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It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In so

by spurgu 7y ago

It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this: "us" "ambassador" "germany"

zerocrates 7y ago
It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.
- spurgu 7y ago
  Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.
  - zerocrates 7y ago
    Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that, rather than the other way around. With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Even those messages are very unreliable, though.
DoingIsLearning 7y ago
The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries. My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google. For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.
- dsl 7y ago
  Do you have any evidence to support that? The Google documentation indicates quotes are still the exact match operator https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
  - DoingIsLearning 7y ago
    I stand corrected, I wanted to provide some examples but I cannot reproduce this anymore. From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query. Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".
    - Jtsummers 7y ago
      There was a time, several years ago now, where that was happening pretty regularly to me. It's gotten better, but since 2009 or so Google search quality has been on the decline for me. It only works well when I use things like site:blah.blah or quoted searches, or something I happened to search for and click on before (but couldn't find in history or had found on another computer). Finding novel things is a pain.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I have nothing to point to, but my experience is that enclosing terms in quotes makes no actual difference. Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.
ceejayoz 7y ago
I wind up having to add "wiki" to about 25% of queries.
cinnamonheart 7y ago
I do this sometimes, and it still ignores the quoted words in favour of giving me whatever results they want. I'm not sure when it was changed to no longer require quoted words in the results, but I usually just give up on the search at that point.
matt4077 7y ago
That's actually not what's happening in OP's search (at least when I run it): Germany is included in every single snippet I see, it just isn't relevant for most of them. "ambassador to germany" works, though.
rasz 7y ago
Did you really mean "us" "ambassador" "germany"? Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead:

by spurgu 7y ago

zerocrates 7y ago

It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.

spurgu 7y ago
Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.
- zerocrates 7y ago
  Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that, rather than the other way around. With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
JohnFen 7y ago
Even those messages are very unreliable, though.

DoingIsLearning 7y ago

The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries. My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google. For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.

dsl 7y ago
Do you have any evidence to support that? The Google documentation indicates quotes are still the exact match operator https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
- DoingIsLearning 7y ago
  I stand corrected, I wanted to provide some examples but I cannot reproduce this anymore. From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query. Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    There was a time, several years ago now, where that was happening pretty regularly to me. It's gotten better, but since 2009 or so Google search quality has been on the decline for me. It only works well when I use things like site:blah.blah or quoted searches, or something I happened to search for and click on before (but couldn't find in history or had found on another computer). Finding novel things is a pain.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I have nothing to point to, but my experience is that enclosing terms in quotes makes no actual difference. Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.

ceejayoz 7y ago

I wind up having to add "wiki" to about 25% of queries.

cinnamonheart 7y ago

I do this sometimes, and it still ignores the quoted words in favour of giving me whatever results they want. I'm not sure when it was changed to no longer require quoted words in the results, but I usually just give up on the search at that point.

matt4077 7y ago

That's actually not what's happening in OP's search (at least when I run it): Germany is included in every single snippet I see, it just isn't relevant for most of them. "ambassador to germany" works, though.

rasz 7y ago

Did you really mean "us" "ambassador" "germany"? Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead: