I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a huge help.
Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers.
It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.
I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried +"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation.
There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actually likes the new google search.
Btw, what's the answer? Only link I found was [1] someone says it's REH-sig, not REE-sig (not too sure what's the difference). But I'm more interested on how to pronounce the second part, is it more like "side"("sign" minus 'n'), "seed", "sad", or something else?
Actually, I don't think that's accurate. It's not auto-correcting "resig" to "resignation" as if you misspelled it. It just naturally happens that "pronounce" and "resig" almost always appear together when "resig" is a part of "resignation". Evidence for this is that your post is now hit number seven.
I'd suggest that if there's 100 users entering the query [how to pronounce resig], there are a lot more of them that have dropped the "n" from resign than are looking for the pronunciation of resig. And even more queries overall where "resig" was supposed to be "resign". I admit it's unfortunate that sites have to guess based on the behavior of the group (rather than knowing, for example, that you usually don't misspell things) but I'm not sure any of us individually has enough query history to make those kinds of guesses.
[how to pronounce "resig"] works for me now. (Or at least doesn't mess with the query, though the results aren't great.) Do you remember what results you were seeing before?
yea, that seems to work now. Wasn't getting any "resig"'s at all before unless I added -resign -resignation. Now, ["pronounce" "resig"] seems to do the trick, as w/o quotes or just '+'s still gives resign and resignation results.
Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers.
It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.