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by gue5t 3774 days ago
This is still how web searching works. I have no idea why you would think otherwise--at its core Google is still fundamentally an indexing service, and you use indices by figuring out which words may be in the documents you want to read and then finding the documents containing those. Without doing this, it becomes impossible to distinguish documents which are what you want from documents which describe what you want (and which often refer to something behind a paywall or in a private or non-digitized collection).
3 comments
OJFord 3774 days ago 

    > This is still how web searching works. I have no idea
    > why you would think otherwise
I imagine it would be days worth of experiencing success with such 'question searches'.
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whybroke 3774 days ago
I dunno...

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+can+i+pirate+movies

Seems to have no results about pirate movies.

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gue5t 3774 days ago
The only result, of the 10 on that page (right now, for me), that answers the question is https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-bittorrent-is-the-best-way-to-...

But if you search "using * to pirate movies" (google will match the star, even in quotes, with a word or phrase in result context), every result will include the name of a method for pirating movies, which you can investigate further. I see "popcorn time", "bit torrent", "pirate bay" and "camcorder" on the first page. These are all direct answers that a human would consider reasonable (though of varying efficacy) to the question.

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cwyers 3774 days ago
I mean, but if you only need one link that answers the question, 1/10 is not any less useful than 10/10.
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dtparr 3774 days ago
Now I can't help but wonder how different the world would be if TPB was only about pirate-movie torrents.
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sdrothrock 3774 days ago
> I have no idea why you would think otherwise

It might be due to better NLP, but it may also be due to the rise of blogging-style personal content where authors say things using that phrase. For example, "I was wondering how to start up my own Ubuntu server on AWS and thought I'd write a tutorial while I was at it." contains "how to start up . . . Ubuntu server on AWS"

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