pretty much -- must users won't bother to learn search operators for same reason they didn't learn LaTeX and will resist learning markdown. sure it works and lot of work to recall something hard to master only use every so often.
it's the layperson's version of recalling regex if only need it every few weeks -- lots of cognitive load for minimal return, easier to ask friends or reddit.
yes, search operators seem intuitive to perhaps the average HN reader or SO coder, etc. That's a small set of people compared to 7B+ people attempting to recall oh, right ~term adds synonyms -- easy for most people here, mostly useless or not worth remembering for most of the world.
Most users weren't learning search operators before Google came along either.
Google's goal is to make them ultimately irrelevant and just give you what you're looking for, meeting the user halfway on the search query. That may not be possible, but it's the right mindset to have for solving the problem... Making the human talk like a computer is a UI failure.
we're attempting to tackle some of that at Breeze and it's hard / challenging / etc -- it's not sufficient to make it technically easy to filter results by topic, the user also has to rethink it's even possible to filter results beyond whatever default list that's returned. Giving users a UI that facilitates that is equally as hard as solving the technical aspect of making it easy for users to tune results and spend as much time there as coding.
we ran smack into that with a special topic we released this week, Ladypedia, where we ended up added a dial to filter out male results on a sliding scale for Wikipedia results. Doing it by default was too strong, and so we ended up selecting for female gender and then letting user dial in how many male-related pages to filter out.
No, Google made users passive to profit from controlling limited choices presented to them.
> I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context
Looks like it to me, too. It's Google's propaganda for "we made you need us".