alt Hacker NewsIts also why Google Search "went to shit years ago"
Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:
Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"
But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was
What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey
Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.
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I typed this into Google because I expected you would be correct, and the LLM would return examples of the meme, and I wanted to see it.
Instead, the AI answered that it is "actually a famous example from internet culture used to describe how people use search engines. The phrase stems from discussions on tech forums like Hacker News regarding the differences between "keyword searching" and "natural language searching"".
I used to use search commands with "quotes", triple quotes, and +exact word search, I noticed last weekish that those no longer work.
We know exactly why google went to shit years ago. It's not a perception/"people used to be more techie" issue.
You could just have a specialized model that rewrites prose questions to actual search keywords (i.e. what power users do in their heads), and even a 2nd one that does a fitting pass based on intention after querying.
Answering with AI slop is a choice.
Except sometimes I explicitly do not want to reveal what my search intent is / explain why I want to search for this. The Google 2006 method gave me some room to do this, but now it feels like I can't do that on my own and I need to talk to Gemini. Horrible experience.
Christ, thank you! I’ve been saying this for years and no one I’ve spoken to, even engineers, could acknowledge the level of “chunking” that’s been engrained in them over the years for turning inquiries into keyword/phrase shorthand, and that this is NOT something most people want to do, and is the killer app of Google AI. This time around, you CAN type in an input box what you would say to a human in everyday conversation, AND expect a reasonable response. That’s invaluable to a casual user.
If you are a fast typer, maybe the longer query might just come out naturally.
If you are properly lazy, you must expect or at least attempt to get results for the shorter query. Especially on a phone.
I'm not an engineer, but this is how I was taught to use digital search back in my elementary school's library in the second or third grade (it replaced the card catalogue) and it's how I've searched ever since. We had an entire class period on how to keep our search keywords to the minimum so we'd get good results.