3 ms·

Only that google now treats "+" and "-" merely as suggestions, if you want to fine tune your results, google got really bad at that. DDG and bing handle it fine

by comboy 8y ago

Only that google now treats "+" and "-" merely as suggestions, if you want to fine tune your results, google got really bad at that. DDG and bing handle it fine. On google you usually have to find a link to click "yes, really only provide results with the keyword I explicitly provided" and even then you end up with 8 results where you would get hundreds of them a few years ago.

lallysingh 8y ago
Use quotes instead of plus. Plus was reassigned for Google plus
- afterburner 8y ago
  I just realized, they can totally assign it back now...
- eitland 8y ago
  Google now also treats doublequotes as suggestions now it seems. On bad days (I'm assuming some A/B-testing going on) it also ignores the verbatim option.
  - comboy 8y ago
    Indeed. Sometimes I think that if I had a text collection of a few sources (like HN), I could do a better job just greping them on my own PC. This is in regard to highly specific queries e.g. when debugging.
    - eitland 8y ago
      A trick I've found out, which strengthens my suspicion that the "bugs" are just stupid a/b tests: If you get worse results than you usually get, try reporting it (or reporting basically any problem) on the page. For me at least it seems that magically within hours the problem is now gone. In the beginning I thought they had fixed the issue I reported really quick. But after seing this happen again (and again) I think a better explanation is they have a systen that opts you out of the tests once you report a problem. Personally I have moved on to DDG (and I have one browser with Qwant as the default) but this trick helped me a few times.
DanBC 8y ago
Yes, that's the point. Most people couldn't use + correctly, so Google moved to "", and most people can't use that so Google treats it as a suggestion. As much as we hate the new google that returns pages that don't contain our search terms, other people love it because it mostly just works for them. The old Google, the Google where word order mattered and whereyou could use + or -, was hard to use for most people. AskJeeves' selling point was that you could just aski it natural language questions.

by comboy 8y ago

lallysingh 8y ago

Use quotes instead of plus. Plus was reassigned for Google plus

afterburner 8y ago
I just realized, they can totally assign it back now...
eitland 8y ago
Google now also treats doublequotes as suggestions now it seems. On bad days (I'm assuming some A/B-testing going on) it also ignores the verbatim option.
- comboy 8y ago
  Indeed. Sometimes I think that if I had a text collection of a few sources (like HN), I could do a better job just greping them on my own PC. This is in regard to highly specific queries e.g. when debugging.
  - eitland 8y ago
    A trick I've found out, which strengthens my suspicion that the "bugs" are just stupid a/b tests: If you get worse results than you usually get, try reporting it (or reporting basically any problem) on the page. For me at least it seems that magically within hours the problem is now gone. In the beginning I thought they had fixed the issue I reported really quick. But after seing this happen again (and again) I think a better explanation is they have a systen that opts you out of the tests once you report a problem. Personally I have moved on to DDG (and I have one browser with Qwant as the default) but this trick helped me a few times.

DanBC 8y ago

Yes, that's the point. Most people couldn't use + correctly, so Google moved to "", and most people can't use that so Google treats it as a suggestion. As much as we hate the new google that returns pages that don't contain our search terms, other people love it because it mostly just works for them. The old Google, the Google where word order mattered and whereyou could use + or -, was hard to use for most people. AskJeeves' selling point was that you could just aski it natural language questions.