4 ms·

Ask HN: Is there a search engine that performs “Exact Search”?

27 points by ColinWright 5y ago

Google tries to figure out what you might mean and then return appropriate results, but sometimes I want an exact search. Even putting quotation marks around the phrase doesn't work reliably. The same is largely true of DDG as well. So ... what do you use when you want to do an "exact search" on the web? Edit: In reply to a couple of comments ... I don't have a recent example to hand, and recent attempts have failed to reproduce the exact behaviour. Also, of course, Google tries to customise search results, so my example of a screw-up might behave perfectly for you. But I will keep trying to get an reproducable example, and would welcome examples from anyone else. Edit 2: Example: I have open in another tab a specific web page, and from it I have copy/pasted "So a germ of an idea is enough" into Google, which fails to find it. Another phrase from that page is found, so the page has been indexed. Indeed, if I use the "site:" qualifier, it does find the reference. This is not exactly the behaviour I recently saw and was asking about, but it's close enough to be of interest.

f_allwein 5y ago
I never had a case when Google with quotes did not work as intended. Can you give an example?
- ColinWright 5y ago
  I've edited the question to be more specific.
- brudgers 5y ago
  I am glad it works on your machine. Happens to me not infrequently in the long tail.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Special characters is pretty iffy, even with quotes
ryan-duve 5y ago
Do you mind adding an example of the behavior you're describing either here or in the OP? I feel like I've seen what you're describing but every quoted term I search for gets exact matches.
- ColinWright 5y ago
  I've edited the question to be more specific.
brudgers 5y ago
[a crude speculative outline] No. Because to a first approximation, it is not possible to make it work all the time in practice. Results returned are best effort. Best effort is largely limited by latency. At the scale of the entire web, parts of the index will be absolutely inaccessible due to partitioning and practically inaccessible because they are sitting on disk (or simply don’t exist because they wouldn’t fit into memory) or are so far away that they can’t reliably be returned within the limits of acceptable latency — e.g. on a server in Japan for a London query (and anyway how likely is relevance of Japanese results?). I mean maybe there are results for the “site” qualifier in memory on the server your query hits and maybe their aren’t. Either way, Google’s going to return results in 250ms if that’s the performance target. Either way Google’s not going to spin for twenty minutes or seconds it would take to crawl the site, process the results, and build the inverted index. Everything is engineered. The engineering is guided by statistics. But so is performance. Sometimes better information is close by in hot memory. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes bandwidth is saturated. Sometimes your cell service is slow. That’s probably why HN uses Algolia even though it costs money.
- justinclift 5y ago
  > No. Because to a first approximation, it is not possible in practice. That doesn't really seem to fit how things work. It "used" to work, at least with DDG until a few months ago. eg, giving a search query of: "some specific IT term" "some other specific term" linux Would actually return pages with those first two terms in them, and a "best effort" for the last term. However, now their results are often garbage. It's most likely the search will have a list of results with neither of the first two "exact" terms in them, and may only have some resemblance to the third term. Not sure what's going on, but it's been a huge step backwards and I'm now personally open to using an alternative search engine that actually works. _Not_ Google nor Bing though.
  - brudgers 5y ago
    Sorry for not being clear. I have updated my comment. I meant it is not possible to make it work all the time. In my experience, Google etc. have always done better when the search is about computing, e.g. when it is about IT terms. In the long tail away from computing and a very broad definition of popular culture, it is not uncommon for quotation to make no difference at all. Particularly when the quotation has a slight resemblance to something broadly in popular culture...or god forbid a product. It is of course possible to get exact matches in theory. I mean your favorite text editor can do it in your source files. And in the early 1990's Web Crawler could do it for the web. But today, it's cosine similarity plus special exceptions looking at an arbitrary subset of the entire sharded index that happens to be in hot memory of the server cluster your query hits bounded by current load and the target service level for returning something. I wouldn't be surprised that your experience has recently degraded in this regard. The web is bigger every day.
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
People sharing names with celebs?
nkurz 5y ago
I don't know if it still forces the behavior you want, but it's possible that "Verbatim" mode will meet your needs. To activate it, look under the search bar after you have results for the button marked "Tools". Click this, then change the pulldown from "All results" to "Verbatim". Alternatively (if doing it programatically) add "tbs=li:1" to the search query.
- ColinWright 5y ago
  That's a really interesting idea. I tried this search: "I'm not a mathematician or a puzzler" That returned this result: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpeakingAtThe2017MathsJam.html https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpeakingAtThe2017MathsJam.htm... Sure enough, the phrase is on that page. Exactly that phrase. Then I followed your directions and switched to "Verbatim" mode, and got this result: Your search - "I'm not a mathematician or a puzzler" - did not match any documents. That's not what I was expecting.
  - nkurz 5y ago
    I tried your example, and got what seem to be non-deterministic results. The first time I searched for "I'm not a mathematician or a puzzler", I got "No results", plus a long list of results for the same search without the quotes (which did not include solipsys.co.uk). I switched to Verbatim, and still got "No results", but no list of alternatives without the quotes. I then tried regular and Verbatim without the apostrophe in "I'm" ("Im", in case it was indexed without punctuation) and got the same non-results. Then I tried misspelling "mathmatician" an suddenly I got the hit on your site as a suggested alternative! Then I tried a regular search of the original correct phrase, and got your site as one would expect! Then I switched to Verbatim and again got "No results". I'm not sure what to make of this, but since the same search a couple minutes apart produced different results, there must be something happening behind the scenes. Maybe the different backends have different versions of the index, and Verbatim only uses the version without this phrase? Or maybe it's just chance and if one kept trying, one would eventually get it to work with Verbatim.
- justinclift 5y ago
  > To activate it, look under the search bar after you have results for the button marked "Tools". Hmmm, what search engine is that with? Guessing not DDG (?), as that's not showing a Tools button.
sjcoles 5y ago
I have had this begin to happen and the quality of results has taken a nosedive in the past 6 months. A good example would be to search for something in quotes that has multiple meanings. Ex: I was having issues with Chrome leaving around RDP-TCP### folders on terminal services boxes. Try as I might Google would not properly interpret "rdp-tcp" as a folder name and instead gave results about the tcp protocol and RDP. Searching for info on temp profiles only gave me info on roaming profiles. Eventually said fuck it and wrote a scheduled task to remove the files because I couldn't find any information on Google.
- Aulig 5y ago
  I had a very similar experience just yesterday when searching for exactly "run_async" would not work at all. It seems to always be an issue with the special characters.
rozab 5y ago
Can you give the site where your example actually comes from? We have this discussion a lot, and rarely is any actual evidence dissected.
aaron695 5y ago
> Edit 2 .... I use the "site:" qualifier You have literally NOT given an example again this is true. We have to trust you the "site:" qualifier somehow works? I think this is user error. Google does “Exact Search”, to answer the question asked. There will be practical exceptions (And many many theoretical exceptions), but anyone at that level will know work arounds.
PhantomGremlin 5y ago
Google search has turned to shit (pardon my French). Here is a recent HN discussion about it. I rant about it there. I won't repeat myself here. You can read plenty of other people say the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113007
unearth3d 5y ago
I get better results using an incognito window and adblock, or sometimes a basic VPN. Neither want or need any Google customisation.
ColinWright 5y ago
Not knowing how much Google will change its results when it gets lots of related enquiries in a short time, I was reluctant to be too specific. Someone else has now provided an explicit example[0], and I'll provide another example of similar (although not identical) behaviour. Consider this search: "I'm not a mathematician or a puzzler" That finds this page: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpeakingAtThe2017MathsJam.html https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SpeakingAtThe2017MathsJam.htm... This search fails: "So a germ of an idea is enough" That fails, even though it's taken from the same page. This search succeeds: site:www.solipsys.co.uk "So a germ of an idea is enough" This is the example the triggered the question, but the question itself is about experiences I feel I've been having more often over the past 6 or 12 months, and that's better illustrated by the example given in [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28508675

justinclift 5y ago
Unfortunately "Recently degraded" means more like "fell off a cliff". :( The problem manifests itself again just now. Searching for these terms just gives bullshit results, instead of saying something useful like "no matches" or actually showing pages that meet what I asked for: "JBL" "ACTIVE-1" "Linux" Those specific search terms are due to my trying to work out whether the JBL ACTIVE-1 will work under linux. eg for driving my JBL LSR305/310S active monitors. There's a USB port, but no mention of Linux on the ACTIVE-1 product page. ;)
- brudgers 5y ago
  I understand the issue. I do a lot of non-IT (and non-consumer) related searching. Google quoting started getting worse for me probably ten years ago. And by "worse" I mean that before that, persistent searching could often "summon" better results. That is if I kept checking back with the same search terms, the results would tend to get better. Sometimes right away. Sometimes after a few hours or even days. In other words, poor searches would tend to get better and my mental model was that the index I was hitting would change based on my search and lack of interest in previous results. On the other hand, Google's results for technical topics (aka "things Google engineers value") has always been much better. I suspect this is because, search results require a lot of hand tuning of the "did you mean JPL" when "JBL" is in the search (not saying that's an actual example). --- I went over the dunes and sat by the Pacific after my last comment. I have a plausible theory for the recent dropoff. There's only so much hot memory on a server. Everything Google might return is there: Ads, the web page inverted index, AMP pages, etc. Google is pre-rendering more content for uses that are or look a lot like AMP. That means there's less space available for other things. The business decision is between ads and inverted index space. Your query isn't about a product you are about to buy. There's no money in it. And what are you going to do, use Bing? It's an engineered system. Economics are part of engineering. Google is a for profit business. You are a user, not a customer.