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Google's losing fight to spammers is a part of the problem. I'm not arguing that Google is sacrificing quality for revenue. Though I'm sure Google has the run

Google's losing fight to spammers is a part of the problem. I'm not arguing that Google is sacrificing quality for revenue. Though I'm sure Google has the run the numbers on such practices. Instead, I'm arguing that Google search has lost some ability to differentiate between generic and specific. I'm thinking of any of countless cases where I give up on keyword bingo and make a phone call or post in a chat app to get the information I couldn't squeeze out of a Google search. Google often chops and screws keywords that should not be. Quoting does not yield expected results, even when I can ultimately find the exact quote on an eventually discovered result. Fuzzy matches often pollute results for similar but distinct searches. Differentiation is not always easy or even possible. Fuzzy matches regularly fuzz the wrong words for my searches. Results often outdated by years or even over a decade. Limiting by time often returns results outside the range. Mostly in the 'results' before the results. I often find myself thinking some searches would be easier with a hand written regex.

jeffbee 6y ago
You touched on what I was driving at in my original comment. There is no doubt whatsoever that if you were able to make a full pass over the corpus with a regular expression you could find docs you can't find on Google's search. But that's obviously not how their search works. They have to make it work at their scale, which dictates the format of the index, which in turn limits the possibilities for query operators. They have to make these design choices so that their product can exist at all. "Grep the world" is a fine strategy for corpora up to a certain size, and I do wish there was a product that just stored everything I've ever seen and let me run expensive searches on that.
creato 6y ago
I think this fuzzy logic of search pisses off people like us (the HN demographic) but makes most users happy. Have you seen how tech illiterate people use Google? They type in questions and phrases with words like "a" and "the" in them. This is who google is optimizing for, because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like this for every one of us.

jeffbee 6y ago

You touched on what I was driving at in my original comment. There is no doubt whatsoever that if you were able to make a full pass over the corpus with a regular expression you could find docs you can't find on Google's search. But that's obviously not how their search works. They have to make it work at their scale, which dictates the format of the index, which in turn limits the possibilities for query operators. They have to make these design choices so that their product can exist at all. "Grep the world" is a fine strategy for corpora up to a certain size, and I do wish there was a product that just stored everything I've ever seen and let me run expensive searches on that.

creato 6y ago

I think this fuzzy logic of search pisses off people like us (the HN demographic) but makes most users happy. Have you seen how tech illiterate people use Google? They type in questions and phrases with words like "a" and "the" in them. This is who google is optimizing for, because there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like this for every one of us.