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We're improving search results when you use quotes
- droptablemain 4y agoThis functionality has been totally degraded over the past few years to the point where it's hardly useful. Hopefully this is the tide turning.
- orwin 4y agoI feel like Google search quality declined those past few years. But bing and those using bing results declined so much faster that I have to accept it... I actually started to use RSS again this year. For the first time in a decade.
- throwntoday 4y agoThere was a moment in time where quotes and negeation hyphens were completely ignored. I have no idea why they ever thought that was a good idea.
- wetpaws 4y agoCause they likely have some internal metrics we are not aware of that has a priority over the search quality.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago# successful promo packets per quarter
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 4y agoI still find that they often don’t do what i intend them to
- Thorrez 4y agoWhat do you intend it to do? Do you dislike that it looks in hidden text (e.g. img alt text), or that it ignores punctuation? Or are you saying it returns pages without the text on it at all? I don't think that's the case. Disclosure: I work at Google, but not Search.
- colechristensen 4y agoWhen I quote "two words" in a group I expect to only get results based on those two words, spelled with those characters, exactly as quoted. Not split, not with different spelling or related meanings, not with anything but actually the string of bytes which I have quoted.
- Thorrez 4y agoGoogle doesn't replace them with split versions (except that it ignores punctuation), nor does it replace them with different spellings or related meanings. The words you search for will be there, in order, the only difference will be all whitespace and punctuation is treated as a space. >string of bytes which I have quoted That's tricky. What if there's a line break? What if you search for "some text" but the html contains "some <b>text</b>"? Punctuation would be a problem too. What if you searched for something with "-" (hyphen-minus, unicode 0x2d), but the page contained a "‐" (hyphen, unicode 0x2010)? What if you searched for something with a dumb quote, but the page contained a smart quote? What if you searched for something with a space but the page contained a non-breaking space?
- metadat 4y agoYes, this. 50% of the time or more I need to flip to the burger "advanced" menu and add the "Verbatim" constraint. Apparently Google search has been optimized for the lowest common denominator of an idiot. Truly shameful. If anything, it's the idiots who should be forced to use the UX of lesser idiots like myself. Let them select the "Hazy" constraint from the advanced menu. If DDG (or any alternative not incentivized to serve dimwits) would do this by default, I'd switch in a heartbeat and never look back.
- epistasis 4y agoIt could also be that the quoted term was in the page source, but not visible when doing a ctrl-f search from within a web browser. Whenever I have been frustrated that a term didn't appear in the visible text, it did show up in the source. So my searches were paying attention to the term, but not in a way that I cared about as a user.
- sidibe 4y agoWhat I'm reading again and again in the comments is that people are 100% sure this wasnt happening. But that would suggest they were clicking on the results that weren't what they wanted according to the snippet and Ctrl+F'ing. I'd be surprised so many people do that
- epistasis 4y agoI'm not sure I follow what you are saying. Are you suggesting that people will discard a result based on the snippet presented? I ignore the snippets entirely, as they are seldom relevant, and click each link in the results. Especially if I have put quotes around a word I really want.
- notacoward 4y agoSomebody got a good review for breaking it (but improving some other metric), somebody will get a good review for fixing it. Net result for users is zero, but all the churn looks like productivity in a "metrics based" GAMMA review process. I've seen worse. (Same problem with GDP as a measure of economic productivity BTW, but that's a topic for another day.)
- WatchDog 4y agoI'm glad to hear that they are working on fixing this, but I would be keen to understand why quote searches have been so much worse over the last ~2 years.
- solardev 4y agoUltimately they just want to show you ads for you to accidentally click on
- metadat 4y ago
- astonex 4y agoBecause ranking is very difficult
- metadat 4y agoPageRank isn't new at this point, has been publicly available for more than 10 years. If I were less of an idiot myself I'd found a fresh search engine. Other than Dear Bing (who doesn't support the "Verbatim" filter), there are no public independent full-web indexes left. R.I.P.
- summerlight 4y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05649 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05649 Google now has moved to model based ranking. In the current (search-hostile) web environment, PageRank or whatever simplistic algorithm doesn't work anymore.
- monetus 4y agoFull-web isn't something google can do anymore either, for better and worse.
- dietr1ch 4y agoWhat makes you think that Search still runs mainly guided by page rank? If that were the case then search engines would differ only on how big their database is, but unless you care about the long tail you wouldn't be able to notice much of a difference. I don't work in ranking, but considering how the web has changed since the early 2000s I'd guess that page rank's quality has gone down as spammy websites and walled gardens appeared.
- ArrayBoundCheck 4y agoI've been using quotes in google forever ago Google made quotes basically not do anything forever ago. But there were a few good years when it did what people wanted
- paulpauper 4y agomaybe they can fix the years-old 'sort by date' reddit bug. I am tired of 5-10 year old reddit posts showing up when searching by past year or month.
- squeaky-clean 4y ago> For instance, in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site. I've never thought of doing this. This would have been helpful in so many past searches.
- dekhn 4y agoSee also some context for Google search operators including ones that have been removed: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ and changed: https://www.googleguide.com/quote_operator.html https://www.googleguide.com/quote_operator.html (IIRC this was due to Google+ and was an internally unpopular change, but my memory may be faulty).
- modeless 4y agoI don't understand why they never added + back after Google+ finally died. When I was at Google I actually went as far as looking for the code to re-enable it in superroot. If I recall correctly I actually found some of the code but never had time to learn enough about superroot to make and test a CL. Of course I probably wouldn't have actually been able to get it changed back just by making a CL but at least I would have learned why it couldn't be changed back.
- grapeskin 4y agoI feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes. Instead of reverting something and admitting it was a bad decision, they’ll at best completely relaunch a half-assed complete rehaul of it and pretend it’s a brand new feature. I guess it’s too hard to find a way to reframe adding back a + as something new. But god, I wish there were a way to do actual precise searches like there used to be. It’s especially awful with multilingual computing. I can search for things word by word in quotes, and Google will return things translated word by word into a different language. If I wanted that language, I would have input the words in that language. And there’s no escaping it, even if I change my settings to only search one language.
- dylan604 4y ago>I feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes. The only one that comes to mind is Apple's mea-culpa on the Trashcan MacPro. They actually sat down with reporters and admitted it was a bad design. That one stood out due to the actual admission vs the typical silently revert design back without admission of bad idea (like the butterfly keyboard, magsafe, touch bar, etc).
- gotbeans 4y agoI'm not even mad anymore about the search quality. Google search is such a shitfest right now, you have to scroll a full page in a 100% 4k screen to get to actual results, it's absolutely disgusting. I don't care if they search is unoptimal or downright bad. The ad situation is so much worse IMO.
- metadat 4y agoBig-G only shows about 10 or fewer actual (non-advertisement) results on the first page, too. Regardless of screen size. What's up with that? Seems a little stingy.. why go to the effort of HTTP2 to deliver so few hits?
- gotbeans 4y agoThe critique is about the quantity of ads, not the quantity of results.
- jedwhite 4y agoNote here - they aren't changing what results are returned when you search with quotes, they are just highlighting what you searched with quotes in bold in the snippet displays in the search results page.
- ColinHayhurst 4y agobest comment
- bitL 4y agoWith Google+ gone, will + make a return as well?
- pipeline_peak 4y agoYeah, to get 2010 search performance, you’ll have to buy the new Google+ Premium Service package for $5/month
- speedgoose 4y agoI would gladly pay to avoid all the SEO spam and get a better Google search experience. I think we are many there. Unfortunately we are not enough, and ads bring more money to Google on average than what we are willing to pay.
- carrotcarrot 4y agoThere's several paid search startups to choose from. I'd rather do that than willingly part with my money for Google.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoHow well do they perform?
- nikanj 4y agoGoogle would also gladly pay to not have any SEO spam. It makes no money for them and annoys their customers
- Rackedup 4y ago
- causality0 4y agoI can't believe I was so naive as to think this was going to be Google apologizing for how it screws up most search operators by only obeying them if Google agrees with you. Most of the time it happily includes all sorts of SEO horseshit like synonyms, related words, and even companies who happen to be competitors of what I wanted exact results for. Words in quotations aren't supposed to be suggestions.
- mcswell 4y agoJust to be persnickety: If you do a search for "dog" (with the quotes), do you expect to find hits with only "dogs"? What about "doghouse" or "Dogbert"? "Dogged" (the past tense or past/passive participle of the verb 'dog')? If you search for "goose", do you expect to also see "geese"? (And for good measure, what should be done about languages where most nouns have case marking suffixes, like Russian, or languages with lots and lots of suffixes, like Turkish or Finnish.) I'll agree about synonyms, if you use quotes you shouldn't see those.
- Daneel_ 4y agoHonestly? I expect "dog" and nothing else. Not dogs. Not dogged. Just dog.
- rawoke083600 4y agoAgreed ! "dog" --> exact match +dog --> stemming allowed: i.e "doghouse, doggies, dogs" That would be nice to have
- mcswell 4y agoAgreed, it could work that way (but doesn't). As a computational linguist who has worked a lot in morphology, I support this :).
- dannysullivan 4y agoThat's how it works. That's how it has worked for years, except you don't need the + symbol -- that tells us nothing. ["dog"] or anything in quotes means exact match, and that's what we do. [dog] or anything without an operator means we'll generally try to exact match but also might do stemming or synonym or other matching, if it seems helpful.
- copperx 4y agoGoogle is the Clippy of this day and age. Why can't we have a Google Advanced Search? Is it that hard? Is it rocket surgery? Is it forbidden by the powers that be? Would it start WW3? I've always found it baffling that we have to play guessing games with a capricious search engine that tries to interpret what we want. There are some times when we know exactly what we're looking for!
- collegeburner 4y agogoogle literally starts captcha blocking me if i do too many quote or intext searches. there is obviously a business case for fucking over power users. "you will look at the results The Algorithm surfaces and you will like it".
- flenserboy 4y agoThose users probably don't give their clicks to ads, obvious or otherwise. Their focus on useful results means they cannot be easily monetized, and therefore need to be dissuaded from using G as much as possible.
- Nition 4y agohttps://www.google.com/advanced_search https://www.google.com/advanced_search
- cma 4y agoHave to have an extension to make that show up on new tabs, so cant get right to it on mobile? Why did google kill the option to set a home page for new tabs? Obviously some kind of user hostile monetization reason I guess.
- jabits 4y agoI’m pretty sure indexing and searching the entire internet satisfactorily to all is harder than rocketry or surgery…
- ProAm 4y agoGoogle search has jumped the shark, no?
- soared 4y agoWould love to see a final count of positive v negative comments on this post.
- lehi 4y agoDuckDuckGo's absurd handling of quotes finally forced me back to Google. Adding quotes in DDG gives nonsense results: https://imgur.com/a/2SHpjPG https://imgur.com/a/2SHpjPG
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marricks 4y agoAll my search results have that exact phrase in it, just some with non alpha characters in that phrase. I have no clue what your DDG is doing but it’s not behaving right.
- emptyparadise 4y agoI love DDG but it's so overzealous with rewriting queries to include more (usually irrelevant) results.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- johnklos 4y agoSame about DDG, but since I'll never go (directly) back to Google, I set up my own SearXNG instance. So much better!
- wizofaus 4y agoIt seems DDG handles quotes somewhat similarly to how Bing does (I just tried "input: dispatch" and got the same list of useless results from both. Google's are no better though.) But Bing is much better for "life sucks and so do you". Strikes me that DDG just isn't "there" yet, which is the impression I've had almost every time I've used it.
- Hallucinaut 4y agoHaven't done the search myself but... Novacaine for the soul?
- throwaway30dc7 4y agoToo little too late. I have used G for like maybe 5 of my last 1000ish searches. There ARE between alternatives now. I like Kagi the most. Worth every penny.
- disqard 4y agoI too pay for, use, and swear by kagi now. It's great!
- emptyparadise 4y agoI think what scares me about Kagi is the privacy aspect. One thing to look up "hot steamy decompiler software in my area" in an incognito tab (even if it's not particularly that private) and another to do that logged in to a service linked to your credit card linked to you through all the KYC.
- jlarocco 4y agoDo you not pay for your own ISP or cell service? And for all practical purposes, switching to an incognito tab is pointless against Google. If there are 99 searches from IP 1.2.3.4 using Firefox version 123.4 with Google cookies, and now 1 search from IP 1.2.3.4 using Firefox version 123.4 without Google cookies is practially "good enough" to assume it's still the same person. Anyway, I'm also sold on Kagi, and DuckDuckGo before that. I didn't even know Google had broken quote searches, but I'm not too surprised.
- emptyparadise 4y agoBut ISP dangers are at least mitigated by HTTPS/proxies/VPNs/public Wi-Fi/Tor. Does Kagi have any comparable protections? It would actually be extremely cool if it did.
- richardsocher 4y agoThat's why at you.com we made private mode accessible without any login. And we don't even do analytics and do not store your query in private mode. (richard, ceo of you.com here)
- prometheus76 4y agoI love where they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? Is this just from their family members at holiday dinners?
- scrollaway 4y agoThe PR people writing the article are rephrasing the words of the division lead who has aggregated the feedback from a bunch of project managers who are relaying what the data analysts in each team are interpreting from a host of metrics their engineers implemented. It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved. Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.
- indymike 4y agoTranslation: The HIPPOs have spoken (Hippo = HIghest Paid Person's Opinion).
- bushbaba 4y agoTo be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
- scrollaway 4y agoI suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
- RulerOf 4y ago>To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. ....hmmmmm.... I'd pay money for regex search.
- mcswell 4y ago
- slater 4y agoOK, now re-implement the "-[searchterm]" filtering that used to remove all results with that searchterm, up until about a year or so ago. Had a search last week where i specifically stated "-[big european capital city]", and results were chock full of "best [whatever] in [specified big european capital city i didn't want]"... what?!
- dannysullivan 4y agoIf you don't want a city name being matched, then you need it inside of quotes and the - outside of those. From the examples you've given, it sounds like you might have it reversed. IE, there aren't correct ["-berlin"] ["-new york city"] These are the correct way to indicate you do not want (the - symbol) a word or phrase (the quote symbols: [-"berlin"] [-"new york city"]
- binwiederhier 4y agoThis is fascinating. Not because of the content of this article, but because it's the first glimpse behind the Google Search curtain that I've ever seen in an official Google post. You rarely see details about search explained. Or maybe I'm just ignorant. Even that bit about "don't" being turned into "don t" was interesting. Again, not because I was amazed in any way. More so because Search has been so mysterious for many years.
- JacobThreeThree 4y agoThere is interesting information about Google Search on their blog and YouTube channels: https://developers.google.com/search/blog https://developers.google.com/search/blog https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA
- ma2rten 4y agoThere was an excellent talk from Jeff Dean a while back which went into a lot of detail.
- plq 4y agoCan you share a link to this specific one? He seems to be a pretty active speaker.
- mrazomor 4y agoProbably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-3Ahy7Fxsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-3Ahy7Fxsc Or this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI (terrible audio) Both are very old, but extremely well aged. IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well. Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.
- endisneigh 4y agoUltimately one thing people misunderstand is what it means philosophically to search. Suppose I have some great content "bt its writen lik dis". One could argue saying searching for content with the query 'like this' should yield the previous statement. Others would disagree. That's basically the crux of the problem. The more exactness you're demanding the fewer results you will receive. The fewer results that are available reduce the perceived utility of the search engine, Google in this case. Case in point: I've been searching for some "FoundationDB" related stuff. If you use HN's algolia for "Foundation DB" (no quotes) it will show you queries where FoundationDB is a single word. Is this good or bad? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=foundation%20db&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- darkhorse222 4y agoWhen I'm using quotes it's usually because the first, unquoted search ended up not being fruitful. In a world of algorithmic nonsense, quotes turn google back into what it should be best at: being an index.
- chrismcb 4y agoI would argue that a search for "like this"without quotes should maybe find that page. But the search with quotes should not find it.
- karlding 4y agoThere's a "Typo-tolerance" option [0] HN exposes in the search settings [1]. If you disable that, then those results no longer show up. [0] https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/optimize-search-results/typo-tolerance/ https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/optimize... [1] https://hn.algolia.com/settings https://hn.algolia.com/settings
- jodrellblank 4y ago> "That's basically the crux of the problem. The more exactness you're demanding the fewer results you will receive. The fewer results that are available reduce the perceived utility of the search engine." I disagree, so I went to search for the Joel Spolsky blog post at joelonsoftware.com from antiquity where he complains that search engines prioritise finding 5,000,000 results instead of the result you want, and that's completely useless because you can never read that many results. DuckDuckGo changed my search because "Not many results contain 'joelonsoftware" and then offered to search for what I typed in, if I arm twisted it. I only wanted one result, and think less of DDG for changing what I tried, in order to give me more results, instead of what I wanted. It's here[1][2] from 22 years ago and says "there are three important ideas from computer science which are, frankly, wrong, and people are starting to notice. I’m sure there are more, but these have been driving me to distraction: 1. The difficult part about searching is finding enough results," then "Most of the academic work on searching is positively obsessed with problems like “what happens if you search for ‘car’, and the document you want says ‘automobile'”. So when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me." The fewer, better, results that are available increase the perceived utility of the search engine. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-from-computer-science/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-... [2] I tried a couple of DDG searches including inurl: and site: then switched to Google, went through 4 pages of results, and a couple of searches, before "site:joelonsoftware.com "useless" "results"" got it at the top.
- stevage 4y agoThis seems like the tiniest of tiny improvements in a tiny aspect of Google Search. Am I missing something? How did this become the #1 story on HN?
- judge2020 4y agoIt's top HN because HN commonly sees complaints about quotes in Google Search not performing correctly; i'd link to some of these complaints, but the algolia search is needlessly fuzzy and doesn't seem to include all comments on HN.
- zerocrates 4y agoI hope you appreciated the irony.
- robbrown451 4y agoSomething like that is about as key to using the web as anything. I've used quotes on searches to get an exact phrase since, what, 1995? The fact that has been broken for a long time and now fixed is absolutely worth top story of the day to me.
- CameronNemo 4y agoI think developers and technologists use this feature often to locate people experiencing the same technical issues. Don't know what an error means? Google it. With quotes.
- wraptile 4y agoIt really shows how frustrated google search users are when a minor improvement is celebrated to this extent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wizofaus 4y agoFunnily enough I just searched for "input: dispatch" and couldn't see a single match that included the key colon character so I really hope they fix that.
- carrotcarrot 4y agoGoogle has replaced punctuation white white spaces for at least a decade.
- wizofaus 4y agoDo # and ++ count as punctuation? But yes, that's my point, they should at least favour results that match on non-alphanumeric characters if used with double quotes (ideally I should even be able to search for double quote characters!).
- boredemployee 4y agoLately I've been using books when I need information, instead of google, much better and less privacy issues. I recommend it!
- mcswell 4y agoI recommend clay tablets. Fire them, and they'll last pretty much forever, or at least a few thousand years.
- brodo 4y agoParchment also lasts quite long and is easier to store. If you have a lot of goats, it might be the better option!
- klysm 4y agoThat’s a very expensive alternative compared to a VPN
- trasz 4y agoIt’s actually free, unless you live in some weird country that doesn’t have libraries.
- klysm 4y agoMost of the stuff I’m interested in isn’t going to appear in print in libraries unfortunately
- trasz 4y agoEven university libraries? What kind of books do you have in mind?
- mcswell 4y agoConference proceedings. When I was at a computational linguistics conference back in ~2004, I was appalled when another attendee checking out from the hotel left his printed conference proceedings there, saying the electronic form (CD then, web pages now) was good enough and a lot easier to carry around. I thought about that as I carried the printed proceedings (large conference, so large proceedings) back on the flight home. He was right, I was wrong. And I haven't seen printed conference proceedings for some years now.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoNow they just have to solve the problem of the first results page being 100% e-commerce sites.
- hedora 4y agoNow, if only they could solve the problem where the text they index does not match the text my browser displays. I've seen a few searches recently (on DDG) where the indexed text is apparently hidden behind an authentication wall. Google's cached page feature used to fix those sorts of shenanigans.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoAh the good ol "whitelist the google bot IPs but pop-up paywalls for everyone else" trick. It'd be cool if google randomized their crawler's IPs and made their bot look like just another user, then we'd all get the same viewing experience.
- jfoster 4y agoMy understanding is that Google have a policy against sites doing that. Does Google not enforce the policy sufficiently, or are there exceptions made?
- nostromo 4y agoGoogle’s policy shifted. You can show the crawler full text of an article and then put it behind a paywall for example.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoNot only does that benefit the site owners, it benefits Google by creating a moat. Any new entrant to search is initially restricted to the same content as you or I.
- orangeoxidation 4y agoDoesn't it make search worse though? I don't like my searches to end at paywalls and Google being able to do more of that doesn't seem an advantage.
- 4y ago
- jrm4 4y agoI'm amused at how an equally valid headline would be "Search results will continue to suck for those who aren't tech-savvy enough to use quotes"
- danuker 4y agoThey don't mention anything about result quality, just snippet quality.
- AraceliHarker 4y agoIt would be more beneficial to many people to restore "The Blocked Sites Feature."
- gverrilla 4y agoGoogle is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. It started like a beautiful love story about knowledge and freedom, but now Google arrives drunk and hits us with a keyboard every night.
- disantlor 4y agoi get your point but this is really pretty dramatic. it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for
- gverrilla 4y ago"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. […]. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
- ShamelessC 4y agoGreat quote (given the context) - gonna go give this a read now, thanks.
- Gigachad 4y agoAlmost everything posted on this site is blown way out of proportion. Google is a tool you can use if you want. The vast majority of people think it works great. But from the comments that get posted here you'd think the government is sending police forces to bust down your door if you don't endure an hour of google waterboarding.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoMy increasing dissatisfaction with Google’s core product, what made it a company in the first place, it’s prime product, it’s raison d’être, Internet search, is because it now seems to fixate on the most generic terms in my query and returns answers for a question it assumes I have - rather than just being a powerful keyword search like it was two decades ago. You can still use something while lamenting that the product is not as good as it used to be.
- mixedmath 4y agoI wish that google would enable quote search functionality for youtube too. That is, if I put quotes around a youtube search, then it will only return results containing that in the title or description, and not show related videos or anything like that.
- dqpb 4y agoDo Google Search Engineers use Google Search?
- treeman79 4y agoWill google stop suppressing political positions they don’t like?
- jabits 4y agoWhat are Google’s political positions?
- kristopolous 4y agoThere's antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate filled documents they simply won't give you. Such as white replacement videos calling for vigilante killing sprees. Many of the qanon "baker" sites aren't indexed on Google. You can type in the domain, try to feed Google as much leading information as possible and it'll simply not tell you the site exists. They'll give you articles about them but if you want to see the content you'll have to find it another way. I've explored multiple of these. There's no robots.txt asking you to go away. The pages are readily scrapable. It's clearly a proactive decision. Also dangerous medical quackery (such as ingesting heavy metals, infecting yourself with deadly diseases as medicine and bleach enemas) that's led to numerous deaths they simply will not provide to you. I'm guessing the lawyers told them to de-index these sites. Some see this as "censorship by the liberal woke left". You can go to a Yandex or Bing index to get these things if you're curious although Bing is starting to follow suit as well because I'm guessing their lawyers are equally insistent. Listen to the Qanon-anonymous podcast back catalog (investigators of the far right) and you'll run into this constantly - they'll have entire episodes dedicated to some document or video Google claims doesn't exist. But then you open up, say, baidu and get 10,000 results
- retrocryptid 4y agoThat will be a cool feature when they implement it.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y agoThe second Google starts to give in to the common complaints about search, its maybe over. Meaning, they have lost their edge, know it, and know they are vulnerable.
- thehappypm 4y agoTo who, Bing? There are no serious competitors
- carrotcarrot 4y agoI use Bing, DDG, and Kagi. I also keep tagged bookmarks with Pinboard which I rely on much more than search. Even if people aren't finding good alternatives, they might be searching less. Subconsciously, searching ends up feeling futile. The less tech savvy tend to just let one of their algorithms "find" things on its own terms (TikTok, YouTube for short entertainment, Spotify for music , Netflix for shows, Instagram for shopping) TLDR a true competitor is not needed to see a lack of search volume. To some degree Google search is entertainment and (was once) useful for discovery. Now it can be substituted with other ways of discovering things.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoThey’re being lazy and irresponsible. Non tech savvy people don’t use delimiting quotation marks, nor should they. They are a technical feature for narrow searches. Google Search has always been the dominant bridge between users and sites. Given the obvious complaints over search results, for a company of this stature to talk about explicit search performance during these times is pretty tone deaf. To me it’s a clear indicator that Google Search is many years away from being their flagship product. It’s truly unfortunate to know there are thousands of people who’d like to change that by working together but simply can’t because Google put their flag up first. And it’s all because this once curious academic project has devolved into a surveil marketing machine. Fuck Silicon Valley and brogrammer culture
- dannysullivan 4y agoThe post specifically did NOT tell people to make use of quotes when searching. It said the opposite, and simply explained the change with snippets is to better help those who decide they do want to use quote searching for whatever reason. Here's what we said (I work for Google): Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users. We generally recommend first doing any search in natural language without resorting to operators like quotation marks. Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary. By default, our systems are designed to look for both the exact words and phrases entered and related terms and concepts, which is often useful. If you use a quoted search, you might miss helpful content that uses closely related words. Of course, there are those times when the exact word being on a page makes all the difference. For those situations, quoted searches remain available and are now even better.
- robot 4y agoDear Yonghao, no matter what you improve, when I see 6 ads before any actual search results everything turns to shit.
- codalan 4y agoOkay, Google
- beej71 4y agoFor some reason, this bit of the movie Whiplash came to mind: Terence Fletcher: Really? Adjusting the seat, really? That's been your problem the whole fucking time, the seat height? So now you have it, right? Go! [Ryan starts playing] Terence Fletcher: Bullshit! Fuck you!
- userbinator 4y agoI think for many of us, the ultimate Google should just be some form of "grep for the Web". Defaulting to case-insensitive would be the only "massaging" of the query that I'd consider a good idea.
- robbrown451 4y agoYou don't even want it to spell correct? That's pretty extreme. My 8 year old thinks I'm old fashioned because I don't just talk to the google lady casually like she is my friend, when doing a search/asking a question.
- cesarb 4y agoI think for many of us, "correcting" the spelling is one of the biggest annoyances of Google search, and the main reason which forces us to resort to using quotes so often. When I search for a word, I want to search for that word, not some other completely unrelated word which happens to have a similar meaning to one of the dictionary definitions of a word a few characters different from the one I typed.
- robbrown451 4y agoUsually that is one click to correct, which works for me. I often search for things I don't know how to spell, typically a proper noun, and often specifically because I am trying to figure out how to spell it and that is the quickest way.
- kazinator 4y agoRegarding "improving" --- just look at how you had it working in 1999, and crib from that.
- noduerme 4y agoOkay, except the quote operator doesn't work as described and hasn't worked that way in at least 10 years. "Did you mean x?" No, asshole, I put what I meant in quotes.
- dannysullivan 4y agoI work for Google search. It does work as described. If you have an example you're comfortable sharing where you feel it doesn't, I'd be happy to have the team look into it.
- rexreed 4y agoTo be fair, very little of what Google search does works as described lately. Google is not about retrieving search results, it's about displaying advertising and promoting content that is related to your query, but not your specific query. Google search hasn't worked as described for at least 10-12 years.
- memcg 4y agoIs it possible that some variations in results are caused by variations in what phone vs desktop, apps or browsers send to google when people search? FYI, I have my Windows Desktop Firefox homepage set to Google Advanced Search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1 https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1 and I never (almost) logon to my google account when I search. It would be nice to add "site or domain:" exclusions.
- noduerme 4y agoNext time one comes up I'll post back. I'd say I almost always try it in conjunction with the + operator, and my sense is one or the other is often ignored.
- dannysullivan 4y agoIf you're using that with the +, yes, + is being ignored. It hasn't been an operator for years. That's what the quote operators are for. If you search for something in quotes, that's the same as it used to be when you'd use +. IE, if you used to do this: [+find +all +of +these +"words and phrases"] After the + operator support ended years ago, in favor of quotes, this is how you would (and still should) do it: ["find" "all" "of" "these" "words and phrases"]
- kgc 4y agoSo basically like how it used to work before.
- fswd 4y agoYeah this was the standard in 2003-2005 if I recall. Then they removed it. Took them almost 20 years to reinvent it...
- pmarreck 4y agoDid Google remove the ability to do boolean searches? When I recently tried to do something like (word_a OR word_b), it tried to match on "(word_a" which was wrong
- dannysullivan 4y agoIn a Boolean like that, the command would be to match either of the words, A or B. But sometimes our ranking systems might find that A seems more relevant, so it could get weighted more. That's still a Boolean match, though. And you don't need to do that. By default, we'll search for any of the words (OR) that are entered.
- pmarreck 4y agoI thought the default search was AND? And that it only starts returning results that don't include a word if that word is rated low in relevance (possibly due to misspelling) and the number of results from the original search are low? (Which is literally what it says it's doing when you do such a search?)
- dannysullivan 4y agoAges ago, AND was the default. That was true of many search engines, too. I can't pin down when exactly we shifted to OR as the default, but it's been that way for years, probably over a decade easily.
- codefeenix 4y agokeep the ad placement the same, but make search work. Is it so hard to separate the two?
- wraptile 4y agoThis has been my huge pet peeve from a content creator's point of view. I'm in charge of the blog at my company, and it has been frustrating to see spam articles perform better than articles I'd spend days working on just because of keyword mash (and backlinks, but that's a different topic). Hopefully, showing quoted snippets encourages "fuller", real content rather than the current keyword mash that rises to the top.
- benreesman 4y agoQuoted searches getting better is good. I mostly use them for math and programming related searches. If some bright spark is sitting around with talent to spare but no idea, the perennial failure mode “search engine for hackers” is an idea whose time has come. Google is sufficiently beholden to search revenue that grew too much faster than use to be a death sentence for vertical search startups anymore. And modern OSS/cloud compute make the once technically impossible merely absurdly difficult. And “search for hackers” -> “search for technical stuff of all kinds” -> “search for serious people” -> “…” sounds kind of familiar.
- Pxtl 4y agoIf I can't ctrl-F and find the text I googled after I click through, using Google's browser, then either the browser is bad or the search engine is bad.
- danuker 4y agoOr the site is bad. Some sites show some content to Googlebot, and other content to mere mortals.
- rawoke083600 4y agoI feel Google should be able to solve/identify this ?
- Pxtl 4y agoThat falls under "search engine is bad"
- dcow 4y agoIt’s interesting that they recommend opening dev tools to ”find” in the whole rendered text page once you land on it. Seems out of touch. Why not improve browser find to include looking in those helpful but not visible places too?
- sidcool 4y agoI always wonder how the search architecture is. Must be one of the most complex ones out there. It's a challenge in everything: Data Engineering, ML/AI, Search (duh), Algorithms, Scaling, Availability, Performance etc. etc.
- carrotcarrot 4y agoWhy can't we have options anymore? Is it that difficult to have a toggle for what the description shows?
- s1k3s 4y ago> Punctuation is sometimes seen as spaces. This is so annoying for me. Is there a way to get around it, like marking a character to disable this behavior?
- niguskurfa 4y agoHaking phon
- de6u99er 4y agoRemember when we could use "+" to tell Google it must include a term and "-" to define what the search result must not include? This was helpful to filter out advertisements and other useless nonsense while making sure to get what we want.
- nazka 4y agoHmm what do you mean by could? It’s not possible anymore? So far it seems to be still there.
- PeterisP 4y agoIIRC not really, at least some times it will still return documents that do not have the exact "+'ed" term in it.
- manholio 4y ago"-" still works, "+" was bastardized when Google launched Google+ but you can get similar functionality by surrounding your term in quotes, preventing it to be dropped.
- gandalfgreybeer 4y ago“-“ works but I’ve seen it fail so many times that I’m more surprised when it actually filters it properly nowadays.
- dreen 4y ago- works, quoting a word was the same as +
- unicornporn 4y agoThis is the right answer and I was under the impression that this was in the the Google fu crash course these days.
- 4y ago
- dvh 4y agoWait does this mean there is a new player in town? Anybody knows who that is? Why else would Google improve search?
- edumucelli 4y agoFor what I understood the search results are the same, just the display of the results that is changing by highlighting the quoted terms. I thought "improving search results" meaning that results itself were more relevant, not only the display.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bearmode 4y ago"Punctuation is sometimes seen as spaces. Our systems see some punctuation as spaces, which impacts quoted searches. For example, a search for [“don’t doesn’t”] tells our systems to find content that contains all these letters in this order: don t doesn t" This is one of the most annoying things tbh, when you specifically need to include special characters it just gives you garbage
- chaosbolt 4y agoGoogle and Youtube search are heavily censored, for example if you open Youtube and type "JRE alex" then Alex Jones will be the last suggestion despite his episode having the most views, if you type "JRE Robert" then Youtube will suggest Robert Downey Jr and other guests whose name starts with Robert, but it won't show Robert Malone, and if you write "JRE Robert Malon" it still won't suggest it. Now those episodes have been controversial, and I only bring them up because it's the example that came to my head (before someone misses the whole point and starts looking at the finger), and Google Search also censors them, now while I still use google mainly to access Stackoverflow and Reddit threads, I see no point in using it if I'm searching for anything I want a neutral conversation about that I can examine and make my own conclusion. All in all the internet seems to be getting smaller and smaller, I don't use any social media apart from HN and Reddit, and I only use Reddit because I seem to still be addicted to it since it's probably one of the most censored of all of them. 10 years ago as a 20 year old I benefited greatly from how the internet was, here is an example: I grew up on the idea that there was nothing wrong with porn, and there isn't per se, and no one ever spoke about addiction like behavior when it came to watching it, then one day I discover a controversial post on Reddit and dove down the rabbit hole and lo and behold I had the same problems as this community of people trying to quit watching it, and I benefited from their experiences and knowledge, same about discovering communities against social media like Facebook, which pushed me to research the subject and deleting my account, etc. but now it seems like any controversial community is quickly banned or pushed aside in its own unfindable bubble and that to me is a great loss. I want to see people have an opposite opinion than mine, and I want to be able to get into heated non censored discussions in comment sections and get suggestions about articles, studies and content to challenge my views.
- bambax 4y ago> Google and Youtube search are heavily censored, for example if you open Youtube and type "JRE alex" then Alex Jones will be the last suggestion despite his episode having the most views This is provably untrue. I just searched YT for "JRE Alex" and the first three results are clips from the "JRE" show (I didn't know what that acronym was before now) featuring Alex Jones [0]. Why are people repeating these complotist theories when it takes five seconds to disprove them. Also, even if it was true (which it isn't), it still wouldn't be censoring. Censoring would mean not returning results when a match exist -- not massaging the SERP. It would also mean not publishing clips from said "censored" content on Google's own video platform, where they have millions of views. In France there is a controversial (to say the least) comedian, Dieudonné, a holocaust denier and an anti-semite. He's heavily censored by the French government who regularly bans his shows; but canceling his YT channel happened only recently, after a lot of interventions by the state and other non-governmental agencies. It's been my experience that Google is quite resistant to censoring, in general. [0] Here are the top three results on YT for "JRE Alex": Alex Jones - God Doesn't Know Where He Came From | Joe Rogan 2.6M views 3 years ago JRE Clips Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1255 w/Alex Jones: https://youtu.be/-5yh2HcIlkU. 3:43:03 Joe Rogan Experience #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo 13M views Streamed 5 years ago PowerfulJRE Alex Jones is a radio show host, filmmaker, writer, and conspiracy theorist. Eddie Bravo is a jiujitsu black belt, music producer, and ... 3:11:09 Joe Rogan Experience #1555 - Alex Jones & Tim Dillon 23M views 1 year ago PowerfulJRE Tim Dillon is a standup comedian, actor, and host of the Tim Dillon Show. Alex Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and host of the Alex ...
- miked85 4y agoquote searches always seems to work fine, until recently
- wodenokoto 4y ago> "Punctuation is sometimes seen as spaces. Our systems see some punctuation as spaces, which impacts quoted searches. For example, a search for [“don’t doesn’t”] tells our systems to find content that contains all these letters in this order: "don t doesn t" Others have pointed this bit out, but I'd like to ask specifically: How do you search for special characters? I recently came across some R code that used %||% and you cannot search for this. As in, you cannot search the internet for this at all. Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, all of them will ignore special characters. Even Github search will strip out the special characters leaving you to search for nothing.
- alecco 4y agoTry "percent pipe pipe percent". If somebody bothered to spell it, it might show up. Might.
- nneonneo 4y agoTry the code: operator on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=code%3A%22%25%7C%7C%25%22 https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=code%3A%22%25%7C%7C%25%22
- danuker 4y agoThank you! This is what I'll use from now on. And my use cases for Google keep dwindling.
- karlicoss 4y agohttpa://grep.app often helps for obscure code searches on GitHub
- godshatter 4y agoI tried "r operators pipe percent" (without the quotes) in search.brave.com, and it came back with this link as the second link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50970207/what-does-the-operator-do-in-r-percent-pipe-pipe-percent https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50970207/what-does-the-o... I'm guessing that would work fine on google, but I don't go there so I can't be certain.
- rob_c 4y agoeither reverting a broken feature or listening to how search has become almost unsuable for technical work in the last few months in favour of ramming some nonsense "popular" article down your thoat. thank you google overlords for your brief allotment of sanity
- zild3d 4y ago> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary. Except it's been regressing to where operators are often more necessary again
- alecco 4y agoIt's not entirely Google's fault. SEO-oriented content is ruining the web. It's a battle I'm not sure search engines can win. Keyword indexing and PageRank worked for a while because the underlying data wasn't written trying to game them. Then came spam linking and keyword stuffing and more. I'm surprised search engines are still useful in spite of that.
- Yizahi 4y agoGoogle search? What's that? :)
- Hard_Space 4y agoFine. It would also be great if I could search for filetype:pdf without getting gamed results where academic publishers either create a folder hierarchy that simulates a PDF result (but you actually have to pay), or else only shows GoogleBot the actual PDF (and the rest of us have to pay). Would additionally be great if Google's autocomplete on filetype:pdf didn't default to "filetype pdf" (i.e. adds a space and omits the colon, nullifying the token).
- brynjolf 4y agoJust bring back the default to be to search for what I typed. I know what I want Some colleagues at work have switched off Google since C# regularly gets ignored as a parameter. It didn't use to. Just annoying having to argue with a tool every day.
- fareesh 4y agoThis explains why Google search has been so bad recently
- nyx_land 4y agoso Google is starting to get scared because they've noticed people noticing their main product has become trash.
- O__________O 4y agoFirst, I sincerely appreciate Google’s efforts to acknowledge there are issues and fix them; it’s amazing, thank you! ______ TLDR: It’s impossible to report issues when Google makes it impossible to replicate the issues. In the below text, found four errors: (1) feature mentioned in Google’s blog post is not working; (2) quoted search is not working; (3) + search operator does not work as it used to work; (4) it is impossible to replicate results. — Aware of likely hundreds of bugs like this, wish Google would listen. ______ This comment was a response to another comment, but given all the bugs I found, decided to make it a top level comment. ______ It does not, at least in one way, which was as a substitute for quotes when injected into a string where +’s replaced spaces; just confirmed this does not work, indifferent about it returning; see links below for proof. My core concern is Google list ALL search operators OR operations AND publicly make SERP experiments per each that are reproducible without millions in resources AND whitelist for automated execution of these tests; if in unlikely chance Google’s looking for strong opinions how to radically improve search quality, I am willing to do it for free or paid. Here’s the example searches that show + does not work in at least one way it once did as mentioned above: - millions of results https://www.google.com/search?q=test%2Btest%2Btest%2Btest%2Btest%2Bz https://www.google.com/search?q=test%2Btest%2Btest%2Btest%2B... - 3 results https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+z%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+... * This is not the same as the +keyword syntax mentioned in thread; I will try to find an example. EDIT: weird... If I click this link: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+z%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+... I get zero result results, but if I click: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+a%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+... Then edit the a to z without making any other changes, like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+z%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+... I get 3 search results... which clearly is a bug. EDIT: Grr... I was able to reproduce it, but then Google broke it. Using method above, here’s proof it returned 3 results: https://ibb.co/kG8sYZS https://ibb.co/kG8sYZS - Note: if you look at the screen shot above, you will see a SERP that breaks the feature Google announced that in the blog post; specifically that the query is not highlighted in the SERP description. More importantly, I searched for "test test test test test z" but got results for "text text text text text z" — which means quoted search itself is broken. And proof I then got a bug (zero results) using the exact same search: https://ibb.co/6JjLX6y https://ibb.co/6JjLX6y ____ * Conclusion: To me, if you cannot share a search result and get the EXACT same search results (and possibly ability to see different ones AND annotations of why they are different) — how this not a bug; how can anyone independently test Google’s search quality?
- O__________O 4y ago@dannysullivan (Google’s public liaison of Search [1]; he is commenting in this thread) - What is the best way to ping you and how do I format my search bugs/features in a way that makes it easy for them to be processed by Google? - Already pointed out and documented replication issues in another comment in this thread [2]. _____ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dannysullivan https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dannysullivan [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354078
- dannysullivan 4y agoYou can ping me here on Hacker News, probably best to reply to this, and I can watch for replies. I'm also on Twitter, @dannysullivan For search issues, if people are comfortable, it's always best to share the exact query that was used. Putting it within brackets, as if those are the search box, can be helpful. Like if you searched for "this that" as a quoted search, ["this that"] would represent it. Explain what the issue is, list any particular URLs if helpful, screenshots if those are also helpful.
- throwaway743 4y agoSwitched to Kagi recently and haven't looked back
- puffybeignette 4y agoWhy am I conditioned that anytime I see google post about something they’re doing for users, that it’s really something that benefits them behind the scenes.
- kurtextrem 4y agoIf an official blog post, meant for regular users, lists using the search of Chrome Dev Tools to find hidden content instead of the actual Ctrl+F search: "in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site." it is maybe time to change the Ctrl+F search instead of recommending regular users to use developer tools.
- BrianOnHN 4y agoTLDR Google re-discovers decades-old search feature, users seemingly never realized it disappeared.
- jfoster 4y ago> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary. In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.
- emrah 4y ago> In my experience, things have degraded since then "In my experience" is exactly right, search results degraded for a fraction of users such as developers. It's good to see Google is going back to making those users happy although that probably means bad news for DDG et al
- Ralfp 4y agoMy average search starts with „site:reddit.com” because otherwise first three pages of results will be SEO blogs where 90% of article follows „First, what is XYZ?” followed by „so we see why it serms hard, but if you pay us/our affiliate money we will do it for you nice and easy!”
- april_22 4y agoTry out alternative engines like You.com or Brave Search. They let you set reddit and other apps as a preferred source/show it on all relevant queries. https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth...
- dr-neptune 4y agoduckduckgo also has "bang operators" that allow you to specify site. An example is !r for reddit or !w for wikipedia It's even nicer for some sites like Wikipedia because it goes directly to the page if theres an exact match instead of the intermediate search results page
- 4y ago
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoIf search foo could really influence results, somebody would create onionlayer over google search to wrap it in search foo and deliver better results without adds. The degradation is part of the buisness model and can not be allowed to be circumvented.
- jll29 4y ago"The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document." Keyword-in-context (KWIC) is useful and well-tested, with a history going back to early scriptural concordances. The context tells the searcher that the right sense of the phrase is talked about in case the quoted phrase is ambiguous. Snippet extraction has a long history, the standard paper is Turpin et al. (2007), there are regularly new improvements: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=snippet+generation https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=snip...
- turdnagel 4y agoI miss when you could jump to the cached version of a page which would have all your search terms highlighted in different colors on the page. Peak Google search.
- josefresco 4y agoGreat, now fix "Phrase Match" on Google Ads. Google is constantly pushing Broad Match, to the point where they loosen the definition of phrase match to include synonyms. If I want Broad Match, I'll use it but please let me use Phrase Match as it's intended. Match the phrase exactly, if not don't show my ads.
- belter 4y agoQuality of search still has some improvements open. Searching right now with quotes for the title of this HN post: "We're improving search results when you use quotes" The first three results are interesting: 1- First result is the Google announcement but not this post. The title is "How we're improving search results when you use quotes" not "We're improving search results when you use quotes" and the search was with quotes, but to be accepted, maybe... 2- Second result is this post 3- Third result is a quackery page made by some SEO spammers. Now what is interesting is that is almost a copy-paste of Google with changes like this: Google announcement text: "...We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this...." SEO Spammers write on page ( with enhancement misspelled): "...We’ve heard suggestions that folks doing quoted searches worth seeing the place the quoted materials happens on a web page, somewhat than an total description of the web page. Our enchancment is designed to assist handle this..." And the page becomes the third link from Google results...
- knodi123 4y ago> folks doing quoted searches worth seeing the place Ah, I remember this trick from my college days, using a thesaurus to beat exact match tests so you could copy from wikipedia et al. Glad to see it's still alive and well, and totally not being abused to make the internet a less useful place.
- throw7 4y agoNone of this information will be true or working in the short future. They'll "fail fast", "break things", say they've read your mind and give you what you really wanted.
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago"For example, a search for [“don’t doesn’t”] tells our systems to find content that contains all these letters in this order: don t doesn t" Well, that explains why some technical things are hard to find. For example "... in javascript" gives unclear results but "ellipsis in javascript" or "three dots in javascript" will provide what you are looking for.
- fleddr 4y agoPlease now also improve search results without quotes. When I query a b c (without quotes) I want results exclusively containing all 3 words, not just one or two of them. There's a reason I typed it. Next, remove content thieves like Pinterest entirely from the index. Next, invest in recency + relevancy over just page reputation. A huge amount of high value recent content is written but it keeps losing against much worse old content which only ranks because it's old. As the typical example: the 15 year old Stackoverflow jQuery answer. Invest in location awareness. Including location in your query gives laughable results. Find a way to down rank sites gaming particular categories with shady tactics.
- superbaconman 4y agoI don't know... Recency sucks when searching for news related stuff. It feels next to impossible to look into the history of news commentary on any given topic.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
- dannysullivan 4y agoIf there's something newsy, we show recent stories because that's often helpful. If you want to older content, we have time range options. Check out before/after: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
- emmelaich 4y agoDate range is great, but unfortunately it can fail when for instance old newspaper stories still have recent news in the sidebar. Google will include those recent updates as belonging to the date of the old story.
- 4y ago
- justanorherhack 4y agoAs said in other comments this is great but I wish they would get lower some of the search stealers like Pinterest, redbubble, yelp, and LinkedIn. There also a lot of top x sites that are practically generated and thinks like user benchmark that are complete garbage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cycomanic 4y agoGoogle search is generally so much worse than it used to be. They are improving search with quotes... great thanks please also make it really just contain exact phrases (at least for me I often get none exact results even with quotes). Location is terribly annoying if I'm in France and go to Google.de maybe I do want German results, not google thinking just because I have an IP from a certain place I want results from that place (do Google employees not travel?). I now seem to often enough get results which might not contain any of the search results I'm looking for, I guess because somehow a ML algorithm thought they might be relevant (hint, usually they are not). And then there are all these content regurgitators which for some topics just guarantees completely irrelevant results. I admit not all of this is Googles fault, but somehow everybody largely optimising (and exploiting) for the Google algorithm, makes it worse for them. Alternative engines seem to fare better, and I guess less Google dominance is a good thing.
- bslorence 4y agoAm I the only one who finds that quote-searching sort of kind of sometimes works in Gmail, but usually doesn't?
- slim 4y agoI think I finally nailed what's wrong with Google. It's the Tiktokisation of every ad business model. The end game for google is, whatever search keywords you input, they will answer with results based on what their algorithms think will entertain you and keep you engaged
- sizzle 4y agoPlease solve the Pinterest spam results
- michannne 4y agoOne thing that immediately stood out to me is the mention of Developer Tools. Most laypersons don't even know it exists. I'm wondering if it's possible for Google to make the presentation of things like meta tags and descriptions more user-friendly? Like, a small banner or icon when your mouse is at the top of a page or even an icon in the address bar, when you click it, it shows you things like the meta and description
- whoisthemachine 4y agoWeird little nit about the blog, the progress bar disappears when I scroll up and reappears when I scroll down (using FF). On a more related note, I haven't used G search in at least 5 years except on mobile, so this is kind of shrug announcement to me, but good on them for restoring functionality that they clearly didn't want to support.
- smrtinsert 4y agoI really wish google gave you access to which search algorithm it used when you queried. I refuse to believe a general purpose algo is appropriate for all domains.
- boring_twenties 4y agoQuotes used to work fine until they broke it. Hopefully this "improvement" is as easy as git revert.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoTyping two quotes is harder than just typing a comma after a multi-word string. And if I type in a year ... 2020 ... at least make some effort to limit the top results to those that contain it.
- dannysullivan 4y agoWe have date range operators such as before/after that do exactly that. See here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
- adam2k 4y agoI started using Neeva several months ago and, although this is totally anecdotal, I find the results much more accurate than what I get through Google even when using the quotes in my searches. I'll occasionally test out the same search on both engines and see the differences.
- katiebennett545 4y ago