I hear what he's saying though - you often need to have a very specific 'magic phrase' to unlock a search and really find what you're after. The more technical the thing is, the more specific the phrase. As a software engineer, I've learned to get really good at finding those phrases - we call it 'search literacy'. Not everyone has it, and it honestly is kind of frustrating, given the massive amount of money Google pours into AI, specifically for search. That was their original selling point for the brand. Unfortunately, they no longer care much about you finding stuff, only serving ads. Although, in this case, those interests were aligned. That's why it often makes more sense to ask people on a forum first (who sometimes will unfortunately tell you to Google it - which you did, and ended up on the forum). So I can understand the pain. That said, there's just so much data out there now I think it also may be an issue of just not being able to optimize everything. The sorts of ML networks you need to train for a search like that require a lot of human-labeled data and need to be frequently re-trained on large data sets as the data gets updated. Another alternative is reinforcement learning, but that is more compute intensive and still requires a human to specify what to train on. You can mine for things to train on with another ML network using a clustering algorithm tied to maybe some sort of NLP, but that's generally going to be pretty imprecise with the current state of the art.
The magic phrase in this case seems to be "Full face downhill mtb helmet". I didn't know about the major helmet types and regulations before this journey of safety discovery myself. Funnily enough, everyone I talk to on the street refers to it as a 'BMX' helmet. And it's similar, but DH, Enduro and BMX helmets are technically different as they conform to different standards. No one so far seems to understand what downhill is. I tried belaboring it the first couple of times and then gave up. I do get a lot of chuckles with the new helmet, btw, but it's mixed in with comments of approval because it looks so cool. Even if it were all chuckles though, I'll take that over a broken jaw, shattered teeth or cheese grater face. That knock to my head was a message that I intend to fully heed. The other common misconception is that it's a dirt bike helmet - and I do now notice that a surprising number of city motorcyclists wear moto helmets for some reason.
I've discovered one other unexpected benefit to the helmet, btw. I tend to have a bit of a temper - I'm not proud of it - but I'm honestly a bit thin-skinned when people troll me on the street. This happens a lot in San Francisco, surprisingly. The DH helmet muffles my hearing enough that I can't hear these stupid comments anymore, so I tend to be a bit calmer. I read an article recently regarding the fact that apparently a lot of women nowadays wear Airbuds to screen out skeevy dudes cat calling them on the street. So a full face helmet is sort of like Airbuds for dudes... or ladies, I know it's not technically gendered, but I mostly see men wearing them. It does have the same effect though - in the case of most women, they are attempting to avoid fear or anxiety, in my case it's helping me avoid anger. Different emotions, same outcome.
One last thing, I noticed something descending Portola the other day... on fast descents, the wind seems to lift the visor and buffet your head. It sort of acted as an unintentional safety feature, as I couldn't go much faster than 30-35 mph. Is this typical? My bike encourages an upright posture, I guess most people racing downhill have their head down in an attack posture. I was surprised how pronounced the effect was though. A bit of an annoyance, but not a deal breaker; thought that might be a useful detail to other people reading the thread.
