[KingPrad]

This type of "low tech" idea seems like the kind of thing Google, Yelp, and all the other big companies should be doing a better job with.

I have celiac and presumably Google has figured that out by now (or could, if they spent some time determining allergies for accounts). Yet in Google Maps I have to type "restaurant gluten free" when looking for food options. Then I have to poke around to see which might be legitimately gluten free. I've been typing this in for a decade, and never has Maps learned this basic time-saving assumption it should make.

Same with Yelp. It hasn't figured out that I always filter by gluten free and search reviews for that. It never just makes gluten free restaurants prominent, nor follows up with me the next day on whether it made me ill or things like that.

As you say, it's baffling the simple filtering that could be done based on known user information. Note that my story is about gluten free, but would apply to any number of food allergies or dietary preferences, yet the "market leaders" seem unable to innovate on this specificity.

[perl4ever]

This sort of comment just makes me despair, because you seem to be complaining about Google not taking enough control of determining what you want, and I see that as a tremendous problem (the problem) what with their attempts already.

Here's an example of what I hate about Google. I searched for recipes "without eggs". It gave me hundreds and hundreds of hits for "without eggs or butter". Now that may be what most people want, sure, but it's eradicated the possibility of other permutations. When you guess what people want to search for, you remove the ability to search for nearly every other possibility imaginable.

It makes me feel like Skynet has already won.

[guitarbill]

i think this comes back to why diversity in tech is a good thing. by which i mean diversity of background/life experience, but of course that's hard to measure...

that, or listening to customers. yes, the signal to noise ratio is high, but excellent sales people are great at that. i assume this isn't done because ads are the product, not the website itself