8 ms·

Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or bo

Google has definitely stopped being able to find the things I need. Pasting stack traces and error messages. Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. None of it works anymore. Does this mean they are ripe for disruption or has search gotten harder?

MrEldritch 7y ago
I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.
- echelon 7y ago
  Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely computer friendly for ingestion and remixing. It not only turned search into a problem we could all solve, but gave us rails to start linking disparate content into a graph of meaningful relationships. But instead Google wanted to make things less strict, less semantic, harder to search, and easier to author whatever the hell you wanted. I'm sure it has nothing to do with making it difficult for other entrants to find their way into search space or take away ad-viewing eyeballs. It was all about making HTML easy and forgiving. It's a good thing they like other machine-friendly semantic formats like RSS and Atom... "Human friendly authorship" was on the other end of the axis from "easy for machines to consume". I can't believe we trusted the search monopoly to choose the winner of that race.
  - pbourke 7y ago
    It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.
    - echelon 7y ago
      > 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. You don't think we'd have rich tooling to support it and make it easy to author? Once people are using it with success, others will follow.
      - majewsky 7y ago
        The breakthrough would be when Google were to rank pages with proper semantic markup higher. Just look at AMP. (Of course that won't ever happen, but that's what would be needed.)
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      If WordPress outputs semantic output that instantly gives you a lot more than 0.0001%. The rest would follow as soon as it improves discoverability of their content
      - plorkyeran 7y ago
        Wordpress can't magically infer semantic meaning from user input any better than Google can. The whole point of the semantic web is to have humans specifically mark their intention. A better UI for semantic tagging would help for that, but it would still be reliant on the user clicking the right buttons rather than just using whichever thing results in the correct visual appearance.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    I work for Google but not on search. I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. There are currently multiple competing microdata formats out there than enable you to specify any kind of metadata but they still won't help if spammers fill those too. Maybe some sort of webring of trust where trusted people can endorse other sites and the chain breaks if somebody is found endorsing crap? (as in, you lose trust and everybody under you too)
    - echelon 7y ago
      > I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. That's not so hard. It's one of the first problems Google solved. PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... I'd much rather tackle this problem in isolation than the search problem we have now. The trust graph is different from the core problem of extracting meaning from documents. Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure, which is a hard problem we're currently trying to use ML and NLP to solve.
      - grey-area 7y ago
        >Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure HTML has a lot of structure already (for example all levels of heading are easy to pick out, lists are easy to pick out), and Google does encourage use of semantic tags (for example for review scores, or author details, or hotel details). For most searches I don't think the problem lies with being able to read meaning - the problem is you can't trust the page author to tell you what the page is about, or link to the right pages, because spammers lie. Semantic tags don't help with that at all and it's a hard problem to differentiate spam and good content for a given reader - the reader might not even know the difference.
      - ori_b 7y ago
        > PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... What prevents spammers from signing articles? How do you implement this without driving authors to throw their hands in the air and give up?
    - bsanr2 7y ago
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Good machine-readable ("semantic") information will only be provided if incentives aren't misaligned against it, as they are on much of the commercial (as opposed to academic, hobbyist, etc.) Web. Given misaligned incentives, these features will be subverted and abused, as we saw back in the 1990s with <meta description="etc."> tags and the like.
  - acdha 7y ago
    > Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. Can you explain in technical details what you think was lost by Google launching a browser or what properties were unique to XHTML? Everything you listed above is possible with HTML5 (see e.g. schema.org) and has been for many years so I think it would be better to look at the failure to have market incentives which support that outcome.
  - overgard 7y ago
    I don't think there's any reason to think google was responsible for the semantic web not taking off. People just didn't care that much. It may have been a generally useful idea, but it didn't solve anyone's problem directly enough to matter.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
If they were ripe for disruption and it was easy to do this disrupting just be returning better search results, and returning better search results was an easily doable thing then I suppose all the other functioning businesses that have a stake in web search would already be doing that disrupting. Search disrupted catalogs. What will disrupt search?
- masonhensley 7y ago
  Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs? Not joking I have a feeling subject specific topics will be further distributed based on expertise & trust.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Return of the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ? Heh.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    That's exactly what github's Awesome lists are: Decentralized, democratized handcrafted subject-specific catalogs
    - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
      If they became important sources of information outside technically competent people I suppose we would end up with a bunch of Awesome lists of Content Farms!
  - mikehollinger 7y ago
    > Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs? I think those are called books. ;-)
  - asdff 7y ago
    Pubmed is an excellent example of a boutique search engine.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
tyingq 7y ago
My guess is that suppressing spammy pages got too hard. So they applied some kind of big hammer that has a high false positive rate. You're getting the best of what's left. Maybe also some quality decline in their gradual shift to less hand weighted attributes and more ML.
- bhartzer 7y ago
  Well that “big hammer” so to speak is that they tend to favor sites that have a lot of trust and authority. Someone mentioned that the sites that have the answer typically is buried in the results. That’s because they tend to favor big brands and authoritative sites. And those sites oftentimes don’t have the answer to the search query. Google’s results have gotten worse and worse over the years.
- basscomm 7y ago
  My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary, including: searching for synonyms for words I searched for instead of the specific words I chose, excluding words to increase the number of results (even though the words they exclude are usually the most important to the query), trying to figure out what it thinks I asked for instead of what I actually asked for. I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).
  - klint 7y ago
    I was going to reply with something along the same lines. Dropping the keyest keywords is a particularly big pet peeve of mine. For those "needle in a haystack" type queries, instead of pages that include both $keyword1 and $keyword2, I often get a mix of the top results for each keyword. The problem is compounded by news sites that include links to other recent stories in their sidebars. So I might find articles about $keyword1 that just happen to have completely unrelated but recent articles about $keyword2 in the sidebar. It also appears that Google and DDG both often ignore "advanced" options like putting exact phrase searches in quotation marks, using a - sign to exclude keywords, etc. None of this seems to have cut down on SEO spam results either, especially once you get past the first page or two of results. I suspect it all comes down to trying to handle the most common types of queries. Indeed, if I'm searching for something uncomplicated, like the name of the CEO of a company or something like that, the results come out just fine. Longtail searches probably aren't much of a priority, especially when there's not much competition.
ma2rten 7y ago
Did you try putting them in quotes? EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.
- tokai 7y ago
  Google blatantly disregard quotes.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Reference?
    - eitland 7y ago
      Will you take my word for it? They not only disregard quotes but also their own verbatim setting.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        Asking for a reference helps: - Establish the behaviour as documented. - In representing and demonstrating this to others. It's not that I doubt your word, but that I'd like to see a developed and credible case made. Because frankly that behaviour drives me to utter frustration and distraction. It's also a large part of the reason I no longer use, nor trust, Google Web Search as my principle online search tool.
        eitland 7y ago
        I see. I'll try to make a habit out of collecting those again. That said, I might have something on an old blog somewhere. I'll see if I can find it before work starts... Edit: found it here http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html?m=1 http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-... . It is from 2013 and had probably been going on for a while already at that point. Edit2: For those who are still relying on Google, here's a nice hack I discovered that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else: Sometimes you might feel that your search experience is even worse than usual. In those cases, try reporting anything in tje search results and then retry tje same search 30 minutes later. Chances are it will now magically work. It took quite a while for me to realize this and I think in the beginning I might not have realized how fast it worked. It seemed totally unrealistic however that a fkx would have been created and a new version deployed in such a short time so my best explanation is they are A/B-testing some really dumb changes and then pulling out whoever complains from the test group. Thinking about it this might also be a crazy explanation for why search is so bad today compared to ten years ago: There's no feedback whatsoever so most sane users probably give up talking to the wall after one or two attempts. This leaves them with the impression that everyone is happy, so they just continue on the path back to becoming the search engines they replaced.
baggy_trough 7y ago
I've been using DDG as a good enough search engine for most things, but when I sometimes fall back to Google, it blows me away how many ads are on the page pretending to be results!
- cgriswald 7y ago
  'if not ddg(search) { ddg("!g " + search) }' has been my go-to method for awhile now; but as time has progressed, the results from DuckDuckGo have either been getting better, or the Google results have been getting worse; because usually if I can't find it on DDG now, I can't find it on Google either.
  - thom 7y ago
    I use DDG by default, but I can feel myself mentally flinching unless I basically know what I'm looking for already (i.e. I know I'll end up on StackOverflow). When I'm actually _searching_, it's useless, and I'll always !g.
- klingonopera 7y ago
  Same here, I actually prefer DDG to Google now, even for regional (Germany) results. When I switched, about a year and a half ago, I felt like I was switching to a lesser quality search engine (it was an ethical choice and done because I can), that, however, gradually and constantly got better, whereas Google went the opposite path. Nowdays I only really use Google to leech bandwidth off their maps services. Despite there being a very good alternative available, OpenStreetMaps, they unfortunately appear to have limited (or at least, way less than Google) bandwidth at their disposal... A pity though, because their maps are so awesome, the bicycle map layer with elevation lines is any boy scout's wet dream... but yeah, to find the next hairdresser, Google'll do. Speaking of bandwidth and OSM reminds me, is there an "SETI-but-for-bandwidth-not-CPU-cycles" kind of thing one could help out with? Like a torrent for map data? EDIT: Maybe their bandwidth problems are also more the result of a different philosophy about these things. OSM is likely "Download your own offline copy, save everybody's bandwidth and resources" (highly recommended for smartphones, especially in bandwidth-poor Germany) whereas Google is "I don't care about bandwith, your data is worth it".
blattimwind 7y ago
> Pasting stack traces and error messages. I cannot fathom the number of times I've pasted an error message enclosed by quotes and got garbage results, and then an hour of troubleshooting and searching later I come across a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim. The garbage results are generally completely unrelated stuff (a lot of Windows forum posts) or pages were a few of the words, or similar words, appear. Despite the search query being a fixed string not only does Google fail to find a verbatim instance of it, but instead of admitting this, they return nonsense results. > Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. I can confirm this part as well, searching for a very specific phrase will generally find anything but the article in question, despite it being in the search index. Zero Recall Search.
- fouc 7y ago
  It seems like pasting a very large search query should actually make it easier for the search engine to find relevant results, but given that this doesn't happen suggests that the search query handler is being too clever and getting in the way.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  > a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim. Did you put the error message in quotes? I've never had this problem.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    I, too, have pasted error messages verbatim into Google queries only to have garbage returned. I did include the error message in quotes. I started filtering sites from the results eg `-site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com` etc to start to get a hint of other developers with similar issues and/or some bug reports and/or documentation and/or source code.
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      > -site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com` A mock-google that excludes quora and optionally targets stackoverflow/github sounds useful.
darkerside 7y ago
Perhaps expectations have risen over time
Mauricio_ 7y ago
Are you sure there's a page on the web that has the stack trace you search for? Maybe there just isn't anything.

MrEldritch 7y ago

I think the Web just kind of stopped being full of searchable information.

echelon 7y ago
Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. All of that is extremely computer friendly for ingestion and remixing. It not only turned search into a problem we could all solve, but gave us rails to start linking disparate content into a graph of meaningful relationships. But instead Google wanted to make things less strict, less semantic, harder to search, and easier to author whatever the hell you wanted. I'm sure it has nothing to do with making it difficult for other entrants to find their way into search space or take away ad-viewing eyeballs. It was all about making HTML easy and forgiving. It's a good thing they like other machine-friendly semantic formats like RSS and Atom... "Human friendly authorship" was on the other end of the axis from "easy for machines to consume". I can't believe we trusted the search monopoly to choose the winner of that race.
- pbourke 7y ago
  It wouldn’t matter. 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. Everyone else would continue to serve up puréed tag soup.
  - echelon 7y ago
    > 0.0001% of content authors would employ semantic markup. You don't think we'd have rich tooling to support it and make it easy to author? Once people are using it with success, others will follow.
    - majewsky 7y ago
      The breakthrough would be when Google were to rank pages with proper semantic markup higher. Just look at AMP. (Of course that won't ever happen, but that's what would be needed.)
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    If WordPress outputs semantic output that instantly gives you a lot more than 0.0001%. The rest would follow as soon as it improves discoverability of their content
    - plorkyeran 7y ago
      Wordpress can't magically infer semantic meaning from user input any better than Google can. The whole point of the semantic web is to have humans specifically mark their intention. A better UI for semantic tagging would help for that, but it would still be reliant on the user clicking the right buttons rather than just using whichever thing results in the correct visual appearance.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I work for Google but not on search. I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. There are currently multiple competing microdata formats out there than enable you to specify any kind of metadata but they still won't help if spammers fill those too. Maybe some sort of webring of trust where trusted people can endorse other sites and the chain breaks if somebody is found endorsing crap? (as in, you lose trust and everybody under you too)
  - echelon 7y ago
    > I think in this case semantic web would not work, unless there was some way to weed out spam. That's not so hard. It's one of the first problems Google solved. PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... I'd much rather tackle this problem in isolation than the search problem we have now. The trust graph is different from the core problem of extracting meaning from documents. Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure, which is a hard problem we're currently trying to use ML and NLP to solve.
    - grey-area 7y ago
      >Semantic tags make it easy to derive this from structure HTML has a lot of structure already (for example all levels of heading are easy to pick out, lists are easy to pick out), and Google does encourage use of semantic tags (for example for review scores, or author details, or hotel details). For most searches I don't think the problem lies with being able to read meaning - the problem is you can't trust the page author to tell you what the page is about, or link to the right pages, because spammers lie. Semantic tags don't help with that at all and it's a hard problem to differentiate spam and good content for a given reader - the reader might not even know the difference.
    - ori_b 7y ago
      > PageRank, web of trust, pubkey signing articles... What prevents spammers from signing articles? How do you implement this without driving authors to throw their hands in the air and give up?
  - bsanr2 7y ago
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Good machine-readable ("semantic") information will only be provided if incentives aren't misaligned against it, as they are on much of the commercial (as opposed to academic, hobbyist, etc.) Web. Given misaligned incentives, these features will be subverted and abused, as we saw back in the 1990s with <meta description="etc."> tags and the like.
- acdha 7y ago
  > Imagine if instead of kneecapping XHTML and the semantic web properties it had baked in, Google had not entered into the web browser space. We might be able to mark articles up with `<article>`, and set their subject tags to the URN of the people, places, and things involved. We could give things a published and revised date with change logs. Mark up questions, solutions, code and language metadata. Can you explain in technical details what you think was lost by Google launching a browser or what properties were unique to XHTML? Everything you listed above is possible with HTML5 (see e.g. schema.org) and has been for many years so I think it would be better to look at the failure to have market incentives which support that outcome.
- overgard 7y ago
  I don't think there's any reason to think google was responsible for the semantic web not taking off. People just didn't care that much. It may have been a generally useful idea, but it didn't solve anyone's problem directly enough to matter.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

If they were ripe for disruption and it was easy to do this disrupting just be returning better search results, and returning better search results was an easily doable thing then I suppose all the other functioning businesses that have a stake in web search would already be doing that disrupting. Search disrupted catalogs. What will disrupt search?

masonhensley 7y ago
Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs? Not joking I have a feeling subject specific topics will be further distributed based on expertise & trust.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Return of the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ? Heh.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  That's exactly what github's Awesome lists are: Decentralized, democratized handcrafted subject-specific catalogs
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    If they became important sources of information outside technically competent people I suppose we would end up with a bunch of Awesome lists of Content Farms!
- mikehollinger 7y ago
  > Boutique hand crafted artisanal catalogs? I think those are called books. ;-)
- asdff 7y ago
  Pubmed is an excellent example of a boutique search engine.
- bagacrap 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago

My guess is that suppressing spammy pages got too hard. So they applied some kind of big hammer that has a high false positive rate. You're getting the best of what's left. Maybe also some quality decline in their gradual shift to less hand weighted attributes and more ML.

bhartzer 7y ago
Well that “big hammer” so to speak is that they tend to favor sites that have a lot of trust and authority. Someone mentioned that the sites that have the answer typically is buried in the results. That’s because they tend to favor big brands and authoritative sites. And those sites oftentimes don’t have the answer to the search query. Google’s results have gotten worse and worse over the years.
basscomm 7y ago
My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary, including: searching for synonyms for words I searched for instead of the specific words I chose, excluding words to increase the number of results (even though the words they exclude are usually the most important to the query), trying to figure out what it thinks I asked for instead of what I actually asked for. I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).
- klint 7y ago
  I was going to reply with something along the same lines. Dropping the keyest keywords is a particularly big pet peeve of mine. For those "needle in a haystack" type queries, instead of pages that include both $keyword1 and $keyword2, I often get a mix of the top results for each keyword. The problem is compounded by news sites that include links to other recent stories in their sidebars. So I might find articles about $keyword1 that just happen to have completely unrelated but recent articles about $keyword2 in the sidebar. It also appears that Google and DDG both often ignore "advanced" options like putting exact phrase searches in quotation marks, using a - sign to exclude keywords, etc. None of this seems to have cut down on SEO spam results either, especially once you get past the first page or two of results. I suspect it all comes down to trying to handle the most common types of queries. Indeed, if I'm searching for something uncomplicated, like the name of the CEO of a company or something like that, the results come out just fine. Longtail searches probably aren't much of a priority, especially when there's not much competition.

ma2rten 7y ago

Did you try putting them in quotes? EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.

tokai 7y ago
Google blatantly disregard quotes.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Reference?
  - eitland 7y ago
    Will you take my word for it? They not only disregard quotes but also their own verbatim setting.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Asking for a reference helps: - Establish the behaviour as documented. - In representing and demonstrating this to others. It's not that I doubt your word, but that I'd like to see a developed and credible case made. Because frankly that behaviour drives me to utter frustration and distraction. It's also a large part of the reason I no longer use, nor trust, Google Web Search as my principle online search tool.
      - eitland 7y ago
        I see. I'll try to make a habit out of collecting those again. That said, I might have something on an old blog somewhere. I'll see if I can find it before work starts... Edit: found it here http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-search-results.html?m=1 http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-... . It is from 2013 and had probably been going on for a while already at that point. Edit2: For those who are still relying on Google, here's a nice hack I discovered that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else: Sometimes you might feel that your search experience is even worse than usual. In those cases, try reporting anything in tje search results and then retry tje same search 30 minutes later. Chances are it will now magically work. It took quite a while for me to realize this and I think in the beginning I might not have realized how fast it worked. It seemed totally unrealistic however that a fkx would have been created and a new version deployed in such a short time so my best explanation is they are A/B-testing some really dumb changes and then pulling out whoever complains from the test group. Thinking about it this might also be a crazy explanation for why search is so bad today compared to ten years ago: There's no feedback whatsoever so most sane users probably give up talking to the wall after one or two attempts. This leaves them with the impression that everyone is happy, so they just continue on the path back to becoming the search engines they replaced.

baggy_trough 7y ago

I've been using DDG as a good enough search engine for most things, but when I sometimes fall back to Google, it blows me away how many ads are on the page pretending to be results!

cgriswald 7y ago
'if not ddg(search) { ddg("!g " + search) }' has been my go-to method for awhile now; but as time has progressed, the results from DuckDuckGo have either been getting better, or the Google results have been getting worse; because usually if I can't find it on DDG now, I can't find it on Google either.
- thom 7y ago
  I use DDG by default, but I can feel myself mentally flinching unless I basically know what I'm looking for already (i.e. I know I'll end up on StackOverflow). When I'm actually _searching_, it's useless, and I'll always !g.
klingonopera 7y ago
Same here, I actually prefer DDG to Google now, even for regional (Germany) results. When I switched, about a year and a half ago, I felt like I was switching to a lesser quality search engine (it was an ethical choice and done because I can), that, however, gradually and constantly got better, whereas Google went the opposite path. Nowdays I only really use Google to leech bandwidth off their maps services. Despite there being a very good alternative available, OpenStreetMaps, they unfortunately appear to have limited (or at least, way less than Google) bandwidth at their disposal... A pity though, because their maps are so awesome, the bicycle map layer with elevation lines is any boy scout's wet dream... but yeah, to find the next hairdresser, Google'll do. Speaking of bandwidth and OSM reminds me, is there an "SETI-but-for-bandwidth-not-CPU-cycles" kind of thing one could help out with? Like a torrent for map data? EDIT: Maybe their bandwidth problems are also more the result of a different philosophy about these things. OSM is likely "Download your own offline copy, save everybody's bandwidth and resources" (highly recommended for smartphones, especially in bandwidth-poor Germany) whereas Google is "I don't care about bandwith, your data is worth it".

blattimwind 7y ago

> Pasting stack traces and error messages. I cannot fathom the number of times I've pasted an error message enclosed by quotes and got garbage results, and then an hour of troubleshooting and searching later I come across a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim. The garbage results are generally completely unrelated stuff (a lot of Windows forum posts) or pages were a few of the words, or similar words, appear. Despite the search query being a fixed string not only does Google fail to find a verbatim instance of it, but instead of admitting this, they return nonsense results. > Needle in a haystack phrases from an article or book. I can confirm this part as well, searching for a very specific phrase will generally find anything but the article in question, despite it being in the search index. Zero Recall Search.

fouc 7y ago
It seems like pasting a very large search query should actually make it easier for the search engine to find relevant results, but given that this doesn't happen suggests that the search query handler is being too clever and getting in the way.
AlexCoventry 7y ago
> a Github/bugtracker issue, which was nowhere in the search results, were the exact error message appears verbatim. Did you put the error message in quotes? I've never had this problem.
- inetknght 7y ago
  I, too, have pasted error messages verbatim into Google queries only to have garbage returned. I did include the error message in quotes. I started filtering sites from the results eg `-site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com` etc to start to get a hint of other developers with similar issues and/or some bug reports and/or documentation and/or source code.
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    > -site:quora.com site:stackoverflow.com site:github.com` A mock-google that excludes quora and optionally targets stackoverflow/github sounds useful.

darkerside 7y ago

Perhaps expectations have risen over time

Mauricio_ 7y ago

Are you sure there's a page on the web that has the stack trace you search for? Maybe there just isn't anything.