I suspect you underestimate how much of the power of search engines is being able to interpret search queries and figure out what a user is really looking for. Even if there were a public, standardised up-to-date high performance full-text index of the entire web freely available I'm willing to bet Google search would be a useful value-add in its ability to answer natural language queries.
> you underestimate how much of the power of search engines is being able to interpret search queries and figure out what a user is really looking for.
So you mean that a search engine is supposed to ignore what you are asking for and instead give you what it thinks you really meant?
If you search for [what year was queen Elizabeth born], Google doesn't return pages that have that phrase in it, rather it returns pages that have an answer to that question. You could call that "ignoring" if you like, but it's what 99% of users expect.
I resort to "natural language queries" only in desperation, when queries that are lists of search-terms have failed.
Actually, they aren't really natural language queries. They are just ordered lists of search-terms. Goo provides no mechanism for saying "This is an english-language question". And even if Goo could parse my natural language, and rephrase it as something like "Are you looking for a list of books published by Douglas Hofstadter?", when you turn that into a query on the index, it stops having anything to do with natural language.
A "dumb" search that just took a search phrase like "books published by Douglas Hofstadter" is going to return pages that have that phrase in it, or something close to that phrase. Google will prioritise results that actually contain such lists, regardless of whether the page contains a phrase like that (e.g. the word "published" is basically ignored by Google).
That's all I meant.
