Remember Alta Vista? I do; I’ve been a search engine junkie from day one, back in the mid-nineties when the explosion of web servers made these miraculous tools indispensable. At the time I was driving Intel’s adoption of the Web, and was teaching a “Searching the Internet” course I’d developed; I believed that proper searching know-how will become a critical skill in the years ahead.

I was right with that prediction, of course, but I hadn’t foreseen one development: my course had put emphasis on Boolean search syntax and the related mindset; and these have slowly been driven out by the adoption, at Google and other search engines, of a DWIM – “Do What I Mean” – approach.

The DWIM concept has been around since the sixties, and has always received an ambiguous appraisal by computer professionals: an ideal computer would need no other command than “Do What I Mean”, but the reality is that computers are still far from perfect mind readers, leading to variously funny or harmful problems. Originally DWIM snafus would involve point errors (I once had a friend whose name would be auto-corrected to “Idiot” every time), but lately they’ve become deeper and more holistic, as Google and its ilk have decided to treat us to a far-reaching change in interpretation of our search queries. Back then, the best search engines would allow you to construct precise Boolean queries like “ladybug or ‘lady bug’ near insect but not red”, and would show you just those pages that had exactly what you’d asked for. Today, such queries are not only relegated to hard-to-find “Advanced Search” pages, they are often ignored even there. Google decides what pages may do you good, and pushes them at you whether or not they contain what you specified.

So – is this “a bug or a feature”? Should we thank the good folks at Google for anticipating our assumed “real” needs, or should we curse them for ignoring our explicit wish? Think of the proverbial Aladdin’s lamp and its genie: would you prefer a genie that, when you ask for a pizza and a coke, brings you those – or a Genie that brings instead a caviar plate and champagne, because it figures you’d enjoy them more? Hmmm…

There are two questions here:

• Are the results more useful? Here I suspect that for the majority of users, and in the majority of cases, they are very useful. Google has made it almost irrelevant how you formulate your query; you will get effective hits regardless of your mistakes. So, if I forget to switch the keyboard language from Hebrew to English, typing in gibberish, Google shows me What I Meant: I can type hruakho and get the Hebrew results with a courteous “Did you mean: ירושלים ?” or, conversely, type in Jקרודשךקצ and get a “Showing results for Jerusalem”. How neat is that?
• Do we lose anything on the way? Here, to mirror the above, for a minority of users, and in a minority of cases, I think we do.  A “Do What I Mean, Not What I Say” denies us the ability to say – and mean – things away from the beaten path. DWIM is fine for searching “Jerusalem” or “Dollar exchange rate”, but if you’re looking for an old article about an arcane subject by an author whose name just happens to coincide with that of a current Hollywood celeb, you’re in for great frustration.

So what do I really want? How about a button on the search page that allows you to switch DWIM on and off at will, allowing us to choose those dumb but obedient Boolean searches when we need them?

What do you think?