find a suitable result, leverage my assumptions about how searching works. I don't know what Google is doing behind the scenes, so my assumptions may be wrong. I like to give Google the benefit of the doubt though, because I know there is an eventual goal of supporting this type of querying.

I'm not surprised.

I sometimes type in full questions because I know that Google prefers to find the full phrase I give it, which means that I'm more likely to come up with a page answering that exact question rather than one with that phrase. Given that I type reasonably quickly, there isn't much overhead in the extra typing.

Sometimes I have difficulty coming up with the keywords I need to search for a topic. Finishing the sentence "How do I ..." sometimes helps. Once I've done that, I might as well search for that before refining.

Not just children- back in the early days of information retrieval user interface studies, they found that pretty much all search-naïve users instinctively use natural language (or at least "natural-language-ish") queries instead of keyword/boolean queries. This, of course, is the opposite of how search engine designers and programmers think about the problem.

For a more thorough discussion, I'd suggest taking a look at Marti Hearst's "Search User Interfaces" (specifically section 4.1.2, on keyword query specification: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch4_query_specifica... ).

I've started to do this more and more.

Think about this: Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.

That's been one of Google's strengths for a while, though - searching without worrying about "x AND NOT y" markup. DWIM.

>Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.

What, no. Not even close. That would require natural language processing & i doubt google even dreams of that.

Not really. It just means that when people type "How do I" in front of a search and then click on a link with how do i and then whatever it was, then google picked the right result, even though it doesn't know that you are asking for instructions on how to perform a task.

I took it to mean general queries. Anyway I often format my query for google & that gets me to the article much faster.

The people who click those haven't seen all the answers (that would be listed with a non-human query). I want the best answers, not the most popular ones.

Further, typing long phrases or questions unquoted gives a lot of false positives. I don't want that, I want to capture the essential minimum I need to look for something specific.

Google doesn't give you the best answers, they give you the last answer someone else chose. That's how google works, because google believes the best answer is the one after which the searcher does not click on anything else.

How would google measure a "best" answer?

What you're optimizing for in that case is hyperlinks to articles entitled "how do i...". This is probably an SEO technique by now.

I'm not surprised because I have heard that people use Google in this "asking a question" way (I'll call it the "Ask Jeeves Technique"). None the less it still feels odd to me. This is because when I am searching for an answer to a question on Google, I will usually type in a portion of the answer that I feel would be predictable, To take a random example: "The population of Iceland is" (with actual quotes so as to pick up the whole phrase). I don't have a name for this technique (perhaps "Answer Prediction" or the "Reverse Ask Jeeves Technique"), but I usually find it works to my satisfaction. Otherwise, I'm like you, I type in separate keywords that don't make a complete sentence.

I have theorised in the past that perhaps the reason some people use the "Ask Jeeves technique" while I and others might use the "Answer Prediction" technique might be due to me having a clearer general understanding of the way that search engines collect and index their data, i.e. (to oversimplify things for the purpose of illustration) I get that the search engine is just matching text patterns to my query, where as perhaps less technical people don't really understand this and if they think of it at all, they might unconsciously imagine that the Google search page is the interface to some kind of Sky Net like artificial intelligence that is able to take their question, ponder it and provide the most relevant answers. Maybe anthropomorphising our tools is the human default?

Or maybe I'm totally off base here... just some random musings really.

The 'Jeopardy Technique'?

Yes I like that, and may steal it for the future. :)

Technically you're selecting the results you wanna see, so it doesn't tell you how frequent they are. The ranking only tells you relative frequency. You already knew there's someone somewhere who searches like that.

I guess you are an outlier then. Most people will type in full questions and expect Google and answer them automatically

I was about to post the same observation. I would never google for something like this. I think of words that would be likely to occur on a page containing what I'm looking for. Sometimes I quote parts of a phrase such as "how to" to ensure I'm likely to find only how to kind of posts.

Note that this doesn't directly tell you what people want. It tells you what people want and aren't getting. For example, the fact that boyfriends don't search for "...love me" doesn't mean that they don't want to be loved; maybe they want to be loved but are loved enough.

Or sex is generally how love is expressed for guys.

for more sad/hilarious results, look up "how can i get my wife/husband.."

Hilarious indeed, number 10 on the "How can I get my wife" list is "s facebook password"

Actually, when I went to the Google box myself, "...love me" was on it.

How would you like it if poets coded, huh?

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/youhavelovedenou...

I think it's fair to say if you have something, then you can't want it.

Is anyone else a little disturbed that this has 121 points and is at the top of the HN frontpage? Maybe I'm just being grumpy but it seems like total fluff that's of no use to anyone. I'm surprised it hasn't been killed, are there no mods around today?

Why do you think it is fluff that is of no use to anyone.

It is not like HNers aren't interested in girls.

So you think it provides some insight into something or other? Not just a cheap laugh? It seems to me to be quite a long way from "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

The article itself is fluff but it seems to have generated good discussion of how people search. If I upvote it, it will be to find the discussion again, not to give applause for the article.

(Of course now that I have commented, I don't have to upvote it to find it. I can get to it via my comments. :) )

I just got an account today after lurking a few months and read the FAQ just after reading the "Built By Google" story. To poke fun at the FAQ "OMG HN is turning into reddit!!1!" It all ties together nicely from an AI standpoint though. Granted the material is generated by users, but isn't there a hint of AI to it? Look past what the user typed and rather how they're using the service. It's tech and it's a "hack."

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying in this comment.

I believe he is trying to qualify why this article is appropriate for HN. Read the last two sentences. He is refuting the original comment by saying that this story "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". The AI stuff might need a bit of explanation, though.

You're right on the 1st 1/2. Concerning AI, it's certainly artificial, but how intelligent does it need to be to be considered AI (at least, by the general population)? People seem to be using Google Suggest to get answers to real questions (or at least entertain themselves). If a useful answer is returned, is it not "intelligence?"

I know the term is somewhat vague in it's meaning these days but I don't think many people would consider "show the most common queries with this prefix" to be AI.

Besides, it's the content not the mechanism being presented here, I guess it does support some common biases which is maybe a reason people like it.

Hit the 'flag' link. If enough people do that, it'll be killed automatically, without need for any mods.

I have. I'm courious as to what others see in it though... It's up high in the /classic view to so clearly it's not just a bunch of newcomers.

I think it is very useful. I will type partial searches into Google the next time I put together a customer survey.

Please don't. Think of all the confounding factors.

I probably wouldn't have posted it a few months ago, but seeing some of what goes by lately I figured it wouldn't hurt. It's amazing that it got so many points though - it's really not that interesting. Especially compared to some of my other recent submissions that I thought would be way more interesting to this crowd in terms of startups and hacking.

That I see as the problem, because now a whole bunch of other people will see this and think the same as you and we end up drowning in the stuff. Because of course this sort of stuff appeals to the lowest common denominator and doesn't require any mental effort whatsoever to process it tends to get lots of votes and drown out the more interesting but possible slightly challenging material.

I think the site is basically at a point where either pg gets really strict about fluff/politics/economics or it will continue to slide.

It is the nature of these sort of sites that they're always right on the edge. Let's try not to push it over though :)

Maybe (probably) it will degenerate at some point like all the others have but it would be nice if it stayed around a little longer.

Its a monday morning. Most Hackers would be busy coding to visit HN anyway.

It wasn't Monday when I read that comment last night.

"Everyone thinks of changing the world [his or her girlfriend or buyfriend], but no one thinks of changing himself." --Leo Tolstoy

buyfriend? intentional, mistake, or Freudian?

Mistake, Freudian, or my dyslexia :)

This is an amazing visualization which does the same exact thing http://hint.fm/seer/

default search results from French Google I guess?

http://i49.tinypic.com/nogciv.png

I thought the obvious next version was interesting as well. It doesn't exactly paint a very nice picture of men.

How can I get my husband to ...fall in love with me again ...be more affectionate ...love me again ...help around the house ...want me ...be more romantic ...lose weight ...talk to me ...leave the house ...stop drinking

How can I get my wife to ...love me again ...swing ...lose weight ...shave ...trust me again ...love me ...shut up

I assume that I got more common completions for the first than the second because women are more likely to use Google to seek advice.

If you intersect the two sets, everyone wants to get back together or scheme up a George Costanza-like plan to have the partner be the one to initiate a breakup.

Hey, works across cultures! The results in German are pretty much an exact mirror image. That would be cool if it weren’t so depressing.

I don't find it depressing at all. Men want a more active / interesting sexual life with their partner. Women want more bonding with their partner / want their partner to do stuff for them. It's nothing we haven't known for many millenia.

Clearly there are a lot more into relationships but these are the most common "entry-level" problems and there's nothing wrong with that. People who have enough experience at human relationships (because they're old enough) won't use Google to solve their problems, don't you think?

Actually, both partners want both. Perhaps there's a little more emphasis with women on the partner side but "last longer in bed" was also among the choices.

No, not depressing because of that. Depressing because my estimation of my fellow males is so far off. I always thought more highly of us :)

You know, this is the second story about Google auto-completion this week. The behavioural economists have jumped on the Ajaxian/ReadWriteWeb/SmashingMag bandwagon memes.

Try wife and husband ... "how can i get my wife to shut up"

I'm guessing that one pairs with, "how can I get my husband to stop drinking"...

Reading "Predictably Irrational" now and it is a truly fascinating book. This is a good laugh, but the book offers more useful data and insight.

I wonder why the font on the middle line is slightly off...

http://skitch.com/swombat/nqhn8

Because OS X tries to compress letter spacing before cutting the line off.

http://imgur.com/cyTjS.png

See what happens when I resize this window? The text gets squished before it gives up and shows the "..."

Wow, very interesting. Thanks for the explanation!

Nice post, but I get different results: For the boys (girlfriends) : http://skitch.com/panman/nq5d5/google

For the girls (boyfriends) : http://skitch.com/panman/nq5d2/google

Seem to be bore in sync..

http://i49.tinypic.com/nogciv.png

I'm surprised no one's pointed out the obvious. It's difficult to pull any interpretations out of this based on gender. Remember, there are girls who have girlfriends and boys who have boyfriends too.

You can get a couple more if you drop the "to":

How can I get my gf

and

How can I get my bf

How can I get my parents works too.

I had it autocomplete [how can i get my par] and most of them were sensible suggestions, until it got to [how can i get my parakeet to eat my diarrhea]. WTF?

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