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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

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hombre_fatal·

Has the exact same poor search results as Bing.

https://search12.lycos.com/web/?q=elm+list

https://www.bing.com/search?q=elm+list

Funny I only ever hear someone call Bing good when it's named something else (DDG, Lycos).

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Exactly, it's just Bing without the image or video snippets in the middle. Other than that... it knows I am in Paris, however shows the current temperature in Fahrenheit. So no, bye-bye Lycos.

What are you searching for though? Some people care about the Elm language and some people are looking for information about the tree or location.

The "list" in the query string makes the intent clear.

No, not really. Could be a list of elm tree species, or something even more specific (most famous elm trees, species vulnerable to some disease, etc) that's immediately obvious if you're plugged in to the arborist community instead of the hacker community.

No, "array" would be unambiguous. Asking for a list of different elm species a valid interpretation.

A valid but very unlikely interpretation, which is the point. Every query is ambiguous, but if certain interpretations are much more likely than others, the search engine should respond accordingly.

Someone interested in a list of elm species is much more likely to search for "elm species."

It may be that this is true of people who use google but less true of people who use Bing.

It is very unlikely to be the case. Much more likely is that Bing either doesn't have enough search data to properly answer that query or does not have a ranking model that can answer that query correctly.

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