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This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to q

This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue until recently.

siliconescapee 5y ago
I don't have any recent information on how google search works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced searchers received advanced results (and more visibility into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the advanced features and also seem to be reducing personalization of results to save compute resources. It's horrible. You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."
- dannysullivan 5y ago
  I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this. We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the results somehow.
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  I as a programmer can't imagine anyone building a search engine like this ? As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.
dannysullivan 5y ago
I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.
- artdigital 5y ago
  This is not the case in my experience. I type a query with some parts in quotes and often get lots of results that have in small letters at the bottom something along the lines of “does not include <word in quotes>”, with no in bold highlighted part showing the phrase in the page context. This was not the case in the past and google made sure the word I put in quotes is absolutely mentioned somewhere I’m guessing this happens when there are less results matching my phrase
  - dannysullivan 5y ago
    I would love if you or anyone who ever has this happen can share an example, if you're comfortable doing so. We'll debug. But if you quote something, we shouldn't show anything but that which matches the quoted material. Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all." And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words. Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.
    - DougWebb 5y ago
      I want to disassemble my sous vide device, because I broke it today. "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%22+%22disassembly%22&source=hp&oq=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%22+%22disassembly%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%2... Nothing useful at all. Nothing mentioning disassembly. Not even a YouTube link.
      - timdev2 5y ago

siliconescapee 5y ago

I don't have any recent information on how google search works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced searchers received advanced results (and more visibility into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the advanced features and also seem to be reducing personalization of results to save compute resources. It's horrible. You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."

dannysullivan 5y ago
I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this. We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the results somehow.
rawoke083600 5y ago
I as a programmer can't imagine anyone building a search engine like this ? As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.

dannysullivan 5y ago

I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.

artdigital 5y ago
This is not the case in my experience. I type a query with some parts in quotes and often get lots of results that have in small letters at the bottom something along the lines of “does not include <word in quotes>”, with no in bold highlighted part showing the phrase in the page context. This was not the case in the past and google made sure the word I put in quotes is absolutely mentioned somewhere I’m guessing this happens when there are less results matching my phrase
- dannysullivan 5y ago
  I would love if you or anyone who ever has this happen can share an example, if you're comfortable doing so. We'll debug. But if you quote something, we shouldn't show anything but that which matches the quoted material. Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all." And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words. Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.
  - DougWebb 5y ago
    I want to disassemble my sous vide device, because I broke it today. "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly" https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%22+%22disassembly%22&source=hp&oq=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%22+%22disassembly%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%2... Nothing useful at all. Nothing mentioning disassembly. Not even a YouTube link.
    - timdev2 5y ago