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Can you give me examples? Personally, I don't think I've ever had a problem finding things by their name or title on Google. If I type python, I get python's we

Can you give me examples? Personally, I don't think I've ever had a problem finding things by their name or title on Google. If I type python, I get python's website, if I type hacker news, I get this website. I can type the name of an old program and get their webpage on sourceforge for example. I've also tested that it works with finding the official websites of celebrities, e.g. if you type eminem, you get his official website. It does seem to have biases toward recency and product pages, but finding things by their title isn't a thing Google is bad at.

082349872349872 3y ago
I often search for titles containing very specific acronyms or abbreviations (which I would expect to be high precision low recall); Google's first response lately is usually a search based on a "correction" of these to a more common search, presumably because they are biasing to low precision high recall. (eg band names, even at hamming distance, will shadow maths structures) Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"? EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.
Tanoc 3y ago
It's also gotten very poor at exact text matches. I often make a bet to myself before searching for certain things as to whether or not Google will show something irrelevant. Most recently I was searching for a specific memory address error crashing ASIO. I was using the exact text from the error popup, and Google was giving me results for... Skyrim Script Extender refusing to start. The only shared text was "Page fault" between the two. I've also noticed this when looking for specific part numbers where instead it will give me magazines by matching the ISSN. Forcing quotes is a dice roll, as sometimes that will just return zero results, or Google will do the exact opposite and broaden the search terms.

082349872349872 3y ago

I often search for titles containing very specific acronyms or abbreviations (which I would expect to be high precision low recall); Google's first response lately is usually a search based on a "correction" of these to a more common search, presumably because they are biasing to low precision high recall. (eg band names, even at hamming distance, will shadow maths structures) Clicking again on my original query, or liberal use of quotation marks, then does the trick, but it's annoying af. Maybe there's a setting somewhere for "show me the results of my query first, not the 'did you mean' first"? EDIT: upon reflection, the problem is that I use Google in an early XXI manner: if I've been someplace before I use the URL bar, and it's for places I haven't been, that aren't common knowledge, that I want a search engine. There was a time when Google was optimised for this use case, and although that time is long past (in particular, no one buys ads for my queries), the annoyance is recent because now they actively pessimise.

Tanoc 3y ago

It's also gotten very poor at exact text matches. I often make a bet to myself before searching for certain things as to whether or not Google will show something irrelevant. Most recently I was searching for a specific memory address error crashing ASIO. I was using the exact text from the error popup, and Google was giving me results for... Skyrim Script Extender refusing to start. The only shared text was "Page fault" between the two. I've also noticed this when looking for specific part numbers where instead it will give me magazines by matching the ISSN. Forcing quotes is a dice roll, as sometimes that will just return zero results, or Google will do the exact opposite and broaden the search terms.