Re:The Google Squeeze
by uoaei on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @07:34PM
(#21519893)
It's "too" general purpose.
They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.
They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.