Hacker News Reader

You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at doing various forms of searches.

View on HN

No doubt. Enjoying & (feeling like compared to others I was) excelling at finding information was what made me get interested in information science in the first place, but I often felt advances in ML and NLP would allow for anyone to find exactly what they wanted (which would be great) even considering the increasing amount of information to have to search through. Google’s ‘I’m going to ignore half the words in your search query’ seem to be moving away from that for whatever reason.

I have long believed that the art of precision search should be taught at the primary level. It is a necessary skill.

That idea is present in the Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Basically search engines and the use of discussion forums to find information becomes a subject in schools etc. Though this is not the main point of the novel at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

Reply on news.ycombinator.com