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Comment by i_cant_speel | Hacker News Reader

Especially with voice searches. People are searching entire sentences rather than specific keywords which are much more likely to be unique.

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Do people do this?

Or do you mean queries forwarded by home assistants trying to parse inputs?

can confirm. i search full sentences even from the keyboard

I search full sentences (questions) from the keyboard. I figure I'm not the only to have had the question before, so I ask. Also, I find that blog posts, etc. tend to match well for full sentences.

> Do people do this?

The calling card of the developer realising that real users never act like you expect :)

Real users will use your product in ways you never imagined.

I often do full sentences and then start deleting words from it if it doesn't work.

Heh, yes, they do. Which is a reminder that devs are not "typical" users.

As a developer, I search using keywords; for example, if I was looking for property for sale in Inverness, I might search for "property Inverness", whereas I've seen and heard "typical" users use something like "find me a 2 bedroom house with a garden for sale in the North of Inverness" - much more verbose, and containing stop words and phrases unlikely to help (I think!).

With voice I use sentences: it's far more reliable because of the Markov model (or whatever predictive model they are using).

I do the same as you, but was just thinking that if most users search using full sentences then Google will spend most effort optimizing for that, so maybe we're the ones getting the worse results?

No, the optimization they do for the low-quality query is more than balanced out by the higher clarity and relevance of a well-phrased query. There are often extraneous words that aren't simple stop words, and they're not 100% successful at removing these extraneous ones.

> As a developer, I search using keywords;

So did I.

Around the time I left Google behind I had started to search like my wife did, using full sentences. it sometimes worked better I think.

I almost always search keywords while my girlfriend uses sentences and we often get quite different results. If I'm having trouble finding a good result there's a pretty good chance she will find something quickly. Surprisingly this holds true even for programming questions on topics that I know well and she's never heard of before.

What does it matter whether it came from an assistant or not?

Natural language is likely the preferred search input method for kids under a certain age, who cannot yet type fluently. My kids formulate very long, complex queries verbally. The other day my son asked Alexa why the machine gun is such a deadly weapon. She replied with a snippet from Wikipedia that was surprisingly relevant.

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