Erin McKean makes the point in a TED talk that, unlike paper dictionaries, online dictionary searches do not provide serendipity: finding something you didn’t know you were looking for.
I take this many ways:
True, but…
How many people regularly flip a dictionary?
How exact is search?
How many people just type the word into Google (which, because internet search sucks, is quite serendipitous).
(via Daring Fireball
Well, you can’t use a dictionary without flipping through it; looking at words other than your target is an intrinsic part of the tool. Search is precise enough that you’re not going to find “serenade” if you search for “serendipity”. I would say that internet search doesn’t “suck” badly enough to give you wrong results that are interesting, only enough to give you bad results that are useless.
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