sirdavidof

It’s very subjective, but I feel this too. It’s like in adding ML, search has sacrificed precision.

For example, adding ‘-‘ no longer seems to work for excluding terms. Yesterday I searched for “digital agency” and then “digital agency -marketing”. The latter had 3x more results than the former.

Google can be great when I don’t quite know the right term for what I’m looking for, but often when I need something very specific I get nowhere.

It seems like a certain type of mind would be great at this. I wonder what else being good at cryptic crosswords correlates with.

How unique is this to Britain? Do other countries have similar hedge density?

It's often underappreciated how _hard_ it can be to tell why you want something.

I've spent weeks thinking as rationally as I could about a decision, and with years of hindsight realised it was based mainly on what others wanted.

If anyone feels they've solved this, I'd love to hear how.

Yes, but French is arguably fading much more quickly. It's easy to overlook where the words lingua franca originally came from.

It's hard to be objective about these things as someone who only speaks one language natively (like me), but I suspect that English does have more advantages as an international language than simply being the tongue of the world's biggest economic power.

There are many things about English that are difficult, if not infuriating for those learning it (spellings, irregular declinations, phrasal verbs, etc), but it is also a language that is quite easy to gain a basic grasp of. It has much more simplified grammar than most other European languages, for example, and even if spoken badly it is quite often intelligible.

I had a friend who taught English in Greece, and she used to say that learning English was like trying to hold sand in your hand: cup it lightly and it's easy; try to hold it tightly and it's apt to slip through your fingers.

I'm sure many East Asians would disagree with me on how easy English is though, so maybe I'm being parochial.