4 ms·

If Google is an option, put your keywords in quotes.

by ILikeConemowk 9y ago

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
Google sometimes ignores this, for reasons that nobody seems to actually understand.
- Falling3 9y ago
  Really? I haven't seen that before; do you have an example?
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    Exact occurrences seem to vary over time, per user/account, the presence/absence of other features being used (e.g. time range or site: operator), and possibly other factors. It's periodically reported on the Google Search and Assistant Help Forum, and there's a 100+-post thread [1] about it. The behavior is like something in Google's stack is incorrectly matching a cached set of results that had the same set of terms without quotation marks. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gHVUEl8y1k https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gH...
- KMag 9y ago
  I used to be an engineer on Google's search indexing team. I don't have any specific inside information in this case, but knowing the Google mindset, I'm sure they would have pulled up a large unbiased frequency-weighted sample of search queries with quotes in them. The would have then spun up a custom web search front-end that used an algorithm that sometimes ignored quotes, and ran all of the sampled queries through both the regular front-end and the custom front-end. They then would have manually looked through the affected queries. They would have used this to determine whether the change seemed to better serve the user's intent on average. Of course, this involves a bit of subjective inferring of the user's intent. It don't like it, but I'm sure that for the average query using quotes, it does better find what a user is looking for. That's why Google does this. On the other hand, there's a lot of observation bias: I'm much less likely to notice Google is ignoring quotes when it works out well. It's mostly in the frustrating cases that I really notice and remember noticing that Google sometimes ignores quotes. As for what black magic allows them to sometimes determine that you don't really want quotes, you're guesses would probably be as good as mine. I'm just pretty sure that on average, this black magic has a positive impact on search quality.

If Google is an option, put your keywords in quotes.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

Google sometimes ignores this, for reasons that nobody seems to actually understand.

Falling3 9y ago
Really? I haven't seen that before; do you have an example?
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  Exact occurrences seem to vary over time, per user/account, the presence/absence of other features being used (e.g. time range or site: operator), and possibly other factors. It's periodically reported on the Google Search and Assistant Help Forum, and there's a 100+-post thread [1] about it. The behavior is like something in Google's stack is incorrectly matching a cached set of results that had the same set of terms without quotation marks. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gHVUEl8y1k https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/6gH...
KMag 9y ago
I used to be an engineer on Google's search indexing team. I don't have any specific inside information in this case, but knowing the Google mindset, I'm sure they would have pulled up a large unbiased frequency-weighted sample of search queries with quotes in them. The would have then spun up a custom web search front-end that used an algorithm that sometimes ignored quotes, and ran all of the sampled queries through both the regular front-end and the custom front-end. They then would have manually looked through the affected queries. They would have used this to determine whether the change seemed to better serve the user's intent on average. Of course, this involves a bit of subjective inferring of the user's intent. It don't like it, but I'm sure that for the average query using quotes, it does better find what a user is looking for. That's why Google does this. On the other hand, there's a lot of observation bias: I'm much less likely to notice Google is ignoring quotes when it works out well. It's mostly in the frustrating cases that I really notice and remember noticing that Google sometimes ignores quotes. As for what black magic allows them to sometimes determine that you don't really want quotes, you're guesses would probably be as good as mine. I'm just pretty sure that on average, this black magic has a positive impact on search quality.