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Do you have an example where quoting doesn't work? I've seen this conversation many times on HN, and the conclusion is always that quoting works, but not in the
by Thorrez 3y ago
Do you have an example where quoting doesn't work? I've seen this conversation many times on HN, and the conclusion is always that quoting works, but not in the way many people expect, because it searches text hidden in the DOM and source code, and ignores punctuation and HTML/DOM boundaries.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on search.
- SamBam 3y agoI looked back in my history and found one from just last week: https://www.google.com/search?q=wevideo+%22masking%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=wevideo+%22masking%22 The top hits do not include the word "masking" in then as far as I can see (although I'm in Mobile right now so can't check the DOM).
- Thorrez 3y agoIn the DOM (not the HTML returned by the initial request) of the page, I see <yt-smartimation class="smartimation smartimation--enable-masking"> It does seem odd to me to be searching the class names of DOM elements. I'm not sure if that's intended or a bug, or a red herring and the page is found for some other reason. Testing more, searching for 'wevideo "smartimation"', 'wevideo "enable-masking"', 'wevideo "enable masking"', 'wevideo "enable-masking"', 'wevideo "enablemasking"', all return no results. That seems to indicate Google isn't searching class names. However, it's possible it is searching them but due to some algorithm decided to index on "masking" but not index on the other parts. Maybe another possibility is during crawling there was a recommended video in the sidebar with "masking" in the title. I don't really know how the crawler and indexer works though, if it pays attention to those. Maybe another possibility is I'm wrong, and for video results Google does ignore quotes.