&quot;The Google example points at one mayor constraint of text-based UIs: either you severely restrict the language that people can use to query the system, or you will be dealing with a really hard, Google-size problem.&quot;<p>I disagree, and I think we can see the counter-example very clearly with altavista.<p>You could go to altavista and type in &quot;dumb&quot; search queries, just like google.<p>But simultaneously, with no change at all in the UI and no constraints imposed on the &quot;dumb&quot; users, you could also type in very sophisticated boolean searches like:<p>linux grep (&quot;regular expression&quot; and &quot;regex&quot;)<p>and get very precise and sophisticated search results.<p><i>I miss this every single day</i>