Google's advantage is simply billions of dollars and 20 years of R&D into NLP tech.
Not directly, but it does mean that, say, the second 50% of people that ask the same question will get a better answer than the first 50%.
Google has been able to build fairly accurate instant results based on which sites users were clicking on before. I'd say that a majority of simple general knowledge queries are solved by quoting the first 3 sentences of the wikipedia page that match the search query.
But let's say that there is no easy match to show a quick result for. But after 1000 queries, 98% of users clicked on one particular site on the first page and never went back to the search results. Google then A/B trials how many clicks result from showing that website at the top of the results page in an instant result window. If clicks drastically drop, that's a sign most users are satisfied with that result. They were only able to do that, because of the 1000s of times people typed that query and interacted with the site.
So I'd say that yes, having common questions asked over and over again does help you find the answer that users are looking for.
The funny / scary part here, is that this may not be the correct answer. But it's the answer that satisfies the most users, and is therefore the one that will keep the most people coming back to the Google search engine.
I doubt that users have a strict expectation of finding the correct (interpretation of "corresponding") answer. Even if the most clicked answer[s] are still not correct, they may still be the ones who suck less, which can still be acceptable/desirable.
Keep in mind that in this perspective, the concept is similar to Google Translate - Google built a translator that, at least originally, doesn't understand language, instead, it applies (applied) a static model on a large amount of documents. While they certainly poured a large amount of money on it, it's success can't be centered purely on the economical factor.
There are at least three kinds of queries that a search engine has to handle. Requests for websites e.g. "Facebook". Traditional keyword searches across the web e.g. "Twitter ban political ads", and questions "Who was the guy who voiced bender?".
Plus, you're underestimating the percentage of queries that google has never seen before. Google processes trillions of searches every year, and still, 15% of those queries have never been seen by Google before. [0]
[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...
No. I am highlighting that 75% are queries that they have seen before. Note also that the 15% is a figure that is declining, based on what it was in 2007.
When you see google giving you a one/two word answer as a card, that’s very likely coming from it’s knowledge graph.
What we need is more of this open knowledge graphs. Google and Wolfram Alpha are both closed sources but have deep understanding in niche domains.
For example, say the film credits for Spiderman is a "primary source", and a cast list for Spiderman derived from the credits at IMDb is a "secondary source". Google extracts the information from IMDb and substitutes itself as the secondary source.
Does this raise an issue in that ideally users should sometimes be retrieving information from (i.e., accessing) primary and secondary sources directly, whereas a third party always acting as a universal secondary source, e.g., a third party funded by advertising, might introduce (more) bias into the information retrieval process, e.g., in competition for "eyeballs".
From the OP references: https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches...
It's also another matter that so much of the internet is now filled with copy-pasted crap and artificially inflated content that it's actually hard to find what you are looking for on the so-called primary source webpages. If I want to find George Clooney's age, I don't want to sift through a 2000 page ad-ridden Page3-esque gossip blog about him.
At the same time, when I want detailed info about something, I will go in and try to read through the primary material.
In any event, neither a blog nor Wikipedia would likely be a "primary source". Maybe something like a driver license would be a primary source.
It could be that you have a "philosphical objection" to "copy-pasted crap and artifically inflated content". I wonder if Google could have a role in encouraging the continued existence of this stuff. The effective opacity it creates seemingly justifies having an entity like Google.
Even when I entered the actor's name plus the term "age" and was redirected to the Wikipedia search results, I could still see the actor's page as the third result and his date of birth in the summary text.
As for why anyone would want to search some things using Wikipedia versus Google, I can think of a few reasons. I cannot speak for other users however.
I have a script I wrote to search Wikipedia from the command line. For those who care, one can strip out "X-Client-IP" from the returned page html before opening the page in a browser.
The way they "cheated" was to look at the tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of previous queries that matched yours in substance.
If the competing websites for "web search" had the same volume of submitted queries that are substantially similar to yours, then they too would be able to give you "exactly" what you are looking for "9 times out of 10".
If all people submitting queries on the web are somehow convinced to visit only one website and submit a majority, (hypothetically let's say 93%) of their queries there, then it should be no surprise when that website "magically" starts becoming more "predictive" than other websites in returning "exactly" what searchers are looking for and becomes "by far the best at search".[1]
The question raised by the blog post is whether enabling such "magic" is worth the trade-off of also creating a "panopticon" in that single website. Giving this level of visitation and query traffic to a single website makes any competing website (working off less than 7% of people's queries) seem irrelevant, maybe even pathetic.
Without the enormous traffic, I would surmise the glory of the "empire" (to use the author's chosen term), and its appeal to "followers" (e.g., those who marvel at its "magic"), might dissipate rather quickly.
1. Especially the part of "search" that involves dealing with repeated, similar queries for popular information.