In ordinary usage quotation marks are just that - marks to show that quotation is happening.
They do not get used to indicate that I am specifically talking about a particular person’s photography instead of a name, another name and photography without any necessary link between the three things.
And in any case, that is not the point. The point is that you argued that Google does not “encourage” any particular method of using search. I argued that it does.
Even if I narrow that down to just the interface rather than including their corporate marketing, providing a simple empty box for people to type is itself a design decision encouraging people to just type away.
An interface intended to promote careful consideration of search terms and modifiers would include those things in the interface – as others do.
Or one might include a prominent link to the instructions. Which Google also doesn’t do.
I have to disagree. People should learn how to use the tools they use (“It’s a poor workman who blames his tools…” - hey, there’s a quote). The instructions are easy to find - you can even Bing them (oops, you should never verb your nouns. Oops, now I’m in a recursive loop…)
I’ll say it again. Come on, people! (this is a sentence where the comma is doing a lot of work).
But I’d say it’s equally true that it’s a bad tool manufacturer who tells his customers ‘Our tool is so amazing, you can just pick it up and use it how ever feels right to you!’ which is what I would contend Google does.
I agree: Adam’s not “bad at using Google,” Google is bad at serving results. Adam probably does know how to construct elaborate search queries, but the point is that by now we should have a service that’s accessible to the common not-nerdily-inclined person. The technology is there, Google can practically read your mind, but they decided to use that power to serve the ad industry.
I tell you what, here’s your million-dollar idea: a printed periodical that reviews and ranks the best websites. Like you used to see in bookstores in the 90’s. That’s how backwards we’ve gone!
But I think the point is that google has gotten worse. Yeah there are things you can do to get better search results like using quotes or - to cut out results you don’t want, but the point is, not long ago google results pulled up mostly useful pages (with maybe one paid result/ad at the top) and now they seem to pull up a ton of junk/spam/ads that you have to sift through.
I cant go back in a time machine and test it, but I swear (as Adam savage does) that it didn’t use to be this bad and it has gotten worse. It seems that Google has either actively done something to encourage it for profit, or has negligently let themselves and their algorithms be manipulated by this sort of spam.
No! That’s bad UX. Good user interface design anticipates how people will use it and behaves as expected for the largest possible group of users.
Typing in a reasonable phrase that you wish to learn about and getting a pile of trash, ads, bot-generated clickbait, and having your personal data stolen without consent while doing so is the opposite of that.
Oh I just remembered that Brave (search.brave.com) is experimenting with Discussion search, which could maybe help Adam out here… so for example, I searched “best laser printer” and it shows me reddit results:
Google used to have a discussion search filter, and it sounds like they’re trying something similar here too:
The neverending war between the search engines and SEO leaves the scorched earth of adversarial networks in its wake, and over time that scorched earth builds up on our internet.
I do this and I use operators. My Google-Fu is amazing BUT what I have noticed is that the search results are getting worse and valid pages that I used to find fast just disappeared from search. Sometimes I have to search for it inside the Internet Archive.
Duck Duck Go returns a lot of weak Bing results. It’s getting tiresome and more time consuming to reach the right information.
