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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

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!).

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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.

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.

> 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.

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

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