(I really don't understand your first/second sentence (what's injurious?) Also, I'm 40.)
> I will accept that "Google screwed up" (...) if one of my users has a suboptimal Internet experience
I respect that, and from a business point of view you're very right.
The problem is, how do you improve her experience without screwing up mine? Why can't I search for pages that actually contain all the words I'm looking for, as I typed them, and not words "that were present in the page linking to this page" or words Google think I want although I didn't type them in?
From a "moral" point of view (which you brought up), if she "wants to teach kids to read" maybe she could start by learning how to spell?
Most of the world does not think like a nerd. Not even remotely. Remember that when working.
Clue: remember all those things that many of us nerds thought the iPad really needed?
Corollary: why is WinARM likely in deep trouble? Because it's three years late to market, and Microsoft is only recently shown themselves capable of designing a UI for mortals, and the question is whether the Windows UI or the (ill-branded) Windows Phone UI will win the internecine politics. (And I'm betting on the mass of the Windows group.)
Implementation detail: your Google Internet searches are already tuned, if you're logged into Google.
And for completeness, when using the phrase "the problem is..." remember too that with problems arise opportunities, and through opportunities can arise profits.
I don't know why the above comment is being downvoted, but I'm guessing it's because it sounds "elitist" (which is apparently a very great crime).
To elaborate, then: I agree with the parent comment that it's Google's job to make everyone's experience optimal (and not the user's), and it's certainly in the best interests of Google (or any business) to cater to the needs of as many of its customers as possible (although in the case of Google, as has been pointed out many times before, users are in fact the product).
But I would argue that the real elitists are people who think "middle aged women" shouldn't be expected to actually learn how to use machines.
"Middle aged women" (why single them out?) use machines all the time, whether at work or at home. They're expected to know how to use a spreadsheet, a word processor, a food processor. And they do. But somehow this expectation is lifted for "the Internet". Why?
A search engine is not a person; it's certainly not a mind reader. A search engine is just a machine.
Plus a few other pre-eminent and trusted food-networks (Allrecipes) - searching for "Blueberry Pie" on each one, I'd then scan the quality of the comments - looking for insight into other chefs (cross checking their history to see if they, in turn, can be trusted) who clearly have tried out the recipes, and have made relevant comments. I would then identify the recipe that looked most likely to work for me.
I would expect no less from a sufficiently advanced search engine in this, and all other domains.
The Food Network? Really? The home of "semi-homemade"...? ;-)
About Clarke's law, here's an observation by George Bernard Shaw: "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."
Quotations aside, the process you're describing is certainly excellent; it's probably what Blekko is trying to pull, in a scalable way. It'll be interesting to watch how it plays out.
The second iteration, of course, is to engage with every (valid, trusted, revenue generating, etc...) customer who searched, determine the quality of the results, and then feed _that_ information back into the algorithms. You could then bias based on domain experts (world class chef's feedback on BlueBerry Pies more important than an anonymous user)
It may be the case that (AllRecipes, TheFoodNetwork, Etc...) are NOT the best place to search for a recipe, and that, indeed, "http://pickyourown.org is knocking it out of the park this week.
There is a lot of room for search to improve - I think the company that beats google (if it's not google that does so first), will be the one that manages to start creating the search<-->Consumer<-->Search feedback quality looop.
Google may already collect enough data to do this. They track clicks on the search results, so they can see whether you liked the results, whether you went back to a different result after visiting your first, and whether you modify your search terms for another search because the first one did not work out.
1) If you don't understand tax law, should you have to pay more tax? If tax law is simplified (so everybody pays a "fair" amount), why should people who have bothered to structure their affairs in a tax-efficient manner lose out?
2) Google has an "advanced" tab. If they really wanted to, they could have a "fuzzy match" section, and a "required literal" section. They could also do some funky stuff with leximes, but it's just not worth it, even for advanced users.
> I will accept that "Google screwed up" (...) if one of my users has a suboptimal Internet experience
I respect that, and from a business point of view you're very right.
The problem is, how do you improve her experience without screwing up mine? Why can't I search for pages that actually contain all the words I'm looking for, as I typed them, and not words "that were present in the page linking to this page" or words Google think I want although I didn't type them in?
From a "moral" point of view (which you brought up), if she "wants to teach kids to read" maybe she could start by learning how to spell?