The vast majority of people don't search for [hydroxychloroquine]. They search for [Is hydroxychloroquine effective in treating COVID-19?] or [What is the first drug that was approved to treat COVID-19?] or [What methods do we currently have to treat COVID-19?]. You can see these on the search results page as the "Common questions related to..." widget. How else do you think Google gets that data?
The folks who use keyword-based searches are largely those who got on the Internet before ~2007. Tech-savvy, relatively well-off, usually Millenial or Gen-X, plugged into trends. This happens to be the demographic dominant at Hacker News. But there's a much larger demographic who just types in whatever they're thinking of, in natural language, and expects to get answers.
Come to think of it, this is also the demographic that doesn't use tabbed browsing, and uses whichever browser ships with their OEM, and often doesn't realize that there's a separate program called a "browser" running when they click on the "Internet", and issues a Google Search for [google] (#3 query in 2010) when they want to get to Google even though they're on Google already but don't realize it, and doesn't know what a URL is. When a big-tech company makes a brain-dead usability decision you don't like, first consider how that usability choice might appear to your grandmother and it might not seem so brain-dead.
The folks who use keyword-based searches are largely those who got on the Internet before ~2007. Tech-savvy, relatively well-off, usually Millenial or Gen-X, plugged into trends. This happens to be the demographic dominant at Hacker News. But there's a much larger demographic who just types in whatever they're thinking of, in natural language, and expects to get answers.
Come to think of it, this is also the demographic that doesn't use tabbed browsing, and uses whichever browser ships with their OEM, and often doesn't realize that there's a separate program called a "browser" running when they click on the "Internet", and issues a Google Search for [google] (#3 query in 2010) when they want to get to Google even though they're on Google already but don't realize it, and doesn't know what a URL is. When a big-tech company makes a brain-dead usability decision you don't like, first consider how that usability choice might appear to your grandmother and it might not seem so brain-dead.