I also think that if someone is looking for a horse named “Arod”, and knows nothing about baseball and Alex Rodriguez…than even knowing how to manipulate the search results by using these operators – is useless.

There needs to be a simpler way to eliminate non relevant results.

Also this example shows how much Google loves wiki. The few times I’ve searched for Arod (I’m a Yankee Fan), I’ve been looking for his MLB page, not his wiki page, but his wiki page is the first hit in Google. You would figure that Arod’s page would be first, but it’s not…

No, it’s not counterintuitive at all. It is what you have been saying and doing for 10 years now. I very much understand what you mean, when you say it.

But to me, this philosophy is your biggest problem. It’s a problem for two reasons: (1) It’s the wrong goal for a search engine. As search engine should be to help meet people’s information needs. If you go back to what “relevance” is, and how it is defined, it is defined in terms of someone’s information need. It is not (necessarily) defined as “1 of the top 10 links”. And if you place a higher priority on getting people off of your site than you do on meeting their information need, that’s not a good thing. Your goal instead should be to get them off of your site, if and only if, when and only when, they have finally had their information need met. But that’s not what you do, and it is very frustrating to some of us.

This ties in to the second reason why your philosophy is a problem: It is not user-driven. It is a philosophy that you have, which leads to a strategy of imposing certain constraints on the user of your system. You pre-pattern the user to act in certain ways, because of your philosophy. If instead you placed the user at the center of the equation, you would not (necessarily) have this same philosophy. Because some users have different information needs than others, which information needs are better satisfied with richer, more information-filled interfaces.

Thoughts? Do you get where I’m coming from?

For some reason, I like to play with Google’s search and I search about searching with Google. While searching for this, I’ve never come across a page listing all of the helpful commands for Google, BY Google. Either I’m not looking hard enough, or it doesn’t exist.

I’d like to see a page made by Google that has tips and a complete command list. If it exists already, I’d be grateful for a link.

That leads me to wonder if the algorithms are moving toward favoring the most popular subject associated with a keyword (I’m pretty sure A-Rod is more popular than a fictitious horse). If that’s the case, what are you going to do for people who share name spaces?

While M$ and not as good as Google at search, their Browser is head and shoulders above that of Firefox in many areas.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/latest-news/kerry-chikarovski-caught-in-ticket-scam/2008/08/04/1217701899337.html

Also, how one be signed into their Google acount WITHOUT having SERPs skewed to personal search? Would be a nice *option*.