Questions

Time was, a question began with one of the key words - who, what, where, when or why, for example among others - and ended in a question mark '?'.  However as the internet grows so too does our use of it and inescapably so too does our use of search engines.  I question how much influence this has upon our use of language and in particular our use of search engines.

Time was, a question was well formatted and presented in a grammatically correct syntax.  Now though our mentality over time is changing to use new terms and theories that dictate how we formulate questions.  We are slowly making a question synonymous with a query - I do not mean a query in the literal sense, as that is the same thing more or less, I mean a query as in the computer term.

A query in computing terms is a direction intended to pull data from a database. A simple query takes the form of an action followed by the key data followed by the target followed by an optional condition. For example-  SELECT title, year, director FROM some_source WHERE director = 'Steven Spielberg'; - this query for example listing all movies where Steven Spielberg has a directing credit.

Now in your mind, which are you more likely to in and ask Google:

Which movies has Steven Spielberg directed?

Or

List of movies directed by Steven Spielberg

That's just a basic example of how we are changing the way we phrase questions.  We may still think of the question first then process it into the query form but will this always be the case or are we experiencing the process of transition from our natural language roots of forming questions to a more computer logic based approach.

It is worthy of note here that many modern search engines have vastly improved upon their natural language processing, Google is an example.  However in most cases including Google, these search engines ignore many common words and over time as you realise this you change whether or not you include them at all.  Our use of search engines is a continual learning process.  We learn how effective our approach is at finding the information we want.  That learning process furthers our experience and subsequently influences our future behaviour.

While improved natural language processing may grow to become our salvation, at present it is not enough to be utilised by the main search providers.  More and more online when we use sites we choose not to browse but go straight to the search feature to find what we want.  We have grown into the mentality of asking for what we want and expecting to get it.  We are also learning that like many language barriers between people, we have to communicate with search engines etc in a simplistic way.

As we learn that certain words are ignored, and we learn that it is more about telling a search engine what we want rather than asking it, we move away from traditional questions and into statements, formatted as a query.

Who directed the 1992 film adaptation of Dracula?

Or

Dracula 1992 director

I have not only my experience in learning that this is becoming a growing issue but also I have feedback from Google and other sources for this blog alone that displays some of the terms you the reader have searched for when you clicked the link to this blog that Google presented.  Even though there may be words within that query that Google ignores it still provides it for reference purposes.  The number of queries that are simply a list of keywords vaguely alluding to what you were looking for [from a human perspective] versus the number of queries that form grammatically correct, natural languages questions is heavily biased on the part of the keyword preference.