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Comment by pubutil | Hacker News Reader

But are relevance and popularity not related? If more people are using Google to learn about cloud computing than the clouds in the sky, I’d hazard that that would make cloud computing the more relevant result, in terms of what Google sees anyway.

It’s tricky, though, because I’d say that the clouds in the sky are more relevant to humanity as a whole. Not everyone cares about or needs to think about cloud computing.

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Both are relevant meanings and should be included in top results. Perhaps Google should have a disambiguation feature like Wikipedia does (and DuckDuckGo does according to another commenter).

They used to - I remember pushing this feature hard when working on the search visual redesign in 2010, and getting the response that it was just a really hard engineering problem. The back-end teams delivered sometime in late 2011, and IIRC it was live in the left-nav (remember when Google had a left-nav?) for a few months to a year.

It was unlaunched eventually because nobody ever clicked on it. It turns out that disambiguation is a relatively rare feature for people to want when most of the query stream is navigational queries, and it's contrary to Google's goal of getting you to your answer as quick as possible (2 clicks if it were a UI feature vs. one click if the result were just in the results). AFAIK the backend is still live, but it triggers off keywords in the query rather than any UI element. If you search for [cloud weather] 100% of the results are about the meteorological phenomena, if you search for [thrush bird] 100% of the results are about the songbird, if you search for [jaguar car] 100% of the results are about the car, and if you search for [python snake] 100% of the results are about the reptile.

Interesting, thanks! Yeah, disambiguating with a more specific search query is, of course, a fine solution. I guess I've just became accustomed to Google basically reading my mind compared to the bad old days of search engines when figuring out the proper incantation to get the results you want was akin to a logic puzzle.

I absolutely agree with you there. In the meantime, adding additional descriptors yields better results but is maybe a bit un-intuitive to some users (e.g. "thrush bird" rather than "thrush").

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