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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the classic HN misconception, that complex, customisable interfaces ought to be popular?

Yes, this site skews heavily not just in favor of engineers, but the more old-school, "give me the box of tools and leave me alone" style engineer. 99% of humans who use a computer just want a single button that implicitly means "give me content" and they're satisfied.

Yes. Classic approach here is that exposing more behavior is better and that there should be rich formal languages for interacting with systems. Good for HN, more questionable for the rest of users.

They are though. The most profitable paid search engines have incredibly sophisticated operators and interfaces. Westlaw has a super sophisticated topic sorting system that goes back about a century. Lexis has something similar it generates by software.

Free search isn’t the only way. When your users all charge hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour and really need good information, they will pay a lot.

What’s ultimately limited is general user free search. Normal person time just isn’t very valuable and they mostly just want stimulation. Google is mostly a stimulation engine pretending to be a knowledge engine. It started off as more of a knowledge engine and over time optimized itself for providing a buzz.

Firstly, those are apparently geared towards legal research; I was replying to a comment about "a Google competitor". Secondly, B2B software (which I'm guessing those programs might be) has much less incentive for good, simplified UI/UX, even when it's obviously feasible and useful. The focus is almost always on customisations or new configurations that will draw in more leads.

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