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The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searche

The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.

vanderZwan 12y ago
DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).
userbinator 12y ago
Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.
ninkendo 12y ago
Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.
- nevi-me 12y ago
  They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.
  - Wilya 12y ago
    I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could improve the quality of my search results. Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.
    - ninkendo 12y ago
      Exactly. Searches with less results are nearly always better than searches with more... I don't know why Google would think it's helpful to include more, but clearly less relevant results. (By definition, too. If a result is lacking one of your search terms, it's less relevant to what you searched for, strictly speaking.) This is especially true when what I'm searching for yields almost no results. That's how I typically know that what I'm searching for was probably bogus to begin with. But when the first page is full of a bunch of fuzzed-out results that are only tangentially related to what I searched for, I now have to skim through a page full of results to realize that Google just gave up and decided to omit several of my terms.
  - ninkendo 12y ago
    Right, and it told me that the CPAN pages were with "ruby" omitted. But why would I want those search results? Those are obviously not what I searched for. And they weren't at the bottom, they were actually the first result on the list.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't they?

vanderZwan 12y ago

DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).

userbinator 12y ago

Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want. If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore. I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.

ninkendo 12y ago

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own. I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.

nevi-me 12y ago
They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.
- Wilya 12y ago
  I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could improve the quality of my search results. Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.
  - ninkendo 12y ago
    Exactly. Searches with less results are nearly always better than searches with more... I don't know why Google would think it's helpful to include more, but clearly less relevant results. (By definition, too. If a result is lacking one of your search terms, it's less relevant to what you searched for, strictly speaking.) This is especially true when what I'm searching for yields almost no results. That's how I typically know that what I'm searching for was probably bogus to begin with. But when the first page is full of a bunch of fuzzed-out results that are only tangentially related to what I searched for, I now have to skim through a page full of results to realize that Google just gave up and decided to omit several of my terms.
- ninkendo 12y ago
  Right, and it told me that the CPAN pages were with "ruby" omitted. But why would I want those search results? Those are obviously not what I searched for. And they weren't at the bottom, they were actually the first result on the list.
m_mueller 12y ago
The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't they?