LWN.net Logo

Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)

Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)

Posted Dec 29, 2010 4:07 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
In reply to: Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica) by bk
Parent article: Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)

No, your search did a "did you mean?" attempt at spelling correction, and found nothing. If you insist on Google searching for what you actually typed, you find plenty.


(Log in to post comments)

Ext4 filesystem hits Android, no need to fear data loss (ars technica)

Posted Dec 29, 2010 18:17 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

That's really irritating. I'm getting more and more annoyed with Google silently introducing bad behavior like this which, like site previews, I don't see a way to globally disable. Do I have to start prefixing every search term with +?

Google

Posted Jan 1, 2011 13:30 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Google (and pretty much everyone) ignores + or treats it as a hint at most

This is topical with the thread above about filesystem behaviour. Once people are using something, it's too late to decide how they should use it. Google's reality is that millions of people every second are asking Google for things like "ma DONah" and expecting to find pages about the pop singer Madonna, and for "870 + 43" expecting 913 - while its probably as much as seconds at a time between requests by (let's call them) nerds for whom Fu8E7 +frobnicate site:verytechnical.example is very precisely the exact search they wanted to perform.

So Google optimise for the former, not the latter, trusting that (a) nerds will find the way to do whatever they need to do even if you don't make it obvious, so there's no need (b) the nerds don't read adverts and thus don't generate any significant revenue.

As with XKCD's imaginary secret tech support password, it would be nice if Google provided a raw search facility for people who can spell, know what they're looking for and understand what "not found" means, but it doesn't necessarily make commercial sense. If you ask users "Are you an expert?" they say "Yes" even if they know nothing. And then they complain that they don't understand what happened next. If you provide a "secret" expert mode, "helpful" journalists tell ordinary users about it, and you're back to the same situation. I bet that fully half the quoted search queries on Google are users who don't know what quotes do, but believe that it somehow makes the search give more results, or better results.

Google

Posted Jan 6, 2011 9:04 UTC (Thu) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link]

Double quoting terms that should not be "corrected" works with the Google, even though it still offers you a correction, the initial set of results aren't corrected.

Prefixing with plus turns off correction with the Bing, which quite politely doesn't offer some obnoxious correction even after explicitly being told not to.

As an aside, Bing's fancy augmented search results page is much less annoying than Google's, even though it still has behaviour that triggers on mouse-over.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds