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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldIn heat
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    21 hours ago

    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?


  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldIn heat
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    21 hours ago

    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.