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I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a n

I still don’t get why. It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.

rvnx 5y ago
Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads
- richardfey 5y ago
  Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.
- 35mm 5y ago
  Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.
derefr 5y ago
> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day. > the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long. That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.
- dmurray 5y ago
  > That's not the algorithm's fault per se; Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.
  - derefr 5y ago
    What I'm saying is that the "recipe" part of a recipe website is a commodity – there is no "authoritative" source for a given recipe, unless that recipe is too niche in appeal to end up widely disseminated. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw) has a pretty good coverage of the topic. Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff. Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?
  - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
    Try Kagi.com, you can rank domains however you want
    - loonster 5y ago
      What I really want is biased search results of my choosing. $10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.
      - scim-knox-twox 5y ago
thisNeeds2BeSad 5y ago
Because somebody could have crafted a superior search using their refined search as an API, destroying the Add Revenue
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The last time this came up, Google demonstrated that it still worked. Most of the examples of it not working people tried to provide are actually just unexpected exact matches in the HTML that the standard user doesnt see, so they seem like false positives or "surprisingly good" results not based on the page content.
vbezhenar 5y ago
They didn’t remove literal search. Put your literal in quotes.
- Schroedingersat 5y ago
  This stopped working reliably some time before last year.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did. Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush. If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization. On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?
      - saalweachter 5y ago
        I mean, I'm confident that the core of how it works -- "an exact match between the tokenized document and the tokenized query" -- hasn't changed in a very long time, but I can't really promise there wasn't another aspect I'm ignorant of that is responsible for the behavior you remember that changed somehow. "Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
      - 5y ago
Schroedingersat 5y ago
> What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most. Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.

rvnx 5y ago

Approximate match allows you to sell approximate/related-match ads

richardfey 5y ago
Brilliant observation, never thought of it. Now the quality degradation kinda starts to make sense.
35mm 5y ago
Exactly. Even within the ad platform they keep pushing advertisers to target ‘broad’ keywords instead of ‘exact match’ ones.

derefr 5y ago

> It cannot be so difficult for them to keep things like literal search, can it? Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day. > the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long. That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.

dmurray 5y ago
> That's not the algorithm's fault per se; Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.
- derefr 5y ago
  What I'm saying is that the "recipe" part of a recipe website is a commodity – there is no "authoritative" source for a given recipe, unless that recipe is too niche in appeal to end up widely disseminated. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsNLzyqqINw) has a pretty good coverage of the topic. Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff. Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  Try Kagi.com, you can rank domains however you want
  - loonster 5y ago
    What I really want is biased search results of my choosing. $10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.
    - scim-knox-twox 5y ago

thisNeeds2BeSad 5y ago

Because somebody could have crafted a superior search using their refined search as an API, destroying the Add Revenue

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

The last time this came up, Google demonstrated that it still worked. Most of the examples of it not working people tried to provide are actually just unexpected exact matches in the HTML that the standard user doesnt see, so they seem like false positives or "surprisingly good" results not based on the page content.

vbezhenar 5y ago

They didn’t remove literal search. Put your literal in quotes.

Schroedingersat 5y ago
This stopped working reliably some time before last year.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Eh, it's not so much that it stopped working as it is that it never worked the way you thought it did. Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush. If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization. On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?
    - saalweachter 5y ago
      I mean, I'm confident that the core of how it works -- "an exact match between the tokenized document and the tokenized query" -- hasn't changed in a very long time, but I can't really promise there wasn't another aspect I'm ignorant of that is responsible for the behavior you remember that changed somehow. "Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
    - 5y ago

Schroedingersat 5y ago

> What is the incentive to remove it and replace it with a needlessly more complex almost literal but still fuzzy search? Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most. Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.