> In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use “keyword-ese,” typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question.
Funny thing, I've seen people mention right here on HN that for DuckDuckGo you need to adjust the style of your queries. This notion puzzles me, probably because I kept the habit of ‘keywordese’ from the olden days. Most of the time, results are about the same for me in Google as they are in DDG and even in Yandex—with the exception that Google is better at grouping related or similar results, and also if there's one or two sources having the search phrase almost-verbatim then they're at the top in Google. Apparently, I already need to learn talking to the site like it's self-aware, to regret ditching it.
Now, if some wondertech helps me to home in on the answer to my exact software or programming troubles instead of hundreds of vaguely related SO posts—I could really dig that.
Funny that you mention Google's grouping and related SO posts ... I still regularly run into that annoyance that SO hasn't figured out how to do canonical URLs and Google then proceeds to put the identical content from SO on two consecutive spots in the results page. SO does not want to fix it (it has been an issue for years and has been pointed out on meta many times), but I'm confused by Google's fail to consider them duplicates when their content is nearly identical (the difference would be just "hot network questions" in the sidebar etc which depend on the time of the page request).
I wish they would let us use the "keywordese" engine as it was 10 years ago if we want to instead of funneling us along with everybody else into the newer intent search engine.
This is the kind of search you see everywhere. 95% of queries I see for customers in most fields are only 1 or 2 words long (and they are typically a noun phrase).
Funny thing, I've seen people mention right here on HN that for DuckDuckGo you need to adjust the style of your queries. This notion puzzles me, probably because I kept the habit of ‘keywordese’ from the olden days. Most of the time, results are about the same for me in Google as they are in DDG and even in Yandex—with the exception that Google is better at grouping related or similar results, and also if there's one or two sources having the search phrase almost-verbatim then they're at the top in Google. Apparently, I already need to learn talking to the site like it's self-aware, to regret ditching it.
Now, if some wondertech helps me to home in on the answer to my exact software or programming troubles instead of hundreds of vaguely related SO posts—I could really dig that.