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It's the problem of maximizing gross acceptableness vs. accuracy. If there is a term that has 1,000 results but could be a misspelling of a term that returns 10
by lubujackson 8y ago
It's the problem of maximizing gross acceptableness vs. accuracy. If there is a term that has 1,000 results but could be a misspelling of a term that returns 100,000 results, Google will always go with mob rule. It's like when the bean counters take over and shave a nickel here, save a penny there, until everyone leaves because your product has become garbage. Optimizing for search happiness sounds good on paper but winning on edge cases SHOULD be Google's strength - instead, it is their biggest weakness.
I wouldn't even mind the mob rule if Google still had a way to clarify your searches by default. Instead, they continue to assume more and more user intent and remove more and more options for clear user input.
- anoncake 8y agoThat does not explain why Google ignores entire words. People misspell words, yes, but who accidentally enters random other words in addition to their search terms?
- pas 8y agoA lot of people actually. English has a lot of dialects, people have different styles of communication, and Google tries to search across all that. It tries to guess at intent and match that to their index. Does this help? I have no idea, and at least nowadays it offers to include that word explicitly with one click.
- Izkata 8y agoFun little hidden feature that implies they're aware of this: On the results page, under search tools, is an "All Results" dropdown you can change to "Verbatim" to get what you actually want.