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Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
by thfuran 7mo ago
Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
- lelandfe 7mo agoFor instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like: "pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's" Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
- iamnothere 7mo agoI have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too. If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this. A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term. Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
- whilenot-dev 7mo agoThere's a whole list of search operators: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/#list https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/#li...
- ssl-3 7mo agoIndeed. Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that. It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment. Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word. The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt. --- (Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful. But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good. In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
- eMPee584 7mo agoThere's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
- Gander5739 7mo agoA tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
- mister_mort 7mo agoI've never seen it spelled as "oftentimes".
- msephton 7mo agoThen it's a good job we're talking about YouTube, not Google search, and that I tested what I described before posting.