Hacker News Reader

Could you all stop misusing the word "censoring" like that? It's almost worse than the way it's usually misused.

Also, at least for me, Google does exactly what you describe at the right approach.

While I agree this isn't technically "censorship" from one perspective, I do think it's important to consider this: by forcibly omitting search terms against your wishes, it is actively and deliberately preventing you from searching from what you wanted to search for. This is both frustrating for the user, and has a detrimental effect upon the quality of the search results.

When most people search, they're generally looking for information that matches a topic, not necessarily every single word in a query. You can imagine the number of misses that would happen if we didn't compensate for misspellings, for example. Or for synonyms or plural forms. But in no way are people prevented from searching for exactly the words indicated, if they feel that's best. Use Tools > All Results > Verbatim from the search toolbar. Or put quotes around the word or words you want exactly sought.

I'm not misusing it. Dropping dimensions from a document term vector for similarity computation is called censoring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com