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I've been thinking about this. How about a heuristic of: If the user phrases their search as a natural language query ("what is...?", "how do I...", etc...) th

I've been thinking about this. How about a heuristic of: If the user phrases their search as a natural language query ("what is...?", "how do I...", etc...) then use whatever weird relevancy metrics and search word substitution your research suggests will answer the question best. OTOH, if the user appears to phrase their search as just a list of keywords, search for all the words verbatim. They already do query classification for things like Google Calculator. Extending the classifier to switch between "natural language query" and "strict keyword search" seems like a reasonable extension of that idea.

horsawlarway 4y ago
Ok - I totally understand the intent, but NOOOOOOOO!!!! (or more clearly: I have no problem with them trying this, but it doesn't solve my use case) The entire reason I ask is because I don't want google to try to interpret my search query and change it - I don't want it to guess what I'm looking for using [insert classifier of choice] - I want it to do as close to a text scan for the exact search query as I can get. Inconsistent tools are much harder to use. I really don't want to have to play a cat and mouse game with my search tool, and I don't want to have to have memorized all the "games" google is playing with my query and understand how to turn them off.