unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive"

so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query"

it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does.

I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.

There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.

I think it comes from an attitude about a different era of the internet as well. When I was young, I would expect most of the information about say a particularly weird house comes from the website of the owner of the house, or maybe a blogger who is into local architecture, if its on the internet at all. In that context it makes sense to try to query with what you think the owner would self-describe as (so like find out what the proper name of the style is, then query with that). If you come from an era where most of the stuff on the internet is people talking about or sharing the minority of original content, it makes more sense to query using terms that the casual viewer of the house would use.