Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The next person over cares about sports and boobies. By which I mean spectator sports and, uhm, spectator boobies.

Is the last thing I'd want really results different from my neighbour?



For the same query?


Yes. I like that Google seems to surface programming results in the language I use. In the case of “boobies”, if I’m a bird expert it might give me info on blue footed boobies first.


Or if you're a programmer and are looking for that paper written by Professor Firstname Lastname, you might prefer results about the CS professor, not about the eponymous person who undresses for a living. Or plays baseball for a living.

I like arthouse films. ∀ arthouse ∃ approximately eponymous porn film. I can't say I dislike porn, but if the search engines were to treat me like my neighbour I'd never get any arthouse results. Too niche.


Query results are more diverse than you might expect. I once worked in a startup whose name we thought was unique, but in actual fact there were nine other similarly-named companies in the same city, not to mention names of non-local companies, organisations, products, objects…


Depends on the query. Fact based queries should have the same answer.

If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.


> If I'm searching for Python, I'd expect to see more about the programming language than the animal.

Which is different from what most people would expect. You see the problem.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: