12 ms·

I'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 ago
Ultimately they just want to show you ads for you to accidentally click on
metadat 4y ago
- astonex 4y ago
  Because ranking is very difficult
  - metadat 4y ago
    PageRank 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 ago
      https://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 ago
      Full-web isn't something google can do anymore either, for better and worse.
    - dietr1ch 4y ago
      What 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.
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      i've got my issues with brave but iirc they're actually doing an independent web index not just using bing (i think they still use them for images tho). it was really nice to hear somebody else is working on that even if i'm not using it rn.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Didn't know about Brave's Index. I just emailed them to find out how I can help with the bottom line of making human knowledge accessible for lesser-idiots. Thanks!
      - godshatter 4y ago
        I have issues with the Brave browser but I am a big fan of their search product. Just the fact that they are building their own index was enough for me to switch, but I've had better luck with finding useful search results than I previously had with DDG. YMMV, of course. Their forum search results section has been very useful, too.
    - ijidak 4y ago
      Search is a really hard problem. And as the web scales, it's an increasingly expensive problem. (Servers, storage, bandwidth, etc.) I'd wager that it's easier to launch the next SpaceX than to launch the next Google.
    - chongli 4y ago
      PageRank is basically worthless at this point. Its baseline assumption, that keywords and in-links correlate with relevance, is now broken. The vast majority of stuff out there is SEO'd and link-farmed to death. If you want to find anything relevant with PageRank these days, you first need to find a way to filter out all of the spam. This is why search is so hard now.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Impossibly difficult and resource intensive? Sounds like we need a reset of some kind.
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        > find a way to filter out all of the spam It is the same spam sites I see again and again. A manual blacklist from one puny FTE would probably clean up the wast majority.
        graftak 4y ago
        They could even crowd source this by allowing users to block domains from search results, which should affect its ranking long term.
        jpindar 4y ago
        As with so many things, they used to do this then inexplicably stopped.
        anticensor 4y ago
        You can use -inurl:example.com
        nikanj 4y ago
        But that would involve hiring a human. Google's prime directive is "Never hire a human do a job well, when you can train AI to do the same job badly"
- missedthecue 4y ago
  Can you explain to me exactly how "political relationships" prevent bing or anyone else from improving quote search?
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    Lots of site operators explicitly allow Google and block other search engines.
    - lopatin 4y ago
      While this may be true, I'm still confused what it has to do with quote searches.
      - mmmpop 4y ago
        If it were me, I'd be waiting for his "sources" so I can tear them to pieces for not being the NYT or something trustworthy and 100% truthful, all of the time.
        metadat 4y ago
        Why would there be sources? [Unrecorded] phone call / encrypted-channel deals happen all the time. Do you want to pretend it doesn't happen and the world is actually fair? What a nice dream.
    - wowokay 4y ago
      Those sites will lose out in the long run I suppose.
- l33t2328 4y ago
  If a competitor had perfect quotes I’d still use google. They’re too reliable at other things.
- simantel 4y ago
  Yep launched two months ago: https://yep.com/ https://yep.com/
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Seems to be run by an SEO company ...
- bigyikes 4y ago
  I was a DDG user for the past year, and I consistently found myself falling back to the big G due to poor result quality. I recently started paying for Kagi[1] and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I haven’t felt the need to use a different search engine since switching. (No affiliation; just a happy customer) [1]: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
  - DanHulton 4y ago
    I am also a happy kagi paying user, for the extra data point. I do occasionally switch back to DDG for non-technical searches, but even that has been rarer and rarer as time goes on.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I still give DDG first shot at my searches, but their results have been getting worse and worse. I'd blame the people they scrape their results from but nobody is stopping DDG from handling search operators correctly so we can narrow down whatever gets spewed back at us. Even worse several times recently DDG just returns a blank page.
    - carrotcarrot 4y ago
      A lot of DDG is just a front end for Bing.
  - Johnythree 4y ago
    I'm very happy to pay Kargi a small fee, so that I never have to see Google ever again.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
skybrian 4y ago
Maybe they're getting gamed somehow? With this change, it should be easier to see if that's the case.
- L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago
  They're absolutely getting gamed (by sticking clickbait keywords into the meta description or invisible content or even just in plain text at the bottom of the page - you'd think they'd have learned their lesson on Youtube but alas). This doesn't change that.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    remember when sites would load keywords up with the same font color as the background, or in divs with display:none or visibility:hidden type of shenanigans? they supposedly penalized sites for that. so you're saying that keyword stuffing is back?
II2II 4y ago
It soumds like they are only modifying the presentation of results, rather than the quality of the results. Useful, yes, but it's not necessarily what people are looking for.
uo21tp5hoyg 4y ago
Some search engines seem to just completely ignore quotes now, it's very frustrating especially when I know what I want to search and the search engine just isn't letting me.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  My best guess is its because people pasting things in with quotes are met with no results. Stuff like error messages often quote the only unique bit of the error leaving them with no results while ignoring the quotes would give them the result they want. Probably the vast majority of the population have no idea that quotes do anything in searches. Maybe they need some checkbox in the tools bar that makes quotes actually work if you know how they work.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    And the vast majority of the population is who use Google now, rather than web enthusiasts. It was probably causing people to get no results when they had quotes, and most people wouldn't know why.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      how hard would it be for Googs to do the search as requested, see no results, then try without quotes? they do this for other things that annoy the F out of me. for example, searching for a phone number. it's a specific set of numbers that is unique. if there's no results for that number (or very few), it gives me results for numbers that are similar like same area code, same prefix, different number. nope. that's not useful. in this situation, I'd much rather see that no results are found rather than making me think there's a result but forcing me to look closely that it is what I wanted
      - ehnto 4y ago
        That's really not what I want quotes to do though, I want a definitive "not found". But it might be a good compromise. Their whole jam now seems to be zero UI except the box, no filters no exact match checkboxes etc. Stuff like that would be really nice to have on the main search.
Retr0id 4y ago
I hear this a lot, but it I haven't personally noticed any real problems with quoted search (other than the occasional difficulty actually finding the content on the resultant webpages). I have noticed a general decline in search quality over the last couple of years, but nothing specific to quotes. I realise I'm not saying anything particularly useful with this comment, but I just thought I'd add another datapoint. Edit: Thinking more, my biggest issue is when the quoted text occurs in the "recommended similar posts" section of a page (particularly common with reddit). That section gets re-rendered on each view, so it probably won't be there once I click the result.
- 8192kjshad09- 4y ago
  Quoted search is provably broken for some queries, try a google search for "[::]" (with the double quotes), it has no results. Similarly, try a search for 'linux next hop "[::]"' (with the double quotes), none of the results will contain [::]. Proof: https://archive.ph/AAa6k https://archive.ph/AAa6k and https://archive.ph/9WGe7 https://archive.ph/9WGe7
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    This isn't evidence of anything changing, google has always ignored punctuation - treating it as whitespace, as mentioned in the article.
    - oktoberpaard 4y ago
      Not always, though: https://www.blog.google/products/search/improvements-searching-special-characters-programming-languages/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/improvements-searchi....
      - Retr0id 4y ago
        Interesting - looks like they're doing this via a bunch of special-case rules. To any google engineers reading: Please add `really-verbatim` mode, indicated by backtick quotes, which also requires strict matching of punctuation.
kurthr 4y ago
Me too. My anecdote was that during the winter Olympics I was looking for a college friend who's name was several characters off of one of the competing athlete's. It didn't matter how much additional information I put in the search. Even quoted, if it included anything that looked like that popular athlete, then that was all that was returned. When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news. Interesting that DDG did not find the page even with the username. I do not know why, but it appeared it was not indexed there.
- permo-w 4y ago
  quote search often fails on duckduckgo
- Jiro 4y ago
  I once tried to search for a scammer named "internal revenue services" (with an S at the end) and it just wouldn't let me, quotes or not. I tried it now and it's better, but not perfect. Most pages contain the term (as a misspelling) but a few didn't seem to (one had the word "services" in many places on it, however) and there was still a big Google Maps result and a Wikipedia result at the top for the actual IRS.
- trebbble 4y ago
  > When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news. This is exactly what people mean when they say quotes "don't work". Elsewhere are google people in this comment section saying they do, and they may be telling the truth after Google applies some relevance pre-filter to the results. Anything that doesn't pass that, though, basically doesn't exist, which can look like quoting not working at all (and effectively is quoting not working as expected).
victor9000 4y ago
Doing some form of lossy tokenization would leave you in a pickle like this, but that's pure speculation on my part.
kieckerjan 4y ago
Regular unquoted search has declined in the eyes of many people. Quoted search worked and works fine (if you take into account the caveats about tokenisation etc). They are improving the snippets. It is all in the fine article.
dannysullivan 4y ago
I work for Google Search. Nothing changed in how they worked over the past two years. I think it's just that our snippets weren't reflecting where we were finding the quoted terms, causing people to think they were ignored. Hopefully this change will now help avoid that impression.
- mojuba 4y ago
  It's just not true. Some years back (I think around 2017) I was showing to my colleagues how the phrase "The magic of Google is gone" in quotes brings a ton of irrelevant results, none of which contained the phrase or sometimes even any of the words (and no, it wasn't the suggested "results without quotes"). I also posted about it on an online forum which Google could at one point find as the only result, but now it's gone even though that page is still there, on the same forum. Today this phrase yields zero results and suggests some without quotes. I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
  - dannysullivan 4y ago
    Quotes searches bring back pages we can see have the quoted terms. That's how it is intended to work, and that's how does work. I've looked into many of these cases, we find the quoted terms there. In this example, we don't see any pages with that quoted phrase. If there is a page with it out on the web, like the forum post you mentioned, it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it. Do you recall the URL? It would help me look into that more.
    - onli 4y ago
      I have a different example of Google not finding a page with "" that ought to be found. Assume I want to find https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685 https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685, which is on a ~20 year old phpBB forum that is certainly indexed. The post is from 2012 after all. And I take one sentence from there and search for it, with quotes: "Hast du besondere s9y eventplugins installiert?" This leads to https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+eventplugins+installiert%3F%22 https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+even..., which so far has only one search result, to http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten-und-events/ http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten.... Which by the way does not contain the target sentence, but that might be because the search moved over into non-verbatim mode. If I search without the quotes I get more results, but I think not the target thread. Admittedly, this is not "" not working by showing pages that do not contain the target keyword. But it is "" failing by the search not properly searching its own index. What's going on there? Why is the index of a rather stale 20 year old forum not complete? The site is indexed in general.

solardev 4y ago

Ultimately they just want to show you ads for you to accidentally click on

metadat 4y ago

astonex 4y ago
Because ranking is very difficult
- metadat 4y ago
  PageRank 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 ago
    https://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 ago
    Full-web isn't something google can do anymore either, for better and worse.
  - dietr1ch 4y ago
    What 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.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    i've got my issues with brave but iirc they're actually doing an independent web index not just using bing (i think they still use them for images tho). it was really nice to hear somebody else is working on that even if i'm not using it rn.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Didn't know about Brave's Index. I just emailed them to find out how I can help with the bottom line of making human knowledge accessible for lesser-idiots. Thanks!
    - godshatter 4y ago
      I have issues with the Brave browser but I am a big fan of their search product. Just the fact that they are building their own index was enough for me to switch, but I've had better luck with finding useful search results than I previously had with DDG. YMMV, of course. Their forum search results section has been very useful, too.
  - ijidak 4y ago
    Search is a really hard problem. And as the web scales, it's an increasingly expensive problem. (Servers, storage, bandwidth, etc.) I'd wager that it's easier to launch the next SpaceX than to launch the next Google.
  - chongli 4y ago
    PageRank is basically worthless at this point. Its baseline assumption, that keywords and in-links correlate with relevance, is now broken. The vast majority of stuff out there is SEO'd and link-farmed to death. If you want to find anything relevant with PageRank these days, you first need to find a way to filter out all of the spam. This is why search is so hard now.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Impossibly difficult and resource intensive? Sounds like we need a reset of some kind.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      > find a way to filter out all of the spam It is the same spam sites I see again and again. A manual blacklist from one puny FTE would probably clean up the wast majority.
      - graftak 4y ago
        They could even crowd source this by allowing users to block domains from search results, which should affect its ranking long term.
        jpindar 4y ago
        As with so many things, they used to do this then inexplicably stopped.
        anticensor 4y ago
        You can use -inurl:example.com
      - nikanj 4y ago
        But that would involve hiring a human. Google's prime directive is "Never hire a human do a job well, when you can train AI to do the same job badly"
missedthecue 4y ago
Can you explain to me exactly how "political relationships" prevent bing or anyone else from improving quote search?
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  Lots of site operators explicitly allow Google and block other search engines.
  - lopatin 4y ago
    While this may be true, I'm still confused what it has to do with quote searches.
    - mmmpop 4y ago
      If it were me, I'd be waiting for his "sources" so I can tear them to pieces for not being the NYT or something trustworthy and 100% truthful, all of the time.
      - metadat 4y ago
        Why would there be sources? [Unrecorded] phone call / encrypted-channel deals happen all the time. Do you want to pretend it doesn't happen and the world is actually fair? What a nice dream.
  - wowokay 4y ago
    Those sites will lose out in the long run I suppose.
l33t2328 4y ago
If a competitor had perfect quotes I’d still use google. They’re too reliable at other things.
simantel 4y ago
Yep launched two months ago: https://yep.com/ https://yep.com/
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Seems to be run by an SEO company ...
bigyikes 4y ago
I was a DDG user for the past year, and I consistently found myself falling back to the big G due to poor result quality. I recently started paying for Kagi[1] and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I haven’t felt the need to use a different search engine since switching. (No affiliation; just a happy customer) [1]: https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- DanHulton 4y ago
  I am also a happy kagi paying user, for the extra data point. I do occasionally switch back to DDG for non-technical searches, but even that has been rarer and rarer as time goes on.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I still give DDG first shot at my searches, but their results have been getting worse and worse. I'd blame the people they scrape their results from but nobody is stopping DDG from handling search operators correctly so we can narrow down whatever gets spewed back at us. Even worse several times recently DDG just returns a blank page.
  - carrotcarrot 4y ago
    A lot of DDG is just a front end for Bing.
- Johnythree 4y ago
  I'm very happy to pay Kargi a small fee, so that I never have to see Google ever again.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

skybrian 4y ago

Maybe they're getting gamed somehow? With this change, it should be easier to see if that's the case.

L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago
They're absolutely getting gamed (by sticking clickbait keywords into the meta description or invisible content or even just in plain text at the bottom of the page - you'd think they'd have learned their lesson on Youtube but alas). This doesn't change that.
- dylan604 4y ago
  remember when sites would load keywords up with the same font color as the background, or in divs with display:none or visibility:hidden type of shenanigans? they supposedly penalized sites for that. so you're saying that keyword stuffing is back?

II2II 4y ago

It soumds like they are only modifying the presentation of results, rather than the quality of the results. Useful, yes, but it's not necessarily what people are looking for.

uo21tp5hoyg 4y ago

Some search engines seem to just completely ignore quotes now, it's very frustrating especially when I know what I want to search and the search engine just isn't letting me.

Gigachad 4y ago
My best guess is its because people pasting things in with quotes are met with no results. Stuff like error messages often quote the only unique bit of the error leaving them with no results while ignoring the quotes would give them the result they want. Probably the vast majority of the population have no idea that quotes do anything in searches. Maybe they need some checkbox in the tools bar that makes quotes actually work if you know how they work.
- ehnto 4y ago
  And the vast majority of the population is who use Google now, rather than web enthusiasts. It was probably causing people to get no results when they had quotes, and most people wouldn't know why.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    how hard would it be for Googs to do the search as requested, see no results, then try without quotes? they do this for other things that annoy the F out of me. for example, searching for a phone number. it's a specific set of numbers that is unique. if there's no results for that number (or very few), it gives me results for numbers that are similar like same area code, same prefix, different number. nope. that's not useful. in this situation, I'd much rather see that no results are found rather than making me think there's a result but forcing me to look closely that it is what I wanted
    - ehnto 4y ago
      That's really not what I want quotes to do though, I want a definitive "not found". But it might be a good compromise. Their whole jam now seems to be zero UI except the box, no filters no exact match checkboxes etc. Stuff like that would be really nice to have on the main search.

Retr0id 4y ago

I hear this a lot, but it I haven't personally noticed any real problems with quoted search (other than the occasional difficulty actually finding the content on the resultant webpages). I have noticed a general decline in search quality over the last couple of years, but nothing specific to quotes. I realise I'm not saying anything particularly useful with this comment, but I just thought I'd add another datapoint. Edit: Thinking more, my biggest issue is when the quoted text occurs in the "recommended similar posts" section of a page (particularly common with reddit). That section gets re-rendered on each view, so it probably won't be there once I click the result.

8192kjshad09- 4y ago
Quoted search is provably broken for some queries, try a google search for "[::]" (with the double quotes), it has no results. Similarly, try a search for 'linux next hop "[::]"' (with the double quotes), none of the results will contain [::]. Proof: https://archive.ph/AAa6k https://archive.ph/AAa6k and https://archive.ph/9WGe7 https://archive.ph/9WGe7
- Retr0id 4y ago
  This isn't evidence of anything changing, google has always ignored punctuation - treating it as whitespace, as mentioned in the article.
  - oktoberpaard 4y ago
    Not always, though: https://www.blog.google/products/search/improvements-searching-special-characters-programming-languages/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/improvements-searchi....
    - Retr0id 4y ago
      Interesting - looks like they're doing this via a bunch of special-case rules. To any google engineers reading: Please add `really-verbatim` mode, indicated by backtick quotes, which also requires strict matching of punctuation.

kurthr 4y ago

Me too. My anecdote was that during the winter Olympics I was looking for a college friend who's name was several characters off of one of the competing athlete's. It didn't matter how much additional information I put in the search. Even quoted, if it included anything that looked like that popular athlete, then that was all that was returned. When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news. Interesting that DDG did not find the page even with the username. I do not know why, but it appeared it was not indexed there.

permo-w 4y ago
quote search often fails on duckduckgo
Jiro 4y ago
I once tried to search for a scammer named "internal revenue services" (with an S at the end) and it just wouldn't let me, quotes or not. I tried it now and it's better, but not perfect. Most pages contain the term (as a misspelling) but a few didn't seem to (one had the word "services" in many places on it, however) and there was still a big Google Maps result and a Wikipedia result at the top for the actual IRS.
trebbble 4y ago
> When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news. This is exactly what people mean when they say quotes "don't work". Elsewhere are google people in this comment section saying they do, and they may be telling the truth after Google applies some relevance pre-filter to the results. Anything that doesn't pass that, though, basically doesn't exist, which can look like quoting not working at all (and effectively is quoting not working as expected).

victor9000 4y ago

Doing some form of lossy tokenization would leave you in a pickle like this, but that's pure speculation on my part.

kieckerjan 4y ago

Regular unquoted search has declined in the eyes of many people. Quoted search worked and works fine (if you take into account the caveats about tokenisation etc). They are improving the snippets. It is all in the fine article.

dannysullivan 4y ago

I work for Google Search. Nothing changed in how they worked over the past two years. I think it's just that our snippets weren't reflecting where we were finding the quoted terms, causing people to think they were ignored. Hopefully this change will now help avoid that impression.

mojuba 4y ago
It's just not true. Some years back (I think around 2017) I was showing to my colleagues how the phrase "The magic of Google is gone" in quotes brings a ton of irrelevant results, none of which contained the phrase or sometimes even any of the words (and no, it wasn't the suggested "results without quotes"). I also posted about it on an online forum which Google could at one point find as the only result, but now it's gone even though that page is still there, on the same forum. Today this phrase yields zero results and suggests some without quotes. I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
- dannysullivan 4y ago
  Quotes searches bring back pages we can see have the quoted terms. That's how it is intended to work, and that's how does work. I've looked into many of these cases, we find the quoted terms there. In this example, we don't see any pages with that quoted phrase. If there is a page with it out on the web, like the forum post you mentioned, it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it. Do you recall the URL? It would help me look into that more.
  - onli 4y ago
    I have a different example of Google not finding a page with "" that ought to be found. Assume I want to find https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685 https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685, which is on a ~20 year old phpBB forum that is certainly indexed. The post is from 2012 after all. And I take one sentence from there and search for it, with quotes: "Hast du besondere s9y eventplugins installiert?" This leads to https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+eventplugins+installiert%3F%22 https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+even..., which so far has only one search result, to http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten-und-events/ http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten.... Which by the way does not contain the target sentence, but that might be because the search moved over into non-verbatim mode. If I search without the quotes I get more results, but I think not the target thread. Admittedly, this is not "" not working by showing pages that do not contain the target keyword. But it is "" failing by the search not properly searching its own index. What's going on there? Why is the index of a rather stale 20 year old forum not complete? The site is indexed in general.