Post #2851133

One of the things that I dislike the most about the idea of natural-language search is how it removes the _structure_ from information and forces you to replicate it yourself. Sources like Wikipedia have articles organized in a logical fashion. You can learn where certain things usually are (especially if you've read a lot of similar articles), and then find things easily. When you find the thing you were looking for, you also get to read the information around it, which often contains details you may not have thought to look for. But with natural-language search, your only option is to frame your search as a question, to which you will receive an answer. Even if the answer is correct, it doesn't contain "the rest of the article" in the way an actual article would — and on top of that, it is sufficiently ephemeral that you will have to read and parse the whole answer every time you ask the question if you have to come back to something. Books and their digital equivalents are structured the way they are for a reason, and that reason isn't _just_ information retrieval.