[squeaky-clean]

The reason I personally prefer sum() to Σ is I can google "what is a sum". If I Google "what is Σ" I get answers about the greek letter Sigma. If I Google "what is Σ math" it incorrectly says "Standard Deviation". Also if I don't know what Sigma is, it's very hard to ask someone else what the weird uppercase E means.

[njarboe]

Putting in "what does the symbol sigma mean" into google (incognito mode) gives the google blurb of:

"In addition to being the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet, sigma also means 'sum' and 'deviation' in the mathematics world. Learn what each symbol looks like and how each formula works."

It first hit is titled,"Sigma Notation - Math is Fun", with the text 'Sigma Notation. Σ This symbol (called Sigma) means "sum up"'

I think learning the names of the Greek letters is not too high a bar to get started on learning physics and math. Fun too. You really need to know the names of things to start to understand them and ask people about them.

I think the reason people like compact formulas is that it is much easier to understand and check a formula if one can have the whole thing in eyes view.

[squeaky-clean]

That's part of my point though. You had to know Σ means sigma to search that in the first place. If you search "what does Σ mean" or "what does symbol Σ mean" you get answers for lowercase sigma saying standard deviation.

At the very least it means it takes 2 searches, one to find the name of a symbol, and a second to search using that, sometimes I can't do that if the notation is an image of TeX output. Then it becomes "what does box symbol with line through it mean" or something.

Thankfully StackExchange now renders math notation in a way that can be copy pasted, but still, here's an example I was reading recently that started as an ascii email chain and moved to stackexchange, I feel like it was more easily readable before.

It's still tough to Google that Π(u) is the same as the rect() function

https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/42495/implication-of...

> I think learning the names of the Greek letters is not too high a bar to get started on learning physics and math.

But the original point was that for someone who doesn't know math, writing it in a more english-like notation wouldn't be helpful. But because of search engines it is.

[nnfy]

It pains me to see how normal it has become to search using unrelated words, I.e. "what" and "is".

I still can't get over the fact that google removed advanced search syntax.

[TeMPOraL]

Kind of makes sense if you're trying to make your search query match a stackoverflow question...

Though AFAIK Google ignores those common words anyway.

[squeaky-clean]

You do get different (and better) results if you search "What is Σ" rather than "why is Σ" or just "Σ". Like the other commenter said, it's better when you'd rather find a forum or SO post matching that title, rather than getting back Google's own answer.

[nnfy]

I dont think you and the other response understand.

Google used to conduct a relatively straightforward string matching search. That means if you used words like "what" you could end up with unrelated matches, or lower quality matches, because they would match with the word "what".

Now, bear with me, these days google seems to use some kind if machine learning to suggest results to you based on what others have searched and chosen.

What does this mean, practically? At least two things: 1.Laymen have to think less critically, less technically when searching. Considering google is, for the average person, basically the window to knowledge, I think this is ultimately a disservice to society.

2. Search quality for technical information seems to be declining, now that laymen and non-laymen alike are searching using the same " extra" words and, I may just be projecting a poor understanding of neural nets here, but our technical results end up getting sort of clustered with everything else.

Am I the only one who has this problem with the decline of google search's technical relevance? Maybe I'm doing something wrong...I still think what google has done to make the internet more accessible may be a net harm to society.

[squeaky-clean]

Nah, I understand. I had to attend a 1 day class in my university on how to properly use Google and Google Scholar. I also miss some of those operators and tricks.

But nowadays, it's not as simple as just machine learning to understand your query, but the way the information is stored is less and less like a text storage. If I search for something involving "car' it's very likely I'm okay with results containing "sedan", "vehicle", or various brand/model names of cars. I'm also probably fine with "vehcile" or "vehiclle" or "carr" but not "cat". And Google is well aware of this and considers this when building their model.

Furthermore, the way you ask SHOULD change answers, especially because it attempts to automatically answer you at the top of the page. A search for Sigma and What generally means I want to know what it means, how to use it. But a search for "why" should bring up the historical reasoning Sigma was chosen over another letter, or another culture's alphabet entirely. That's too much information to fit into any result for simply "Sigma", and the query is too vague to help pare it down.

I do agree with you though that it is declining for technical information. But I think overall it has gotten much better at becoming a general "window to knowledge" and I think it's worth the tradeoffs.

[nnfy]

Valid points.

[klipt]

"Standard Deviation" is not incorrect, statistics is a branch of math.

[pps43]

Standard deviation is lowercase sigma, sum is uppercase sigma. They are not the same.

[klipt]

Uppercase sigma is used for multivariate distributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_normal_distributi...

[pps43]

But this is not common. If you don't know what uppercase sigma refers to, sum is a much better guess than standard deviation of multivatiate normal distribution.

In this case google is probably simply case insensitive.