This Dinobaby Likes Advanced Search, Boolean Operators, and Precision. Most Do Not
August 28, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I am not sure of the chronological age of the author of “7 Reasons to Replace Advanced Search with Filters So Users Can Easily Find What They Need.” From my point of view, the author has a mental age of someone much younger than I. The article identifies a number of reasons why “advanced search” functions are lousy. As a dinobaby, I want to be crystal clear: A user should have an interface which allows that user to locate the information required to respond in a useful way to a query.
The expert online searcher says with glee, “I love it when free online search services make finding information easy. Best of all is Amazon. It suggests so many things I absolutely need.” Hey, MidJourney, thanks for the image without suggesting Mother MJ okay my word choice. “Whoever said, ‘Nothing worthwhile comes easy’ is pretty stupid,” shouts or sliding board slider.
Advanced search in my dinobaby mental space means Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT, among others. Advanced search requires other meaningful “tags” specifically designed to minimize the ambiguity of words; for example, terminal can mean transportation or terminal can mean computing device. English is notable because it has numerous words which make sense only when a context is provided. Thus, a Field Code can instruct the retrieval system to discard the computing device context and retrieve the transportation context.
The write up makes clear that for today’s users training wheels are important. Are these “aids” like icons, images, bundles of results under a category dark patterns or assistance for a user. I can only imagine the push back I would receive if I were in a meeting with today’s “user experience” designers. Sorry, kids. I am a dinobaby.
I really want to work through seven reasons advanced search sucks. But I won’t. The number of people who know how to use key word search is tiny. One number I heard when I was a consultant to a certain big search engine is less than three percent of the Web search users. The good news for those who buy into the arguments in the cited article is that dinobabies will die.
Is it a lack of education? Is it laziness? Is it what most of today’s users understand?
I don’t know. I don’t care. A failure to understand how to obtain the specific information one requires is part of the long slow slide down a descent gradient. Enjoy the non-advanced search.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2023
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