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I 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 agr

I 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 ago
Just 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 ago
  Honestly? I expect "dog" and nothing else. Not dogs. Not dogged. Just dog.
  - rawoke083600 4y ago
    Agreed ! "dog" --> exact match +dog --> stemming allowed: i.e "doghouse, doggies, dogs" That would be nice to have
    - mcswell 4y ago
      Agreed, it could work that way (but doesn't). As a computational linguist who has worked a lot in morphology, I support this :).
    - dannysullivan 4y ago
      That'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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- causality0 4y ago
  No, I don't expect to see those things, because those things aren't what I searched for. My problem is that i get results for those things anyway. It's especially infuriating when, to use your example, I'm looking for something that happens to be called "dog" but has nothing to do with canines and Google won't stop giving me puppies.
  - mcswell 4y ago
    That's the synonyms thing; I was asking about inflected forms (dogs, dogging, dogged) and compounds containing the word (doghouse).
dannysullivan 4y ago
Words in quotes aren't suggestions. They tell us (I work for Google Search) to find only what's in the quotes. That's how they've worked for years. We haven't been "only obeying them" if we agree. I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. We obey them as outlined in that post. The problem is that people sometimes can't find the quoted material on the page -- that we definitely did see and definitely did restrict to -- so we made it clearer in snippets to help them understand what we saw, where we saw it and hopefully guide them to the right locations in the doc.

mcswell 4y ago

Just 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 ago
Honestly? I expect "dog" and nothing else. Not dogs. Not dogged. Just dog.
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  Agreed ! "dog" --> exact match +dog --> stemming allowed: i.e "doghouse, doggies, dogs" That would be nice to have
  - mcswell 4y ago
    Agreed, it could work that way (but doesn't). As a computational linguist who has worked a lot in morphology, I support this :).
  - dannysullivan 4y ago
    That'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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
causality0 4y ago
No, I don't expect to see those things, because those things aren't what I searched for. My problem is that i get results for those things anyway. It's especially infuriating when, to use your example, I'm looking for something that happens to be called "dog" but has nothing to do with canines and Google won't stop giving me puppies.
- mcswell 4y ago
  That's the synonyms thing; I was asking about inflected forms (dogs, dogging, dogged) and compounds containing the word (doghouse).

dannysullivan 4y ago

Words in quotes aren't suggestions. They tell us (I work for Google Search) to find only what's in the quotes. That's how they've worked for years. We haven't been "only obeying them" if we agree. I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. We obey them as outlined in that post. The problem is that people sometimes can't find the quoted material on the page -- that we definitely did see and definitely did restrict to -- so we made it clearer in snippets to help them understand what we saw, where we saw it and hopefully guide them to the right locations in the doc.