4 ms·

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

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.
      - dannysullivan 5y ago
        On mobile and desktop, I'm getting a message saying that when you search for ["kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"] that we have no results. And there's not much we can do if there are no pages we find that match all those words you required be present. There just aren't the pages. What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches. IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that. Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing). Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking. To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.

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.
    - dannysullivan 5y ago
      On mobile and desktop, I'm getting a message saying that when you search for ["kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"] that we have no results. And there's not much we can do if there are no pages we find that match all those words you required be present. There just aren't the pages. What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches. IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that. Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing). Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking. To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.