11 ms·

Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

263 points by Matt_Cutts 15y ago

Metapony 15y ago
More like adds and then buries. I'd rather have the plus sign operator back, google.
gergles 15y ago
And, of course, the "search for what I actually fucking typed" mode is completely undiscoverable, hidden behind another click, and which can't be defaulted into. This is a good bandaid, but is still a bandaid. I have still switched away from Google to a search engine that will actually search for what I told it to, not one that thinks it can guess my meaning. (Not to mention one that doesn't wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out.)
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
  - SCdF 15y ago
    I use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps. I wonder how many of the 10% are intentional.
  - smackfu 15y ago
    If only Google had some sort of "account" system that could store user-specific preferences...
    - Sargis 15y ago
      It'd be better if we could just append a "v" after the URL to make verbatim searches. That way we can bookmark it and there will be no need to be logged in.
      - botker 15y ago
        You can. Append: &tbs=li:1 Ugly, but it works.
        noibl 15y ago
        Heh, I just found this too and added it to my default omnibox search in Chrome. You may have to add your own to the list: hXXp://www.google.com/search?q=%s&le=en&start=0&tbs=li:1
  - timtadh 15y ago
    How do you tell the difference (for mis-spelled words) between people doing an actual search and people spell checking a word? It could be that a significant percentage of the 10% are not "search queries" but "spelling queries"
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.
    - daveungerer 15y ago
      Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!
      - JoshTriplett 15y ago
        If the computer successfully guesses exactly the thing you wanted and does that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a "did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do it then?". However, if the computer guesses wrong, that will cause significantly more frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong. Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user with their original search.
        moultano 15y ago
        That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch. What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that, but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the feedback we've seen on HN. We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.
  - kitsune_ 15y ago
    I think the algorithm does too many "magic" things lately. I've noticed this when I had some search queries for "flask" (python micro web framework) and some programming related input and most of the returned results were about "flash".
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      We're always trying to find the right balance. The nice thing about this change is that it gives people an escape hatch if we get it wrong. In theory, I could imagine we could look at the corresponding data to improve the balance in the future too.
      - strictfp 15y ago
        Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting corrections does not interrupt my flow and are generally helpful. Auto-corrections are in great part highly disruptive for me. Please don't deviate from this very sound principle, at least not for us power users.
        Matt_Cutts 15y ago
        I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong. My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.
        waqf 15y ago
        Can I enable literal mode permanently with a cookie? Otherwise, you better make sure that going into literal mode is fewer clicks than, say, going to DuckDuckGo.
  - anjc 15y ago
    Spelling correction has nothing to do with "" being worse than +. I think a lot of us would welcome spelling suggestions while we're using our + operator.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    For that 10% figure to be meaningful, we'd need to know how many people are trying to search for something precise and not receiving it.
  - bambax 15y ago
    Although now is not the time to be picky (to be thankful, rather), why not simply let logged in users default to literal search, while still displaying the "did you mean" suggestions somewhere on the page...?
  - ars 15y ago
    All I really want is for google to tell me when it didn't search for what I wrote. I put a word in the search, I expect it in the results - even if the result has a low page rank. If you want to default considering some words optional, that's fine. But say that above the search results.
- Kuiper 15y ago
  What search engine do you use now, out of curiosity?
  - rkudeshi 15y ago
    Probably DuckDuckGo.
    - gergles 15y ago
      Yes, DDG. My only complaint is that it is slower than Google, but it's worth it to me to get the results for what I actually typed the first time.
- 1amzave 15y ago
  > wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? (e.g. with a user-script or something?) It's incredibly obnoxious. And sadly Google's not the only on that does it. Frankly, it seems like a major design mistake from my perspective that Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar at all. It'd be nice to be able to remove that ability, if not "un-wrap" the links entirely.
  - oinksoft 15y ago
    > Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? If you have JavaScript disabled, or these particular event handlers somehow blocked, the href is never replaced. > Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar That's disabled by default in most browsers (see in FF about:config, dom.disable_window_status_change -> true). Look at the mousedown handler of links to see that the href attribute is changed on mousedown.
    - throwaway64 15y ago
      The problem is blocking google.com javascript will also block recaptcha on any domains that use it (a lot do), which they ever so helpfully moved from recaptcha.org to google.com.
    - simonbrown 15y ago
      The href attribute is still changed. While javascript can't change the status bar explicitly any more, they can set the link's href to the fake URL and change the link's target in the click event. Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/ http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/
  - zargon 15y ago
    There are a variety of scripts that remove the link tracking. I use this one: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so thanks for the suggestion.
- redler 15y ago
  Matt, do you know if there are any plans to once again allow the mixing of exact match with the regular fuzzier search functionality? It's great to have exact matching back, but I often found it a useful strategy to build the search loosely, then refine with +specifics. Perhaps something like this, in exact match mode: ~run ~sprint ~hurdle nike could be the equivalent of the old: run sprint hurdle +nike
  - davorak 15y ago
    Yes please allow something like this, mixing verbatim with fuzzier search functionality is powerful.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - Xuzz 15y ago
    You still can do that, you just have to use "quotes" "around" "the" "words" instead of +putting +the +plus +sign +before +each +word. This just lets you get that type of search for every word easier.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    Isn't run sprint hurdle "nike" what you want?
    - redler 15y ago
      Yes, and of course that works fine. It's just the ease of using an inline prefix to modify the term, rather than enclosing it in quotes. We're mourning the loss of the +.
DanBC 15y ago
This is excellent news. I know when Google does stuff that they base it on evidence, and they do it for the best of most users, and that my edge cases are not what most users would have. I was getting caught in some frustrating searches, so I'm really pleased about this. There's some amazing figures in the article: > However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. Wow. Finally: If Google offered user controllable stemming that'd be awesome. When I started using Google there was no stemming. Now there's either Google suggested stemming or user-controlled no stemming.
mrich 15y ago
Thanks for also considering the power users/edge cases. Even better would be to have a prefix for the search, e.g. /l(iteral) so that you could do the whole search by keyboard only (but perhaps there is a key binding for the menu option? Would be great)
zobzu 15y ago
Woohoo! that's actually something that was annoying me greatly. Type stuff and Google just search for whatever it thinks is best. Bleh! Anyway, that's awesome.
losvedir 15y ago
Hooray! Does the "more search tools" menu learn from the user which tools are useful to them? I seem to recall at one point having to open the search tools for the helpful timeframe narrowing options, but now those routinely appear exposed on the left. If after a few times using verbatim it realized I was a "power user" and always had that option sitting on the side for me, I'd love it.
espeed 15y ago
In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly. Actually, Google decided to repurpose the + operator for Google Plus Pages Direct Connect (http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=direct_connect&answer=1711199 http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p...).
- notatoad 15y ago
  that may have had something to do with it, but i think you can probably trust the official sources that it really wasn't used much and was often used incorrectly. i've met more than a few old people who had been told at some point that they always needed to put plus signs between words instead of spaces, no matter what.
rickmb 15y ago
Does anybody else feel somewhat uncomfortable to live in a world where people who a) know how to spell and b) actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? I've always laughed at the idea of the internet and search engines making people dumber, but this seems like hard evidence. Most Google users are too stupid to have ever been able to use a library...
- recursive 15y ago
  > actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? Arguably synonyms and word stemming still are what they are looking for. You could easily argue that one either way.
  - TillE 15y ago
    Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just that, and only for certain words.
- waqf 15y ago
  Well, I feel uncomfortable using a product that is designed to fill such people's needs at the expense of mine. Just like Yahoo's homepage full of entertainment news, Google's aggressive query correction sends me the message "You are not our target audience, because there isn't enough money in catering to you". And when Google is sending that message to geeks, I can't help feeling there's some brand destruction going on.
joebadmo 15y ago
It's encouraging to me that Google takes users' concerns into consideration. I prefer this dialogue to Google just 'getting things right in the first place' in fact. This is one example. Gmail's redesign is another. And I'm sure more changes are coming to both. I hope Google never stops making aggressive changes and listening to feedback aggressively.
101000101 15y ago
Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time. It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else. Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision. But time will tell who is the wiser.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  Actually, usage of the + operator has been in steady decline for years. With Altavista you had to use + to require a word. When I started at Google, many many more queries had tons of pluses. Google's demographic was much more tech-savvy in the early years, but as we've struck partnerships with companies like AOL, the population of people searching on Google has become broader. I don't believe that 95.5% of users will be searching with + or double-quotes any time soon. But for the power users like people on HN, they now have an extra option that allows better slicing/dicing of search results.
  - 101000101 15y ago
    You seem to be suggesting that Google's new demographic will never become more tech savvy or at least not "any time soon". That's an interesting view. I'm just a bit more optimistic.
    - mladenkovacevic 15y ago
      I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.
      - 101000101 15y ago
        Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process. And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results. Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately. The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy". We know where Google stands on this. Let's see what happens.
ck2 15y ago
What if you just want some words verbatim? You'd just use +word right? Oh wait.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  No, now you would use double quotes. So instead of searching for [hacker news ck2] you'd search for [hacker news "ck2"] to require the exact word "ck2". But remember, that could match anchortext pointing to the page. You can use "intext:" to require a match on the page.
thurn 15y ago
I hope they also add a way to enable it from within the query string itself, like 'verbatim: foo'. Much easier, and that way you can do it from search boxes and such too.
mattmanser 15y ago
Wow 2/3rds of people use it wrong. That surprised me. On the other hand, the post tries to pretend that this had nothing to do with +username or +brand and Google+. No, it's the users, it's their fault, not our new product naming boo boo. We'll just silently break our flagship product and hope no-one notices. Blame the customer seems a bad strategy. Just wish they'd man up and admit it. Even if it's really not the reason, because that's the belief on the internet. It's times like this that remind me how Google really doesn't get customer service.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  It's definitely the case that <0.5% of searches use the plus operator, and most of those searches aren't using plus correctly. If you used the plus operator correctly, you're well within the 1% of most savvy searchers. You might be surprised and discouraged to discover that most people don't know about things like the minus operator to exclude terms from search results. If you really want to be depressed, read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...
  - anjc 15y ago
    Could you explain how exactly the + operator is used incorrectly? I know that personally i often end up with bizarre looking searches, purely because i know what i'm searching for. e.g. it might include purposeful spelling mistakes, requiring the plus to avoid autocorrection...but this doesn't mean i'm using the + incorrectly. I just can't imagine somebody, potentially, understanding boolean logic, describing a search with it, and using it incorrectly. I can't even imagine the most naive usage being incorrect, unless you're sure that you know what they wanted to do somehow.
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      I'm at a conference and can't easily get on our internal VPN from here, but I'll try to remember to circle back around when I can get on our VPN. But in general, you see a lot of stuff that looks like semi-random punctuation just sprinkled at the beginning of the query or throughout the query, things that look like people are using plus instead of space as if they're copying from an address bar, etc.
hrktb 15y ago
too little too late? It's hidden into the prefs when I'd liked it always on, on any device I use without having it tied to a specific account or anything. I switched to ddg for regular and advanced queries, and use google for all the fuzzy stuff or very specific queries. It's still easier than to care about the verbatim setting.
mcn 15y ago
> we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger As you are doing this, please keep in mind that when you incorrectly broaden my query, and there is no immediately obvious way to re-narrow it, it costs you much more than you gain each time you correctly broaden my query.
tambourine_man 15y ago
Hi Matt, The problem is that, sometimes, even quoted queries don't guarantee that the word will be there. I hope verbatim solves that.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  Yes, I believe it does. I believe verbatim requires an on-page page.
  - thaumaturgy 15y ago
    Thank you so much for this. I know I'm one of the less-than-a-percentage-point of users for whom the suggestions were making me cranky; this will make me a much happier Google user.
  - tambourine_man 15y ago
    Hey Matt, thanks for listening. Since code search is gone, I'd really love a “grep” for the Web. Full page search, including headers,js,css,html comments, etc. If you could pass that along, I believe it would make a lot of us geeks happy.
RexRollman 15y ago
I still love Google's search product but I am not real happy with the recent UI changes they have introduced. I particularly don't care for the preview arrow thing that now goes down the right side: I keep triggering the damn thing on accident.
- beernutz 15y ago
  Yes, THANK YOU! I find myself doing that as well. I don't understand why that is seen as an improvement. Also, I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text". That seems different than quotes meaning "use this text exactly as i typed it".
  - RexRollman 15y ago
    I generally quote string searches but I do use pluses when I want to search for two separate strings in the same page, such as: "Hacker News"+"Steve Jobs"
- conradfr 15y ago
  Also the cache link has been sadly moved in that panel.
- unfasten 15y ago
  If you'd like remove Preview then you can use the CSS from this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 to disable it. conradfr: You may also be interested in the CSS snippet in the above post since it will make the Cache link show next to the URL.
tomkarlo 15y ago
I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a huge help. Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers. It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.
- fuzzythinker 15y ago
  Counter example: I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried +"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation. There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actually likes the new google search. Btw, what's the answer? Only link I found was [1] someone says it's REH-sig, not REE-sig (not too sure what's the difference). But I'm more interested on how to pronounce the second part, is it more like "side"("sign" minus 'n'), "seed", "sad", or something else? [1] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not-super/#comment-839 http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not...
  - moultano 15y ago
    [how to pronounce "resig"] works for me now. (Or at least doesn't mess with the query, though the results aren't great.) Do you remember what results you were seeing before?
    - fuzzythinker 15y ago
      yea, that seems to work now. Wasn't getting any "resig"'s at all before unless I added -resign -resignation. Now, ["pronounce" "resig"] seems to do the trick, as w/o quotes or just '+'s still gives resign and resignation results.
dholowiski 15y ago
OMG Finally. This will make one IT Guy's day job much easier, and the same guy's weekend/evening programming life easier too.;
Shanewho 15y ago
This sounds like it has potential, although I can't test it yet. You should try searching Google for information on COM programming. Try finding information on "COM Events", for example. Good luck. Macy's is on the the first page! Bing is not any better.
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  I get "Understanding COM Event Handling" at #1, but agree that it's not ideal. Some words like COM or IT have dual meanings where sometimes you want to treat them like stopwords and sometimes you don't.
  - Shanewho 15y ago
    Just tried it with verbatim but results are still no good =( I can see how it is doing exactly what it is told to do ("www.yelp.com/events"), but not what I would like. I like the idea of being able to do verbatim searches though! (and still miss the + button...)
bh42222 15y ago
It might be just my home and work connections and their latency, but for me the auto-complete has hugely slowed down my searches. I type rather fast (as you can tell by all the typos in my posts) and today I type something in and then wait for all the auto-complete options to settle down. Sure, I don't have to hit the search button to get results anymore. But previously it was faster to type, then hit search, then get results. Much faster.
- tgrass 15y ago
  Mine returns faster than I can finish typing and look down.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
botker 15y ago
Here's my Google Verbatim search engine plugin for your browser. http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=google+verbatim http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
teilo 15y ago
This is what I liked about the original method that Google used back in the 90s. It was always an exact text match for all words. At some point that changed, and to this day I still forget to use + to force the old behavior.
Dylan16807 15y ago
It's still stemming for me. I'm using my normal pathological search of [["everything wrong" crossfade]]. Verbatim mode roughly cuts the number of results in half but keeps giving me pages that only have the phrase [[everything's wrong]] and not the phrase [[everything wrong]].
GraffitiTim 15y ago
I just added a custom Google Verbatim search engine to Chrome with keyword "gv", so I can type "gv testing" in the URL bar and get a verbatim search for "testing". To do this, go to the "Manage Search Engines" section of Chrome preferences (Firefox has a similar feature somewhere) and use this URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1
ldng 15y ago
Well for a verbatim search of map(call()) I wouldn't expect google to filter out parenthesis. More than ever now that code search is dead. "map(call())" would work either. So much for verbatim ...
RyanKearney 15y ago
Except it doesn't even work because you still can't search for source code since punctuation like + or $ so it's not even a semi-replacement for Google Code Search (not that that's what it was intended for).

263 points by Matt_Cutts 15y ago

More like adds and then buries. I'd rather have the plus sign operator back, google.

And, of course, the "search for what I actually fucking typed" mode is completely undiscoverable, hidden behind another click, and which can't be defaulted into. This is a good bandaid, but is still a bandaid. I have still switched away from Google to a search engine that will actually search for what I told it to, not one that thinks it can guess my meaning. (Not to mention one that doesn't wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out.)

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
- SCdF 15y ago
  I use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps. I wonder how many of the 10% are intentional.
- smackfu 15y ago
  If only Google had some sort of "account" system that could store user-specific preferences...
  - Sargis 15y ago
    It'd be better if we could just append a "v" after the URL to make verbatim searches. That way we can bookmark it and there will be no need to be logged in.
    - botker 15y ago
      You can. Append: &tbs=li:1 Ugly, but it works.
      - noibl 15y ago
        Heh, I just found this too and added it to my default omnibox search in Chrome. You may have to add your own to the list: hXXp://www.google.com/search?q=%s&le=en&start=0&tbs=li:1
- timtadh 15y ago
  How do you tell the difference (for mis-spelled words) between people doing an actual search and people spell checking a word? It could be that a significant percentage of the 10% are not "search queries" but "spelling queries"
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.
  - daveungerer 15y ago
    Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      If the computer successfully guesses exactly the thing you wanted and does that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a "did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do it then?". However, if the computer guesses wrong, that will cause significantly more frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong. Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user with their original search.
      - moultano 15y ago
        That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch. What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that, but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the feedback we've seen on HN. We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.
- kitsune_ 15y ago
  I think the algorithm does too many "magic" things lately. I've noticed this when I had some search queries for "flask" (python micro web framework) and some programming related input and most of the returned results were about "flash".
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    We're always trying to find the right balance. The nice thing about this change is that it gives people an escape hatch if we get it wrong. In theory, I could imagine we could look at the corresponding data to improve the balance in the future too.
    - strictfp 15y ago
      Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting corrections does not interrupt my flow and are generally helpful. Auto-corrections are in great part highly disruptive for me. Please don't deviate from this very sound principle, at least not for us power users.
      - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
        I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong. My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.
        waqf 15y ago
        Can I enable literal mode permanently with a cookie? Otherwise, you better make sure that going into literal mode is fewer clicks than, say, going to DuckDuckGo.
- anjc 15y ago
  Spelling correction has nothing to do with "" being worse than +. I think a lot of us would welcome spelling suggestions while we're using our + operator.
- rhizome 15y ago
  For that 10% figure to be meaningful, we'd need to know how many people are trying to search for something precise and not receiving it.
- bambax 15y ago
  Although now is not the time to be picky (to be thankful, rather), why not simply let logged in users default to literal search, while still displaying the "did you mean" suggestions somewhere on the page...?
- ars 15y ago
  All I really want is for google to tell me when it didn't search for what I wrote. I put a word in the search, I expect it in the results - even if the result has a low page rank. If you want to default considering some words optional, that's fine. But say that above the search results.
Kuiper 15y ago
What search engine do you use now, out of curiosity?
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  Probably DuckDuckGo.
  - gergles 15y ago
    Yes, DDG. My only complaint is that it is slower than Google, but it's worth it to me to get the results for what I actually typed the first time.
1amzave 15y ago
> wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? (e.g. with a user-script or something?) It's incredibly obnoxious. And sadly Google's not the only on that does it. Frankly, it seems like a major design mistake from my perspective that Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar at all. It'd be nice to be able to remove that ability, if not "un-wrap" the links entirely.
- oinksoft 15y ago
  > Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? If you have JavaScript disabled, or these particular event handlers somehow blocked, the href is never replaced. > Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar That's disabled by default in most browsers (see in FF about:config, dom.disable_window_status_change -> true). Look at the mousedown handler of links to see that the href attribute is changed on mousedown.
  - throwaway64 15y ago
    The problem is blocking google.com javascript will also block recaptcha on any domains that use it (a lot do), which they ever so helpfully moved from recaptcha.org to google.com.
  - simonbrown 15y ago
    The href attribute is still changed. While javascript can't change the status bar explicitly any more, they can set the link's href to the fake URL and change the link's target in the click event. Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/ http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/
- zargon 15y ago
  There are a variety of scripts that remove the link tracking. I use this one: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092

Matt_Cutts 15y ago

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so thanks for the suggestion.

redler 15y ago
Matt, do you know if there are any plans to once again allow the mixing of exact match with the regular fuzzier search functionality? It's great to have exact matching back, but I often found it a useful strategy to build the search loosely, then refine with +specifics. Perhaps something like this, in exact match mode: ~run ~sprint ~hurdle nike could be the equivalent of the old: run sprint hurdle +nike
- davorak 15y ago
  Yes please allow something like this, mixing verbatim with fuzzier search functionality is powerful.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Xuzz 15y ago
  You still can do that, you just have to use "quotes" "around" "the" "words" instead of +putting +the +plus +sign +before +each +word. This just lets you get that type of search for every word easier.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Isn't run sprint hurdle "nike" what you want?
  - redler 15y ago
    Yes, and of course that works fine. It's just the ease of using an inline prefix to modify the term, rather than enclosing it in quotes. We're mourning the loss of the +.

DanBC 15y ago

This is excellent news. I know when Google does stuff that they base it on evidence, and they do it for the best of most users, and that my edge cases are not what most users would have. I was getting caught in some frustrating searches, so I'm really pleased about this. There's some amazing figures in the article: > However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. Wow. Finally: If Google offered user controllable stemming that'd be awesome. When I started using Google there was no stemming. Now there's either Google suggested stemming or user-controlled no stemming.

mrich 15y ago

Thanks for also considering the power users/edge cases. Even better would be to have a prefix for the search, e.g. /l(iteral) so that you could do the whole search by keyboard only (but perhaps there is a key binding for the menu option? Would be great)

zobzu 15y ago

Woohoo! that's actually something that was annoying me greatly. Type stuff and Google just search for whatever it thinks is best. Bleh! Anyway, that's awesome.

losvedir 15y ago

Hooray! Does the "more search tools" menu learn from the user which tools are useful to them? I seem to recall at one point having to open the search tools for the helpful timeframe narrowing options, but now those routinely appear exposed on the left. If after a few times using verbatim it realized I was a "power user" and always had that option sitting on the side for me, I'd love it.

espeed 15y ago

In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly. Actually, Google decided to repurpose the + operator for Google Plus Pages Direct Connect (http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=direct_connect&answer=1711199 http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p...).

notatoad 15y ago
that may have had something to do with it, but i think you can probably trust the official sources that it really wasn't used much and was often used incorrectly. i've met more than a few old people who had been told at some point that they always needed to put plus signs between words instead of spaces, no matter what.

rickmb 15y ago

Does anybody else feel somewhat uncomfortable to live in a world where people who a) know how to spell and b) actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? I've always laughed at the idea of the internet and search engines making people dumber, but this seems like hard evidence. Most Google users are too stupid to have ever been able to use a library...

recursive 15y ago
> actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? Arguably synonyms and word stemming still are what they are looking for. You could easily argue that one either way.
- TillE 15y ago
  Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just that, and only for certain words.
waqf 15y ago
Well, I feel uncomfortable using a product that is designed to fill such people's needs at the expense of mine. Just like Yahoo's homepage full of entertainment news, Google's aggressive query correction sends me the message "You are not our target audience, because there isn't enough money in catering to you". And when Google is sending that message to geeks, I can't help feeling there's some brand destruction going on.

joebadmo 15y ago

It's encouraging to me that Google takes users' concerns into consideration. I prefer this dialogue to Google just 'getting things right in the first place' in fact. This is one example. Gmail's redesign is another. And I'm sure more changes are coming to both. I hope Google never stops making aggressive changes and listening to feedback aggressively.

101000101 15y ago

Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time. It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else. Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision. But time will tell who is the wiser.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
Actually, usage of the + operator has been in steady decline for years. With Altavista you had to use + to require a word. When I started at Google, many many more queries had tons of pluses. Google's demographic was much more tech-savvy in the early years, but as we've struck partnerships with companies like AOL, the population of people searching on Google has become broader. I don't believe that 95.5% of users will be searching with + or double-quotes any time soon. But for the power users like people on HN, they now have an extra option that allows better slicing/dicing of search results.
- 101000101 15y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that Google's new demographic will never become more tech savvy or at least not "any time soon". That's an interesting view. I'm just a bit more optimistic.
  - mladenkovacevic 15y ago
    I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.
    - 101000101 15y ago
      Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process. And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results. Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately. The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy". We know where Google stands on this. Let's see what happens.

ck2 15y ago

What if you just want some words verbatim? You'd just use +word right? Oh wait.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
No, now you would use double quotes. So instead of searching for [hacker news ck2] you'd search for [hacker news "ck2"] to require the exact word "ck2". But remember, that could match anchortext pointing to the page. You can use "intext:" to require a match on the page.

thurn 15y ago

I hope they also add a way to enable it from within the query string itself, like 'verbatim: foo'. Much easier, and that way you can do it from search boxes and such too.

mattmanser 15y ago

Wow 2/3rds of people use it wrong. That surprised me. On the other hand, the post tries to pretend that this had nothing to do with +username or +brand and Google+. No, it's the users, it's their fault, not our new product naming boo boo. We'll just silently break our flagship product and hope no-one notices. Blame the customer seems a bad strategy. Just wish they'd man up and admit it. Even if it's really not the reason, because that's the belief on the internet. It's times like this that remind me how Google really doesn't get customer service.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
It's definitely the case that <0.5% of searches use the plus operator, and most of those searches aren't using plus correctly. If you used the plus operator correctly, you're well within the 1% of most savvy searchers. You might be surprised and discouraged to discover that most people don't know about things like the minus operator to exclude terms from search results. If you really want to be depressed, read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...
- anjc 15y ago
  Could you explain how exactly the + operator is used incorrectly? I know that personally i often end up with bizarre looking searches, purely because i know what i'm searching for. e.g. it might include purposeful spelling mistakes, requiring the plus to avoid autocorrection...but this doesn't mean i'm using the + incorrectly. I just can't imagine somebody, potentially, understanding boolean logic, describing a search with it, and using it incorrectly. I can't even imagine the most naive usage being incorrect, unless you're sure that you know what they wanted to do somehow.
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    I'm at a conference and can't easily get on our internal VPN from here, but I'll try to remember to circle back around when I can get on our VPN. But in general, you see a lot of stuff that looks like semi-random punctuation just sprinkled at the beginning of the query or throughout the query, things that look like people are using plus instead of space as if they're copying from an address bar, etc.

hrktb 15y ago

too little too late? It's hidden into the prefs when I'd liked it always on, on any device I use without having it tied to a specific account or anything. I switched to ddg for regular and advanced queries, and use google for all the fuzzy stuff or very specific queries. It's still easier than to care about the verbatim setting.

mcn 15y ago

> we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger As you are doing this, please keep in mind that when you incorrectly broaden my query, and there is no immediately obvious way to re-narrow it, it costs you much more than you gain each time you correctly broaden my query.

tambourine_man 15y ago

Hi Matt, The problem is that, sometimes, even quoted queries don't guarantee that the word will be there. I hope verbatim solves that.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
Yes, I believe it does. I believe verbatim requires an on-page page.
- thaumaturgy 15y ago
  Thank you so much for this. I know I'm one of the less-than-a-percentage-point of users for whom the suggestions were making me cranky; this will make me a much happier Google user.
- tambourine_man 15y ago
  Hey Matt, thanks for listening. Since code search is gone, I'd really love a “grep” for the Web. Full page search, including headers,js,css,html comments, etc. If you could pass that along, I believe it would make a lot of us geeks happy.

RexRollman 15y ago

I still love Google's search product but I am not real happy with the recent UI changes they have introduced. I particularly don't care for the preview arrow thing that now goes down the right side: I keep triggering the damn thing on accident.

beernutz 15y ago
Yes, THANK YOU! I find myself doing that as well. I don't understand why that is seen as an improvement. Also, I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text". That seems different than quotes meaning "use this text exactly as i typed it".
- RexRollman 15y ago
  I generally quote string searches but I do use pluses when I want to search for two separate strings in the same page, such as: "Hacker News"+"Steve Jobs"
conradfr 15y ago
Also the cache link has been sadly moved in that panel.
unfasten 15y ago
If you'd like remove Preview then you can use the CSS from this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 to disable it. conradfr: You may also be interested in the CSS snippet in the above post since it will make the Cache link show next to the URL.

tomkarlo 15y ago

I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a huge help. Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers. It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.

fuzzythinker 15y ago
Counter example: I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried +"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation. There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actually likes the new google search. Btw, what's the answer? Only link I found was [1] someone says it's REH-sig, not REE-sig (not too sure what's the difference). But I'm more interested on how to pronounce the second part, is it more like "side"("sign" minus 'n'), "seed", "sad", or something else? [1] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not-super/#comment-839 http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not...
- moultano 15y ago
  [how to pronounce "resig"] works for me now. (Or at least doesn't mess with the query, though the results aren't great.) Do you remember what results you were seeing before?
  - fuzzythinker 15y ago
    yea, that seems to work now. Wasn't getting any "resig"'s at all before unless I added -resign -resignation. Now, ["pronounce" "resig"] seems to do the trick, as w/o quotes or just '+'s still gives resign and resignation results.

dholowiski 15y ago

OMG Finally. This will make one IT Guy's day job much easier, and the same guy's weekend/evening programming life easier too.;

Shanewho 15y ago

This sounds like it has potential, although I can't test it yet. You should try searching Google for information on COM programming. Try finding information on "COM Events", for example. Good luck. Macy's is on the the first page! Bing is not any better.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago
I get "Understanding COM Event Handling" at #1, but agree that it's not ideal. Some words like COM or IT have dual meanings where sometimes you want to treat them like stopwords and sometimes you don't.
- Shanewho 15y ago
  Just tried it with verbatim but results are still no good =( I can see how it is doing exactly what it is told to do ("www.yelp.com/events"), but not what I would like. I like the idea of being able to do verbatim searches though! (and still miss the + button...)

bh42222 15y ago

It might be just my home and work connections and their latency, but for me the auto-complete has hugely slowed down my searches. I type rather fast (as you can tell by all the typos in my posts) and today I type something in and then wait for all the auto-complete options to settle down. Sure, I don't have to hit the search button to get results anymore. But previously it was faster to type, then hit search, then get results. Much faster.

tgrass 15y ago
Mine returns faster than I can finish typing and look down.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

botker 15y ago

Here's my Google Verbatim search engine plugin for your browser. http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=google+verbatim http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...

teilo 15y ago

This is what I liked about the original method that Google used back in the 90s. It was always an exact text match for all words. At some point that changed, and to this day I still forget to use + to force the old behavior.

Dylan16807 15y ago

It's still stemming for me. I'm using my normal pathological search of [["everything wrong" crossfade]]. Verbatim mode roughly cuts the number of results in half but keeps giving me pages that only have the phrase [[everything's wrong]] and not the phrase [[everything wrong]].

GraffitiTim 15y ago

I just added a custom Google Verbatim search engine to Chrome with keyword "gv", so I can type "gv testing" in the URL bar and get a verbatim search for "testing". To do this, go to the "Manage Search Engines" section of Chrome preferences (Firefox has a similar feature somewhere) and use this URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1

ldng 15y ago

Well for a verbatim search of map(call()) I wouldn't expect google to filter out parenthesis. More than ever now that code search is dead. "map(call())" would work either. So much for verbatim ...

RyanKearney 15y ago

Except it doesn't even work because you still can't search for source code since punctuation like + or $ so it's not even a semi-replacement for Google Code Search (not that that's what it was intended for).