7 ms·

What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results wi

What I miss most about Altavista was the boolean search operators, and being able to reliably insist that words either must or must not appear in the results with the + and - characters. With Google these operators are seemingly just hints that it feels free to ignore. +noir +film -"pinot noir"

myself248 8y ago
And the ability to do case-sensitive search. "DoS" != "DOS"
- ben_w 8y ago
  I’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.
  - pedrocx486 8y ago
    I don't get the "(?)" you made, but yes, it's a thing: https://scholar.google.com/ https://scholar.google.com/
    - ben_w 8y ago
      The “(?)” is because I’m only 85% sure that was the Google product they were unhappy about.
leeoniya 8y ago
i miss NEAR
- ramraj07 8y ago
  Asterick with quoted words works
afandian 8y ago
I'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now. (Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences) Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.
- itp 8y ago
  I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search. For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good. If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience. As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully. A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar. But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine. Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.
  - afandian 8y ago
    I totally take your point, but I don't think it's inconsistent with mine. Search engines being 'about' a concept isn't a new thing. Bewlew's book from 2008 is called "Finding Out About". The dream is that the search engine can work out what a document is about, and what I'm thinking about based on the content of the document / query, and match them up. The new thing in your example is that Google has gone beyond documents into burrito restauraunts, but it's not such a huge leap. Maybe new adavances have brought new algorithms that are somehow better at finding and modelling those abstractions so the search engine is no longer a recognisable vector space model with predictable proxies. Even if that _is_ the case, they should be able to answer a query I have made, on my own terms.
hellofunk 8y ago
They used to behave in Google as you describe and it was quite reliable. But somewhere along the line, Google changed how it handles search expressions (for the worse, in my opinion).
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  A comment below you mentions Verbatim Mode [0]. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising. [0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introduces-verbatim-searching https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Verbatim mode doesn't do the trick, though. It appears to be essentially the same as quoting your search string.
    - ramraj07 8y ago
      You can enclose each word in quotes and that does seem to work still
diegocg 8y ago
Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.
diegocg 8y ago
Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.
- wtetzner 8y ago
  How do you get to verbatim mode?
  - ozzyman700 8y ago
    Search something on google, on the results page click 'tools'>'all results'>'verbatim' afaik putting a term in double quotes does the same thing but I am unsure if the implementation is really the same, the effect seems to be
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation. I can't. The plus operator meant the the word you applied it to must be in the search result. Quoting the word does not do this for me.
taf2 8y ago
yeah... i also miss trying to locate the search box and search results... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg
elfakyn 8y ago
Google changed the operators; now it's double quotes instead of plus (it was changed for google+ so that the plus searches g+ profiles and pages). You now have to search: "noir" "film" -"pinot noir" I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Probably not. There's some enterprise gapps customer out there still using it.
- timcederman 8y ago
  It still doesn't always respect the quotes.
  - JoeSmithson 8y ago
    People always seem to claim this on HN but it's never happened for me - do you have an example?
    - acranox 8y ago
      I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches. This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string. In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time. The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.
      - 0xADEADBEE 8y ago
        I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.
evrydayhustling 8y ago
My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operators let us use altavista kind of like a database layer: we offered a cartoony interface that build queries behind the scenes that hit existing parts specification documents - eliminating a giant data structuring and reentry problem. It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...

myself248 8y ago

And the ability to do case-sensitive search. "DoS" != "DOS"

ben_w 8y ago
I’ve seen academics upset that Google insisted on changing their search term from “adsorb” to “absorb”. Apparently Google Scholar (?) couldn’t be forced the way Google.com could be.
- pedrocx486 8y ago
  I don't get the "(?)" you made, but yes, it's a thing: https://scholar.google.com/ https://scholar.google.com/
  - ben_w 8y ago
    The “(?)” is because I’m only 85% sure that was the Google product they were unhappy about.

leeoniya 8y ago

i miss NEAR

ramraj07 8y ago
Asterick with quoted words works

afandian 8y ago

I'm nostagic for precise search, but I wonder how it would have fared with the scale we have now. (Edit: scale and diversity of input data but also audiences) Google regularly fails to include all words I searched (even if it's only three or four), often retrieving completely useless results. I doubt it's due to incompetence; I take it as a signal that they're now struggling to match the volume and characteristics of the data they have to ingest to an adequate user experience.

itp 8y ago
I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search. For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good. If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience. As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully. A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar. But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine. Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.
- afandian 8y ago
  I totally take your point, but I don't think it's inconsistent with mine. Search engines being 'about' a concept isn't a new thing. Bewlew's book from 2008 is called "Finding Out About". The dream is that the search engine can work out what a document is about, and what I'm thinking about based on the content of the document / query, and match them up. The new thing in your example is that Google has gone beyond documents into burrito restauraunts, but it's not such a huge leap. Maybe new adavances have brought new algorithms that are somehow better at finding and modelling those abstractions so the search engine is no longer a recognisable vector space model with predictable proxies. Even if that _is_ the case, they should be able to answer a query I have made, on my own terms.

hellofunk 8y ago

They used to behave in Google as you describe and it was quite reliable. But somewhere along the line, Google changed how it handles search expressions (for the worse, in my opinion).

stronglikedan 8y ago
A comment below you mentions Verbatim Mode [0]. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising. [0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introduces-verbatim-searching https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Verbatim mode doesn't do the trick, though. It appears to be essentially the same as quoting your search string.
  - ramraj07 8y ago
    You can enclose each word in quotes and that does seem to work still

diegocg 8y ago

Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

diegocg 8y ago

Have you tried searching with verbatim mode? Without Verbatim mode, Google will try to be smart, eg match car when you search automotive, making spelling corrections, etc. Also, keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation.

wtetzner 8y ago
How do you get to verbatim mode?
- ozzyman700 8y ago
  Search something on google, on the results page click 'tools'>'all results'>'verbatim' afaik putting a term in double quotes does the same thing but I am unsure if the implementation is really the same, the effect seems to be
JohnFen 8y ago
> keep in mind that google removed the + operator, but you can achieve the same results using double quotation. I can't. The plus operator meant the the word you applied it to must be in the search result. Quoting the word does not do this for me.

taf2 8y ago

yeah... i also miss trying to locate the search box and search results... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BzmnXJICYAEGqQ7.jpg

elfakyn 8y ago

Google changed the operators; now it's double quotes instead of plus (it was changed for google+ so that the plus searches g+ profiles and pages). You now have to search: "noir" "film" -"pinot noir" I wonder whether they'll revert back now that google+ is dead.

lallysingh 8y ago
Probably not. There's some enterprise gapps customer out there still using it.
timcederman 8y ago
It still doesn't always respect the quotes.
- JoeSmithson 8y ago
  People always seem to claim this on HN but it's never happened for me - do you have an example?
  - acranox 8y ago
    I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches. This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string. In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time. The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.
    - 0xADEADBEE 8y ago
      I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.

evrydayhustling 8y ago

My first job in high school was adapting altavista into an interface for an internal government parts procurement tool (thrilling, right?). The Boolean operators let us use altavista kind of like a database layer: we offered a cartoony interface that build queries behind the scenes that hit existing parts specification documents - eliminating a giant data structuring and reentry problem. It was my first exposure to how much work could be saved by working efficiently with unstructured data! Of course, Google took this to a whole other level, realizing that for common users queries themselves should be treated as unstructured data! Learning as much as you can from how people already express themselves is one way to write the future, it turns out...