Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like my search engine to be not too intelligent. Sometimes, humans suppose to know what they are meaning.

So

- optional verbatim and prioritized terms (like Google once did it)

- optional logical operators (and, or)

- a separate input box for context (either, specific terms like "product", "shopping", "legal", or some assorted terms to indicate a field of meaning and/or associated concepts, time span, etc)

It's the latter, where the search engine may shine and users may evoke its sophisticated intelligence, but, please, don't reinterpret the principal search terms to concepts that maybe just related. I do understand that this may not be for everyone, nor may it be the sole interface, but there should be a niche for this.

Example, wanting to find something about the early press coverage of System/360:

- Search term: (IBM || "big blue") && System/360

- Context: news 1965,1966 computer

Can you describe how context would work differently than additional search terms?

I just think that a separation of intends may be suitable. One is the actual search term (optionally verbatim and using logical conjunctions), the other provides loose contextual information and/or categories specifying the source set. These are by no means the same.

(Compare the example given above. I don’t think that you can do a search like this with Google today. This should also help with issues like newer content masking established, older one.)

Edit: As it is, search engines return a quite diffuse field of information, which may not what you want, when you're looking for specific information. Some of this is related to the confusion of search terms and categorial and/or contextual information, while its also due to the eagerness to return any information at all (and as current as possible). Sometimes, this may be even worse than returning nothing. Also, this may lead to an eventual erosion of information in the long term.

For centuries, human knowledge (at least, in Western cultures) has been organized in terms of content and categories. In a classic library, a research like the one mentioned above would have been easy. As it is, this kind of structured concept doesn't work with search engines anymore, or, at least, not too well.

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