alt Hacker NewsI'm going to agree and disagree.
I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.
I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.
I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.
New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.
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The big selling point of Google used to be that their fuzzy search was significantly better than just about anyone else, and you could do advanced query filters. Now if you do that, because showing the user zero results is unacceptable, you’ll get all sorts of crap that “doesn’t contain” your query - the results say so!
But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.
> What they failed to do was give context to Google
The context is: "I'm using the premier web-search engine of the internet to search for things on the internet the same way that zillions of people have searched for things on the internet for 20 years."
It's not missing, Google simply chose to build something new that will ignore it because they're trying to alter the relationship.