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ssl-3today at 5:40 AM1 replyview on HN

Indeed.

Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.

It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.

Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.

The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.

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(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.

But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.

In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")


Replies

eMPee584today at 7:40 AM

There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..

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