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Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Name a search engine that's better than Google. Nobody type "I'd like to know what the best way is to braise pork with white wine", doesn't mean Google can't give you good search result if you typed like that, you will get just as good result if you type "pork recipe braise wine", but its fewer words and more efficient to type.

It's less of "google trained us to type like that" and more or "We opted to use the more efficient way of doing that same thing". If Google didn't give us good results if we typed "pork recipe braise wine", it would be a pretty shitty search engine in my book.

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Name a search engine that's better than Google

I never stated that Google isn't the best search engine out there. I stated that I hoped the natural language learning from Duplex would filter down to the Google search engine.

But while we're on the topic, find a search query in which Google will return a list of movie reviewers in the city of Chicago. It can't. It is so focused on second-guessing search queries that it will only return lists of reviews of the film Chicago.

I had this exact very frustrating experience once trying to find the name of a woman I met who publishes a popular movie review blog in Chicago. There's even a "guild" of sorts of movie reviewers in Chicago, but Google could only surface that as high as the 10th page of results.

I know I'm not the only person frustrated with Google's desire to second-guess my searches because I heard a comedian on the radio last week who did a bit that lasted five whole minutes on Google second-guessing searches.

Kind of tangential to this, but I was really amazed at the accuracy of Google's search results when a few years back I tried to find the name of a song I'd heard at a nightclub in Hong Kong. Neither did I know the artist, nor really any part of the lyrics (because it had been very loud and crowded), so I was pleasantly suprised when Google Search took my query "guys in jean overalls singing too ra loo ra loo" and actually returned "Come on Eileen".

I feel that we have such a high standard for google search result quality that we can get frustrated by such highly specific search result edge cases. Google search is not perfect, but its the best search engine out there by a long margin for almost 20 years.

There will be a subset of users who will bemoan user privacy but expect highly specific personally tailored quality search result. You can't have both and there will always be edge cases in such a difficult domain. The fact that so many industry heavyweights can't compete with Google in search result quality, says a lot about how good Google is. Does it has problems? Yes, no one is denying it.

we can get frustrated by such highly specific search result edge cases

Every case is an edge case.

"Edge case" has become the tech industry's excuse for everything.

Every case is not an edge case. You can't be serious if you call of the following queries as edge cases -

1. Chicago

2. Chicago movie

3. Chicago movie review

4. Movies in Chicago

5. Movie reviewers

6. Movie reviewers in Chicago

7. List of movie reviewers in Chicago.

If you still feel so, you may be talking about edge case in non-technical sense.

Disc: Googler but nowhere close to search or duplex.

1. Chicago

But with Google, there is no pure search for "Chicago."

There is only a search for "Chicago" by someone at a particular location with a particular device using a particular browser with a particular search history with a particular number of other parameters that Google's pieced together that we don't even know about.

So, I'll be more specific: Every Google search is an edge case. Google spends billions making sure no two searches return identical results.

"movie reviewers located in Chicago" returns the Chicago film critics association as the second result.

For you. Right now. But when I did the search about a year ago, the results were as described above.

I'd say your issue couldn't be reaperduced.

Well, looks like your problem is fixed then.

> It's less of "google trained us to type like that" and more or "We opted to use the more efficient way of doing that same thing".

I'm a bit baffled at this, given it reads as though the past 20 years of searching hasn't been learning to adapt to what one might call search engine speak for better results. The obvious main issue was for years you had to guess how someone else would phrase something if using longer phrases, since the longer the query the less likely you'll find a matching result. If you didn't get the desired results you then would either re-phrase it to yet another natural sentence or (increasingly since it shortcuts the process) pare back the query to simpler keywords to have a better chance of success finding those same core keywords in sites.

Eventually people got used to just entering keywords instead since it wasted time trying one's luck on more natural sentences for the reasons above. Obviously with better natural language tech (and with more user content generated and indexed) some queries became more successful but even today it can be a complete dice roll for many longer, naturally phrased queries whether anything useful is returned.

This might be true for a small subset or early or techie users, but from my experience watching some of my less tech-inclined friends and family using google search. I find it fascinating how much trouble they go through by typing a complete sentence with proper grammar and spelling. I honestly don't know which one is common, but I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of users type full sentences or long search queries.

In my experience the results are worse with full sentences, just as it was described.

Actually both are true. Google (or earlier search engines) did work on basis of keywords.

The ability to handle full sentences well came much later in one of google's major search updates - I think Hummingbird which came out in 2013.

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