Whether we want it or not, Google’s search engine has become one of the most important tools we use every day when browsing the Internet. It has just been given a new, surprising function – it has learned to admit that it does not know something.
Using Google search engine for simple queries is easy and enjoyable. All you have to do is type in (or dictate) the query and wait a very short moment to get the results. Then, usually at the very top, you will see what you are most interested in. The situation is slightly worse with more complex and less popular queries. Instead of results narrowed down strictly to the text we are searching for, we get a lot of links, which seem to be quite a loose match, and often not at all related to the topic we are looking for.
The first users to see Google admitting that they don’t know the answer to something will be the one’s located in USA. Above the search results they have a single, meaningful sentence: It looks like there aren’t any great matches for your search. Meaning that there are no well-fitting answers for your query.
When you see such a message, you immediately know that you should either make your query more precise, or accept that it may be impossible to find the information you are looking for.
At the moment, the feature is only available to users from the United States, but knowing Google’s policy, it should soon appear in other regions of the world.
A Positive Change
The fact that Google openly informs that it has not found anything to answer the user’s query, and instead only displays the links suggested for browsing, should in my opinion be considered a useful thing. It’s definitely better that the user knows where he stands when he receives the results – he can decide to formulate his query differently, without wasting time on browsing the displayed suggestions. This small change despite what it may seem is quite a big nod to the users so you can be glad that it has appeared. The question is, why so late?
