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Comment by awolf | Hacker News Reader

>People who search in "how can i ..." type of questions are probably not a representative sample of the whole population. My guess is that they are less tech-savvy users on average.

Hmm... I dunno. I search this way all the time. Mainly because I assume a lot of other people do as well and, more importantly, it works. Am I the only one?

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I'll normally word a query differently until I find answers (ie I'll try "how to skin a cat," and if that gives no good result I'll try "skinning a cat," and then "how do I skin a cat" etc until I find the answer)

if that fails, if the question is related to software and/or business I will do site-specific searches at HN and lifehacker (eg site:ycombinator.com skinning a cat).

Sometimes I'll do this in reverse.

I have found that in most business settings I'm the only one who will search for things with this effort. Most people around me give up after a query or two, and then think I'm a genius when I find the information we wanted.

From mobile device, excuse typos etc

Tech-savvy people know that Google eliminates stop-words and uses stemming anyhow, although their algorithms for doing that aren't public, so ...

    lose weight

... is a lot more efficient to write than ...

    how can I lose weight

And while not yielding the same results, I think the first yields better results (in this case).

Then you start adding words for refinement ...

    lose weight safe

See a pattern? ... It's a lot like adding tags, instead of formulating real phrases.

But... the results for "lose weight" and "how to lose weight" are not the same. Nor are the results for "earthquake" vs "what is an earthquake". In both cases if I'm after the latter then it is the more verbose query that yields the better results.

stop words/phrase removal can't be done in a too simplistic manner. words like <how to> signify a different kind of intent. Also if stop words are always removed, queries like <who's who in america> wouldn't work properly.

I am curious also, I was just guessing, I hope I didn't insult anyone. For topics where you can expect to find the exact same question on Q&A sites and forums this is a good approach. It seems though that people who are not familiar with how search engines work often type in questions, as if they are asking an oracle.

WOW... I believe this is highly inaccurate. Maybe in the old days was it naive to type a question into a search engine. (until ask jeeves came along) but with the rise of Q-A sites this is a very valid way to find a question that has been asked before. Certainly it depends on the question you are asking but I think it's quite a false generalization at this point.

I don't search this way normally, but if I'm struggling to find what I want I will resort to this sometimes (in the hopes that a suitably titled blog post will appear somewhere).

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