"The Elmer's Glue pizza error is more fascinating than you think."
"Search cannot read your mind. By and large, the context of your information need is obscure to it. And that's good, actually. We've decided quite rightly as a culture that we don't want big companies recording us 24/7 so they can better understand what led us to Google 'Do spiders give you acne?' at 3 a.m."
"Since intent can't always be accurately read, a good search result for an ambiguous query will often be a bit of a buffet, pulling a mix of search results from different topical domains. When I say, for example, 'why do people like pancakes but hate waffles' I'm going to get two sorts of results. First, I'll get a long string of conversations where the internet debates the virtues of pancakes vs. waffles. Second, I'll get links and discussion about a famous Twitter post about the the hopelessness of conversation on Twitter. For an ambiguous query, this is a good result set."
"The problem comes when the results get synthesized into a common answer." "This is a form of 'context collapse', where the different use contexts (jokes, movies, recipes, whatever) get blended into a single context."
The Elmer's Glue pizza error is more fascinating than you think
