@billyjoebowers I understand why they do what they do, but I don't understand why they insist on taking it to such extremes and refusing to let us have the tools to bypass that when needed (eg stuff like the quotes, judicial usage of keywords, etc.)

It's one thing to try to "help" users along when they suck at searching, but the end result of what they've done is create a thing that experts can't use to find anything and which is so bad at actually doing searches that even the people who weren't good at it can't really find what they want either.

Basically they took what seemed like a good idea at the time and just went nuts with it, then refused to back down (sunk cost fallacy?)

@nazokiyoubinbou @billyjoebowers I've always assumed (without proof) that the companies benefit by conditioning people to just accept whatever they get cause there's nothing they can do to improve the result anyway. That in turn makes it easier to steer people to the results they want, like ads or content they want to promote or something else.

The less control people have of their experience, the less specific are their expectations

@jonoleth @billyjoebowers Honestly, a lot of people basically believe that's the case, but I personally think it's giving these companies way too much credit. They're not that smart and they can't plan ahead past trying to maximize profits for this quarter. (Yeah, I used to think companies would plan ahead because if you're a company that's kind of the thing you have to do to be in business, but their focus seems to be just quarterly profits and I honestly don't think they can see beyond that.)

Honestly, I think they're that bad just because they kept focusing more and more on targeting trying to let people who couldn't "search-fu" be able to search because they wanted everyone to use their services, but they went too far because they didn't think ahead.