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Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that wo

by Liquix 7y ago

Thanks for explaining! It's infuriating to craft a search query containing all the keywords/operators needed to return relevant results - a search query that would return relevant results 24 months ago - only to see Google ignore 75% of keywords completely, extract some commonly-used pair of words from the query, and return 5 pages of results based exclusively on said pair. What was the motive behind this change? Was the previous algorithm really giving people results so bad that Google felt they had to hamstring their flagship product? It seemed to be getting better and better until this...

marcosdumay 7y ago
This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.
staticassertion 7y ago
Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.
- 40four 7y ago
  Wait, are you saying Google is the new 'Ask Jeeves'?!? :) Kidding. Anyway, DDG has been my default for months now. Absolutely love it. The only thing I've really had to change, is to remember to type in a city/ state when looking for local businesses. Other than that, it feels so great to not be the product!
detail-oriented 7y ago
The motivation is always the ability to sell ads against the results.
reportgunner 7y ago
If you ever want to get a good google result you "have" "to" "enclose" "every" "single" "word" "in" "separate" "quotes". Very tedious, especially given it's the current year.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  That would be a very simple extension. I imagine it already exists. Or even better a greasemonkey script could do it.

by Liquix 7y ago

marcosdumay 7y ago

This is a long going change. Google has been making their search fuzzier for years claiming it gets better results for most people. For a while I personally experienced better results on the queries I didn't know the exact name of the thing I was searching for. But those days are gone, because nowadays their search is so fuzzy that it can't extract the correct context from those queries.

staticassertion 7y ago

Because you aren't supposed to Google search by entering in a bunch of keywords you're supposed to ask Google questions. Not that your workflow is incorrect, I'm a DDG user and I do the same thing, but that's what Google wants people using their product to do.

40four 7y ago
Wait, are you saying Google is the new 'Ask Jeeves'?!? :) Kidding. Anyway, DDG has been my default for months now. Absolutely love it. The only thing I've really had to change, is to remember to type in a city/ state when looking for local businesses. Other than that, it feels so great to not be the product!

detail-oriented 7y ago

The motivation is always the ability to sell ads against the results.

reportgunner 7y ago

If you ever want to get a good google result you "have" "to" "enclose" "every" "single" "word" "in" "separate" "quotes". Very tedious, especially given it's the current year.

jjeaff 7y ago
That would be a very simple extension. I imagine it already exists. Or even better a greasemonkey script could do it.