Okay, if I follow you, you're saying that because people are trying to use Google (or, let's just say, "Search") for a purpose other than it was intended, it's the wrong solution.
That's really not too different from what I wrote; except I'm saying: people should be _expected to recognize_ that they're using the wrong solution, and that they need a different solution.
You seem to be suggesting that _Search_ should change something to suit the people who are using it "wrong". (Feel free to correct me on that.) It sounds like you're saying "Search should know what you _intend_ to look for, not just what you _typed into the search field_".
I'm not sure I expect an algorithm to know our _intentions_. (Though Google's 'did you mean...' is clearly already trying to accomplish this, as much as possible.)
I actually had a similar problem just an hour ago. I needed to look up the price of a piece of metalworking equipment. Since I had purchased items from Wholesale Tool in the past, I entered "www.wholesaletool.com" into Firefox. Then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out why my search for a 1-inch threading die wasn't turning up anything useful.
It turns out that the site I really needed was www.wttool.com instead!
And I'm a software dev who spends a lot of time on the web! How much longer would a non-expert have wasted before figuring this out? It's not necessarily anyone's fault; it's just that the web can be awfully confusing at times!
For this to be a fair comparison you would have had to have been browsing a news article about wholesale tools and trying to purchase a tool from this news article.
You mistook one wholesale tool store for another, whereas these users confused a news article about facebook's redesign for the place where you login to facebook.
I am pretty much saying that Google/Search should find what I intend to look for rather than its interpretation of what I type into the search field.
Because that's clearly how the general public intends to use Google/Search.
The only reason I don't use it that way is that I've learned to adapt to its shortcomings. I'm better than most at finding what I want using Google because I've learned to speak in Googlese, so to speak. How to frame my query in a way that returns what I want. I've adapted to the tool rather than the other way around.
Clearly that's a bit much to expect of the masses, who are very often frustrated by Google/Search. I'm not running down the masses here. They want to get things done. We have very basic tools to help them, I'm arguing that our tools should be orders of magnitude more sophisticated.
Sure it's hard, and while that response may be satisfying for engineers, that doesn't solve the problem people are trying to solve when they use Google/Search.
And honestly, there's just something plain wrong with your algorithm when it returns a news story as a top result for "facebook login". It's a safe bet that is NOT the result 99.999% of the users are looking for when they type that in. And if you're failing your users a very high percentage of the time, the problem simply does not lie with your users.
I honestly don't think I actually disagree with what you're saying; I just still don't see this as a "failure" on Google's part, and that was the impetus for the post. I don't think Google should have been expected to anticipate this sort of thing.
Learn from it? Sure. Expect it? I still don't think so.
This whole discussion can be summed up with "know your audience". If you have stupid people in your audience, you should design for stupid people; companies like Facebook and Google should design for stupid people, the rest of the world doesn't.
In the end, it's Google's responsibility to find the correct page for what it's users are looking for, even if they're using it as some sort of web-CLI for the wrong purpose. Google has the stupid people in its audience, so Google should design for them. Heck, Google should be able to detect a person's intentions; not sure if they can, but at least I guess it would be possible to classify websites as stupid and people as stupid, and match accordingly.
That's really not too different from what I wrote; except I'm saying: people should be _expected to recognize_ that they're using the wrong solution, and that they need a different solution.
You seem to be suggesting that _Search_ should change something to suit the people who are using it "wrong". (Feel free to correct me on that.) It sounds like you're saying "Search should know what you _intend_ to look for, not just what you _typed into the search field_".
I'm not sure I expect an algorithm to know our _intentions_. (Though Google's 'did you mean...' is clearly already trying to accomplish this, as much as possible.)