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Does it feel like google is moving further away from this with time? It's common that I get search results that don't contain the keywords I searched for. The

by daten 16y ago

Does it feel like google is moving further away from this with time? It's common that I get search results that don't contain the keywords I searched for. The results will also contain the keywords but in different parts of the page, so short phrases like hacker news will match pages with "hacker" in the first paragraph and "news" somewhere else on the page. Google used to recognize a hyphen as meaning "only return results where these two words are joined by a space or puncuation", now it ignores the hyphen and you have to enclose the phrase in quotes to get that behavior. Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet. In either case, I'm happy to hear IndexTank is trying to fix this.

JacobAldridge 16y ago
I vaguely recall that there used to be a feature (and possibly this was with Altavista before I switched to Google) that allowed you to search for words that were close together. So instead of trying ten different permutations of "like jb hifi in London" I would enter the keywords, and various forms "jb hifi type stores in London", "jb hifi stores in central London" etc would be returned. Or am I dreaming?
- gojomo 16y ago
  The wildcard operator – * – is close to what you want: http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html UPDATE: and someone just posted about the AROUND() operator, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983930 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983930
  - JacobAldridge 16y ago
    Brilliant - you have my * gratitude.
elblanco 16y ago
> Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet It would seem to me that indexing data in such a way as to support arbitrary regex would be difficult. Anybody know of an existing system?
- alecthomas 16y ago
  Yes, Google code search: http://codesearch.google.com http://codesearch.google.com
  - sgk284 16y ago
    It's my understanding that the amount of code is so small that they just have it all in ram (and maybe less accessed data goes to disk) and do a distributed grep.
    - elblanco 16y ago
      Right, that's more or less what all the approaches I've seen use. It's not indexing in the sense of full-text indexing for fast retrieval, all of the data is more or less greped over. It's basically just a full-text search, not an index.
Pewpewarrows 16y ago
That's what the undocumented (as far as I know) AROUND word in searches is for. If you type "cat AROUND(5) dog" into google, it'll return the top results that contain anywhere from 0 to 5 words between cat and dog.

by daten 16y ago

JacobAldridge 16y ago

I vaguely recall that there used to be a feature (and possibly this was with Altavista before I switched to Google) that allowed you to search for words that were close together. So instead of trying ten different permutations of "like jb hifi in London" I would enter the keywords, and various forms "jb hifi type stores in London", "jb hifi stores in central London" etc would be returned. Or am I dreaming?

gojomo 16y ago
The wildcard operator – * – is close to what you want: http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html http://www.googleguide.com/wildcard_operator.html UPDATE: and someone just posted about the AROUND() operator, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983930 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983930
- JacobAldridge 16y ago
  Brilliant - you have my * gratitude.

elblanco 16y ago

> Even more interesting than a simple full-text search would be a regular-expression full-text search of the internet It would seem to me that indexing data in such a way as to support arbitrary regex would be difficult. Anybody know of an existing system?

alecthomas 16y ago
Yes, Google code search: http://codesearch.google.com http://codesearch.google.com
- sgk284 16y ago
  It's my understanding that the amount of code is so small that they just have it all in ram (and maybe less accessed data goes to disk) and do a distributed grep.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Right, that's more or less what all the approaches I've seen use. It's not indexing in the sense of full-text indexing for fast retrieval, all of the data is more or less greped over. It's basically just a full-text search, not an index.

Pewpewarrows 16y ago

That's what the undocumented (as far as I know) AROUND word in searches is for. If you type "cat AROUND(5) dog" into google, it'll return the top results that contain anywhere from 0 to 5 words between cat and dog.