this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Why do people Google questions anyway? Just search "heat cast" or "heat Angelina Jolie". It's quicker to type and you get more accurate results.
see? it's easy
FBI open up
Why use many word when few work
As a funny challenge I like to come up with simplified, stupid-sounding, 3-word search queries for complex questions, and more often than not it's good enough to get me the information I'm looking for.
Because it gives better responses.
Google and all the other major search engines have built in functionality to perform natural language processing on the user's query and the text in its index to perform a search more precisely aligned with the user's desired results, or to recommend related searches.
If the functionality is there, why wouldn't we use it?
that is true but the results will be the same at best, not better
Longer queries give better opportunities for error correction, like searching for synonyms and misspellings, or applying the right context clues.
In this specific example, "is Angelina Jolie in Heat" gives better results than "Angelina Jolie heat," because the words that make it a complete sentence question are also the words that give confirmation that the searcher is talking about the movie.
Especially with negative results, like when you ask a question where the answer is no, sometimes the semantic links in the kndex can get the search engine to make suggestions of a specific mistaken assumption you've made.
It works. It will also find others who posted that question.
Until they worded it as "Does Angelina Jolie appear in heat?"
I just tested. "Angelina jolie heat" gives me tons of shit results, I have to scroll all the way down and then click on "show more results" in order to get the filmography.
"Is angelina jolie in heat" gives me this bluesky post as the first answer and the wikipedia and IMDb filmographies as 2nd and 3rd answer.
So, I dunno, seems like you're wrong.
Have people just completely forgot how search engines work? If you search for two things and get shit results, it means those two things don't appear together.
it's truly shocking how bad people are at seeking information. It literally took me 20 seconds to discover she's not in the movie heat.
I mean, when even people on Lemmy (who are supposed to be a bit more tech literate and stuff) insist that the solution is cutting a couple 2 letter words from your search query to make everything much shorter and efficient, are you even surprised?
I've been thinking for a while that people seem to be getting dumber and it might actually be true I don't think that it's a coincidence that fascism and other forms of conservatism seem to be on the rise pretty much everywhere in the world.
both queries give me poor results and searching "heat cast" reveals that she is not actually in the movie, so that's probably why you can't find anything useful
it's not the queries. it's Google. it doesn't care about your stupid results, it just needs to shove a couple more ads in your ass so please disable your blocker and lubricate
That's why you just add "movie" to the search.
Or do IMDb heat or IMDb jolie or something
Search engine algorithms are way better than in the 90s and early 2000s when it was naive keyword search completely unweighted by word order in the search string.
So the tricks we learned of doing the bare minimum for the most precise search behavior no longer apply the same way. Now a search for two words will add weight to results that have the two words as a phrase, and some weight for the two words close together in the same sentence, but still look for each individual word as a result, too.
More importantly, when a single word has multiple meanings, the search engines all use the rest of the search as an indicator of which meaning the searcher means. "Heat" is a really broad word with lots of meanings, and the rest of the search can help inform the algorithm of what the user intends.
"You can just type your search in the top bar! You don't have to go to www.google.com."
As an IT guy, I know what to expect when I get to hell.
ctrl+L
You won't get funny answers if you do it correctly.
Because that's the normal way in which humans communicate.
But for Google more specifically, that sort of keyword prompts is how you searched stuff in the '00s... Nowadays the search prompt actually understands natural language, and even has features like "people also ask" that are related to this.
All in all, do whatever works for you, it's just that asking questions isn't bad.
Google is not a human so why would you communicate with it as if it were a human? unlike chatgpt it's not designed to answer questions, it's designed to search for words on webpages
Because we're human, and that's a human-made tool. It's made to fit us and our needs, not the other way around. And in case you've missed the last decade, it actually does it rather well.
Except Google has been optimizing for natural language questions for the last decade or so. Try it sometime, it's really wild
typing keywords instead of full sentences is still quicker so nah
Tell me you're too young to have used "Ask Jeeves" without telling me
I'm a zillenial 🤓
We spend most of our time communicating with humans so we're generally better at that than communicating with algorithms and so it feels more comfortable.
Most people don't want to learn to communicate with a search engine in its own language. Learning is hard.
what's there to learn about using search terms
Do you think you were born knowing what search terms are?
They're literally just words? All you need is the ability to speak a language
Whattt
Why wouldn’t I include “the” “a” other articles etc. if I had language but no tech skills
You weren't born with the knowledge of written language either.
Surely you see how using a search engine is a separate skill from just writing words?
Point is, people don't want to learn. Natural language searches in the form of questions are just easier for people, because they already know how to ask questions.
Do you really need to learn to realise the words "is" and "in" aren't that important and that "Angelina Jolie heat" is good enough for a search query?
Any time we use words in a way that's different from a conversation it requires learning. That ranges from argumentation to story telling to, in this case, search queries. If it's different from talking to another human, it's a different skill.
Yes? People aren't born knowing how to use search engines. You learn this stuff.
I don't think we would've had so many lessons on this in school if it didn't need to be taught.
you learned to Google at school? whoa
Yuuuup thanks mom and dad and teachers
Wonder if that whole media literacy etc. thing is still a thing