Comment on In heat
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Why use many word when few work
“How to to describe a character in my story hiding a body after they committed a murder?”
⬇️
“killed someone, how to hide body?”
see? it’s easy
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.
You won’t get funny answers if you do it correctly.
It works. It will also find others who posted that question.
Until they worded it as “Does Angelina Jolie appear in heat?”
Why do people Google questions anyway?
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.
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
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.
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
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
queermunist@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
I spend most of my time communicating with humans so I’m generally better at that then communicating with algorithms.
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
what’s there to learn about using search terms
i_am_hiding@aussie.zone 18 hours ago
Tell me you’re too young to have used “Ask Jeeves” without telling me
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
I’m a zillenial 🤓
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 16 hours ago
Except Google has been optimizing for natural language questions for the last decade or so. Try it sometime, it’s really wild
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
typing keywords instead of full sentences is still quicker so nah
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.