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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. Wh

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
      Unless it's changed in the past 56 minutes, the SERP is pretty up-front that it can't find any pages with all three of those. It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.
      - DougWebb 5y ago
        Mobile doesn't show that, at all. It also doesn't show that bit if you use the brand name "kitchenboss" instead of "kitchen boss", which I originally intended. My phone might have auto-corrected that without me noticing. Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says: Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes): It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search Then it goes on to show me lots of unrelated results, instead of showing me the 'not many' great matches for my search. If my search doesn't turn up many good results (let alone great), that fine. Show me what you've got, let me decide how to broaden my search to get more. All of the unrelated results being shown are marketing spam sites. That's not helpful.
        timdev2 5y ago
        Weird. On a computer, `"kitchenboss" "g320" "disassembly"` returns exactly six results, all of which appear to include the quoted terms. Plus the "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" message at the top. Which sounds like exactly what you want. I wonder why it's different on mobile.
primax 5y ago
I'm sorry but this has absolutely changed. I'm not sure why but quite often we are suggested results in queries that ignore quotes. The engine is even telling us that if omitted those terms. We don't have control over this and it's very frustrating.
- dannysullivan 5y ago
  We haven't changed anything. Promise. Honest. Not at all. But we definitely want to look into any cases where people feel this isn't working, so actual examples (if people are comfortable sharing) will really help. What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them. Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception. If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.
  - primax 5y ago
    Thanks Danny I'll try to whip up some examples. Interestingly I tried my pet peeve search, and it worked for the first time this year! It is for a specific recipe, and I search for 'ocau slow cooked balsamic beef'. I have had to manually find it in the archive of the overclockers.com.au forum for the past year, as Google seemingly forgot it existed no matter what search terms or operators I used. The main difference is I am using Firefox on Manjaro and not my historically typical environment for searching. Normally I would either be using Chrome on Windows or Chrome on iOS if I am in the kitchen. I will play around on some other devices and see what evidence I can find. P.s. I'm being referred in for a role at Google currently, is the Search team only in a specific area like Silicon Valley or is it a global team? Most of the jobs in Australia seem to be commercial facing, not product facing.
vdqtp3 5y ago
> If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I commented[1] about this a few months back with a random phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day also. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094
- Thorrez 5y ago
  I searched for "eggzackly this" and all 10 results on the first page contain the phrase, although most have punctuation in the middle. Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page. Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.
- dannysullivan 5y ago
  Punctuation matters. I explained this in another response, and I should have mentioned it as part of my response here. But to repeat, these are typical reasons why it might seem that quoted search isn't matching when it is: 1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available) In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched. I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.
- alickz 5y ago
  The article has been updated with a response from Danny Sullivan, the person you're responding to, which is worth a read. I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")
int_19h 5y ago
I routinely see queries with quoted keywords where results don't have them highlighted in the snippets on the results page (but do have other, non-quoted keywords highlighted!).
- dannysullivan 5y ago
  That doesn't mean the quoted words weren't present in the content. It just means our system didn't think creating a snippet around those words was the most relevant snippet. Which I get, in some cases, actually would be better. It's something we're looking at.
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Your system for snippet creation is so bad that according to you it's created a situation where many, many users believe that quotes don't work because of how bad it is. Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that. The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    If a snippet doesn't contain the words I searched for, I don't click it, because I assume Google has fucked up the search again and given me some irrelevant thing. If that is what has actually changed in the last few years making people think results are bad, the snippet algorithm, please revert that. I want to see the exact context that the words I typed appear in the page.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    In some cases? I'm literally asking for a specific word to be included no matter what; how could it be irrelevant to the quote used to describe a page?
Der_Einzige 5y ago
So, besides the possibility that you are flat out wrong (as another commentator claims you may be), let's assume that you're right. 1. This is still horrific UX/UI 2. The culture internally at Google seems to have a "we know better than the users" attitude in all things. 3. Query rewriting is a horrific technique in general with almost zero value to life/society outside of fixing spelling errors. Whatever your A/B testing says about it's purported utility is polluted by Google's own dark patterns and political whims of the managers who run the internal search organizations. It helps to actually know better than your users if you want to take the attitude in number 2. I don't believe that you or Google knows better than it's users, for many reasons previously enumerated in this thread and others. One day Google search is going to be displaced and it's current utilization of query rewriting techniques will be one of the fundamental reasons for this. You should take the absolutely massive amount of recent criticism and the fact that users repeatedly claim it's happening in the face of your claim it's not seriously rather than literally blaming the users writ large for a problem that is fundementally with the behavior of Google search.

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
    Unless it's changed in the past 56 minutes, the SERP is pretty up-front that it can't find any pages with all three of those. It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.
    - DougWebb 5y ago
      Mobile doesn't show that, at all. It also doesn't show that bit if you use the brand name "kitchenboss" instead of "kitchen boss", which I originally intended. My phone might have auto-corrected that without me noticing. Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says: Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes): It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search Then it goes on to show me lots of unrelated results, instead of showing me the 'not many' great matches for my search. If my search doesn't turn up many good results (let alone great), that fine. Show me what you've got, let me decide how to broaden my search to get more. All of the unrelated results being shown are marketing spam sites. That's not helpful.
      - timdev2 5y ago
        Weird. On a computer, `"kitchenboss" "g320" "disassembly"` returns exactly six results, all of which appear to include the quoted terms. Plus the "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" message at the top. Which sounds like exactly what you want. I wonder why it's different on mobile.

primax 5y ago

I'm sorry but this has absolutely changed. I'm not sure why but quite often we are suggested results in queries that ignore quotes. The engine is even telling us that if omitted those terms. We don't have control over this and it's very frustrating.

dannysullivan 5y ago
We haven't changed anything. Promise. Honest. Not at all. But we definitely want to look into any cases where people feel this isn't working, so actual examples (if people are comfortable sharing) will really help. What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them. Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception. If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.
- primax 5y ago
  Thanks Danny I'll try to whip up some examples. Interestingly I tried my pet peeve search, and it worked for the first time this year! It is for a specific recipe, and I search for 'ocau slow cooked balsamic beef'. I have had to manually find it in the archive of the overclockers.com.au forum for the past year, as Google seemingly forgot it existed no matter what search terms or operators I used. The main difference is I am using Firefox on Manjaro and not my historically typical environment for searching. Normally I would either be using Chrome on Windows or Chrome on iOS if I am in the kitchen. I will play around on some other devices and see what evidence I can find. P.s. I'm being referred in for a role at Google currently, is the Search team only in a specific area like Silicon Valley or is it a global team? Most of the jobs in Australia seem to be commercial facing, not product facing.

vdqtp3 5y ago

> If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I commented[1] about this a few months back with a random phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day also. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094

Thorrez 5y ago
I searched for "eggzackly this" and all 10 results on the first page contain the phrase, although most have punctuation in the middle. Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page. Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.
dannysullivan 5y ago
Punctuation matters. I explained this in another response, and I should have mentioned it as part of my response here. But to repeat, these are typical reasons why it might seem that quoted search isn't matching when it is: 1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available) In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched. I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.
alickz 5y ago
The article has been updated with a response from Danny Sullivan, the person you're responding to, which is worth a read. I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")

int_19h 5y ago

I routinely see queries with quoted keywords where results don't have them highlighted in the snippets on the results page (but do have other, non-quoted keywords highlighted!).

dannysullivan 5y ago
That doesn't mean the quoted words weren't present in the content. It just means our system didn't think creating a snippet around those words was the most relevant snippet. Which I get, in some cases, actually would be better. It's something we're looking at.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Your system for snippet creation is so bad that according to you it's created a situation where many, many users believe that quotes don't work because of how bad it is. Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that. The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.
- blindmute 5y ago
  If a snippet doesn't contain the words I searched for, I don't click it, because I assume Google has fucked up the search again and given me some irrelevant thing. If that is what has actually changed in the last few years making people think results are bad, the snippet algorithm, please revert that. I want to see the exact context that the words I typed appear in the page.
- int_19h 5y ago
  In some cases? I'm literally asking for a specific word to be included no matter what; how could it be irrelevant to the quote used to describe a page?

Der_Einzige 5y ago

So, besides the possibility that you are flat out wrong (as another commentator claims you may be), let's assume that you're right. 1. This is still horrific UX/UI 2. The culture internally at Google seems to have a "we know better than the users" attitude in all things. 3. Query rewriting is a horrific technique in general with almost zero value to life/society outside of fixing spelling errors. Whatever your A/B testing says about it's purported utility is polluted by Google's own dark patterns and political whims of the managers who run the internal search organizations. It helps to actually know better than your users if you want to take the attitude in number 2. I don't believe that you or Google knows better than it's users, for many reasons previously enumerated in this thread and others. One day Google search is going to be displaced and it's current utilization of query rewriting techniques will be one of the fundamental reasons for this. You should take the absolutely massive amount of recent criticism and the fact that users repeatedly claim it's happening in the face of your claim it's not seriously rather than literally blaming the users writ large for a problem that is fundementally with the behavior of Google search.