The Google example points at one mayor constraint of text-based UIs: either you severely restrict the language that people can use to query the system, or you will be dealing with a really hard, Google-size problem.

"The Google example points at one mayor constraint of text-based UIs: either you severely restrict the language that people can use to query the system, or you will be dealing with a really hard, Google-size problem."

I disagree, and I think we can see the counter-example very clearly with altavista.

You could go to altavista and type in "dumb" search queries, just like google.

But simultaneously, with no change at all in the UI and no constraints imposed on the "dumb" users, you could also type in very sophisticated boolean searches like:

linux grep ("regular expression" and "regex")

and get very precise and sophisticated search results.

I miss this every single day

They beat Lycos etc by having a better product built around a very different paradigm : better performance from the text search, negating need for the heavy graphical hinting.

That's what I was trying to get at :)

For the time I'd also argue that their "on-boarding" was excellent: a textbox and two buttons, you can't get simpler :)

The 2015 equivalent would be adding animated instructions in a pencil typeface on the search box and buttons. The demographics and expectations are different now.