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Does anybody else feel somewhat uncomfortable to live in a world where people who a) know how to spell and b) actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"?

I've always laughed at the idea of the internet and search engines making people dumber, but this seems like hard evidence. Most Google users are too stupid to have ever been able to use a library...



> actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"?

Arguably synonyms and word stemming still are what they are looking for. You could easily argue that one either way.


Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just that, and only for certain words.


Well, I feel uncomfortable using a product that is designed to fill such people's needs at the expense of mine.

Just like Yahoo's homepage full of entertainment news, Google's aggressive query correction sends me the message "You are not our target audience, because there isn't enough money in catering to you".

And when Google is sending that message to geeks, I can't help feeling there's some brand destruction going on.




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