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Comment by fridek | Hacker News Reader

I now have most of my adult years learning how to construct a phrase that gets the right results for Google, and later Assistant. It got to the point where I'm certain it must be a headache for whatever team is trying to support natural language processing in these - all proficient users ask for some artificial gibberish and get where they want to be.

Here comes my favourite brain freeze moment - recently my parents asked me to explain this to them. How do you construct a good search phrase? My brain blanked. I HAVE NO IDEA. It seems I have learned fluent Goonglish without noticing, and now can't explain the grammar or vocabulary of it.

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My 2yo daughter reeeeally loves the Aladdin soundtrack, but the French version (we're in Québec). It took us way too many tries to get our Google Home to play the correct version with voice commands, even adding the language ("Ok Google, écouter Aladdin en français") wouldn't work. I now have a small note with the correct incantation posted besides the Google Home, because even forgetting a single word will play the English version instead. (For the curious, the correct incantation is "OK Google, écouter Aladdin bande originale française du film").

I would summarise it as: use separate keywords instead of sentences. "Change Light Bulb" instead of "how to change a light bulb". "Black Science Guy", "Kevin Durant height", "rails has_many api", etc...

Recently Google got much better in understanding full sentences and there are tons of SEO optimized pages for certain phrases. Nevertheless, using keywords is what I imagine advanced users do.

It also got much worse at keyword searches. It seems like the one capability came at the cost of the other.

That's definitely what people were referring to when they had good googlefu abilities. It was always odd to me when people would have trouble finding stuff and come to me for help. I somehow picked up that language to search effectively while growing up during search engines infancy.

It's weird that it feels like my tried and true abilities are getting worse. Or Googles algorithm is hurting some of us that became very proficient in very specific ways.

I wonder if anyone is working on special languages for talking to voice interfaces. Maybe a reduced grammar would allow for better recognition accuracy and reliability. And we could get more helpful corrections.

The problem reminds me of the difficulty of programming in applescript. In applescript, articles like "the" can be inserted optionally in the code, and there are lots of equivalent ways to write things, i.e. "if x equals y" is the same as "if x is equal to y". As a result I never remember the syntax, and error messages are less helpful.

From my limited understanding, even in lojban, a constructed language with unambiguous grammar, you can have semantic ambiguity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

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