As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we shouldn't even try". Sometimes you get dead end fields. Sometimes, other useful or interesting things spring out of dead ends.
That said, WA's interface leaves much to be desired. With Google (and its ilk), I can enter almost anything in, and get results. If they're not exactly what I want, I can refine it, little by little. It's like a gradient search in a sense.
With WA, I can't enter almost anything in, and get some sort of results where I can continuously refine my search. Instead, I get deadends where it has no idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know what else to do to help it understand.
In fact, it reminds me of playing the old text-based adventure games, where you have to guess what you can do in the "dingy old cabin with a door to the north." You go crazy asking the computer to "pick up mirror" and it replies, "thoust cannot pickth up the mirror" You really have no idea what you can do, and no hint out of the myriad of possibiliies. You end up playing a guessing game, instead of an adventure game.
I think google squared has the right idea. You can enter in some, and it'll spit back some sort of results, usually with columns you don't want. Then you can proceed to refine those results, by adding columns you want and deleting ones you don't.
'As an aside, I don't think I agree with the sentiment of "because it's hard we shouldn't even try".'
I prefer to phrase it as "If thousands of smart people before you have tried something, you need to know why they failed and have some reasonable reason to believe that your approach is better, or you will just be wasting your time."
I use this most often in the context of someone popping up and declaring that they wish to create a "totally visual" language. I don't want to stop that one-in-a-million guy who might make it work, but just blithely letting someone waste their time isn't very nice either. (That's where the whole "encouragement at all costs" ideology falls down; encouragement is not free and the costs are paid by the encouragee, not the encourager; think before you encourage somebody.) Usually I just see someone spout the same ideas that have been tried tens or hundreds of times before; the excited person should take the time to examine those efforts before continuing on, because the easy stuff has been tried and quite a bit of the hard stuff has been too. This goes for many things.
That said, WA's interface leaves much to be desired. With Google (and its ilk), I can enter almost anything in, and get results. If they're not exactly what I want, I can refine it, little by little. It's like a gradient search in a sense.
With WA, I can't enter almost anything in, and get some sort of results where I can continuously refine my search. Instead, I get deadends where it has no idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know what else to do to help it understand.
In fact, it reminds me of playing the old text-based adventure games, where you have to guess what you can do in the "dingy old cabin with a door to the north." You go crazy asking the computer to "pick up mirror" and it replies, "thoust cannot pickth up the mirror" You really have no idea what you can do, and no hint out of the myriad of possibiliies. You end up playing a guessing game, instead of an adventure game.
I think google squared has the right idea. You can enter in some, and it'll spit back some sort of results, usually with columns you don't want. Then you can proceed to refine those results, by adding columns you want and deleting ones you don't.