Is it me or is anyone else surprised that people use Google this way? I don't mean the content, I mean the kind of query.
I generally type specific words or phrases (often with a 'site:' prefix when I know where I'm looking). I never type full questions (i.e., sentences) into Google.
I sometimes type in full questions because I know that Google prefers to find the full phrase I give it, which means that I'm more likely to come up with a page answering that exact question rather than one with that phrase. Given that I type reasonably quickly, there isn't much overhead in the extra typing.
I'm not surprised because I have heard that people use Google in this "asking a question" way (I'll call it the "Ask Jeeves Technique"). None the less it still feels odd to me. This is because when I am searching for an answer to a question on Google, I will usually type in a portion of the answer that I feel would be predictable, To take a random example: "The population of Iceland is" (with actual quotes so as to pick up the whole phrase). I don't have a name for this technique (perhaps "Answer Prediction" or the "Reverse Ask Jeeves Technique"), but I usually find it works to my satisfaction. Otherwise, I'm like you, I type in separate keywords that don't make a complete sentence.
I have theorised in the past that perhaps the reason some people use the "Ask Jeeves technique" while I and others might use the "Answer Prediction" technique might be due to me having a clearer general understanding of the way that search engines collect and index their data, i.e. (to oversimplify things for the purpose of illustration) I get that the search engine is just matching text patterns to my query, where as perhaps less technical people don't really understand this and if they think of it at all, they might unconsciously imagine that the Google search page is the interface to some kind of Sky Net like artificial intelligence that is able to take their question, ponder it and provide the most relevant answers. Maybe anthropomorphising our tools is the human default?
Or maybe I'm totally off base here... just some random musings really.
Not really. It just means that when people type "How do I" in front of a search and then click on a link with how do i and then whatever it was, then google picked the right result, even though it doesn't know that you are asking for instructions on how to perform a task.
The people who click those haven't seen all the answers (that would be listed with a non-human query). I want the best answers, not the most popular ones.
Further, typing long phrases or questions unquoted gives a lot of false positives. I don't want that, I want to capture the essential minimum I need to look for something specific.
Google doesn't give you the best answers, they give you the last answer someone else chose. That's how google works, because google believes the best answer is the one after which the searcher does not click on anything else.
First, some people just search this way on a regular basis. Strange, but I've met several who do. Bless their hearts.
Second, often for queries of this type I'd expect to find hits on advice sites, Yahoo Answers, etc, where the question is actually in the text of the page.
Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...
I didn't search this way for years, but now I often do, especially when I know less about the area I'm searching in.
Sometimes I don't even know enough to know what keyword to use, and full questions seem more likely to give Google something to work with in that case.
They [the people typing these questions] aren't. They are asking a search engine to connect them to people who have been in similar situations and might have advice.
Perhaps - but I doubt that this is how the searchers actually view things. I suspect they just think "I want" and head for the Google box. Most of my students work this way now.
Even if you're right though, I know the internet well enough to know I would look there for people to give me advice on any of these questions.
Not just children- back in the early days of information retrieval user interface studies, they found that pretty much all search-naïve users instinctively use natural language (or at least "natural-language-ish") queries instead of keyword/boolean queries. This, of course, is the opposite of how search engine designers and programmers think about the problem.
I often search this way first, and if I don't find a suitable result, leverage my assumptions about how searching works. I don't know what Google is doing behind the scenes, so my assumptions may be wrong. I like to give Google the benefit of the doubt though, because I know there is an eventual goal of supporting this type of querying.
I was about to post the same observation. I would never google for something like this. I think of words that would be likely to occur on a page containing what I'm looking for. Sometimes I quote parts of a phrase such as "how to" to ensure I'm likely to find only how to kind of posts.
Technically you're selecting the results you wanna see, so it doesn't tell you how frequent they are. The ranking only tells you relative frequency. You already knew there's someone somewhere who searches like that.
Sometimes I have difficulty coming up with the keywords I need to search for a topic. Finishing the sentence "How do I ..." sometimes helps. Once I've done that, I might as well search for that before refining.
I generally type specific words or phrases (often with a 'site:' prefix when I know where I'm looking). I never type full questions (i.e., sentences) into Google.
Edit: My wife reminded me that there was a New York Times article in December about how children search this way automatically: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/technology/internet/26kids...