dannysullivan

8 ms·

31.
by dannysullivan 4y ago
I work for Google Search. The counts we show for results are estimated. They get more refined when you go deeper into the results. But yes, there are still likely to be millions of results for many things you query -- and most people are no
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Ages ago, AND was the default. That was true of many search engines, too. I can't pin down when exactly we shifted to OR as the default, but it's been that way for years, probably over a decade easily.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
It can happen. We keep working on improving in these cases, and we do give newspapers guidance on things they should consider to help avoid it.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
I was involved in writing that post and, in particular, that sentence about feedback. I don't work for PR. I work for our search quality team, as a liaison between the team and the public to ... bring feedback we hear in a variety of p
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
That's how it works. That's how it has worked for years, except you don't need the + symbol -- that tells us nothing. ["dog"] or anything in quotes means exact match, and that's what we do. [dog] or anything wi
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Words in quotes aren't suggestions. They tell us (I work for Google Search) to find only what's in the quotes. That's how they've worked for years. We haven't been "only obeying them" if we agree. I'm
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
In a Boolean like that, the command would be to match either of the words, A or B. But sometimes our ranking systems might find that A seems more relevant, so it could get weighted more. That's still a Boolean match, though. And you do
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
The post specifically did NOT tell people to make use of quotes when searching. It said the opposite, and simply explained the change with snippets is to better help those who decide they do want to use quote searching for whatever reason.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
We have date range operators such as before/after that do exactly that. See here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
If you don't want a city name being matched, then you need it inside of quotes and the - outside of those. From the examples you've given, it sounds like you might have it reversed. IE, there aren't correct ["-berlin&quo
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
If you're using that with the +, yes, + is being ignored. It hasn't been an operator for years. That's what the quote operators are for. If you search for something in quotes, that's the same as it used to be when you&#x
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
We have a long-standing page here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 Also explained here: https://www.google.com/advanced_search Hopefully we'll get these even more detailed
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
It's not that it gets specifically deleted. We just don't have infinite space. There's always new pages coming along. Like trillions of pages out there. So we might not get back to revisiting a page and it falls out of our in
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Yes, we didn't make any changes in how quotes retrieve content with the announcement we made. We changed how we show snippets for quoted searches.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Yes, that's exactly what it will do. But keep in mind that if you do [lyrics walk down the "aisle" at the "store"] by default we'll probably rank pages that have many of the words adjacent to each other because
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Quotes existed originally as a way to match phrases, more than one word. + was meant for matching a single word. Quotes replaced the way to match a single word, while still remaining the way to phrase search.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
We respect multiple quoted terms.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
I explained elsewhere that it's very unlikely to come back because we actually do try to match + in queries now for thing like international phone numbers, and also as someone else noted, there's any number of names that make use
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
By default, we (I work for Google Search). do tend to look for all the words indicated. It's just that sometimes, what seems to be the most relevant documents won't have all the exact words. If you want results exclusively to cont
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
If there's something newsy, we show recent stories because that's often helpful. If you want to older content, we have time range options. Check out before/after: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status&
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Again, the + symbol isn't a command and does nothing. If you searched for [libmad +tutorial] we saw that as as search for pages with both or either of two words, libmad OR +tutorial, plus any related words or synonyms, like tutorial. S
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
See this Twitter thread I shared (I work for Google Search) on our before/after commands we added to make it easier to do this type of searching. It also explains why it is sometimes difficult for us to determine the date of a document
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
The change from + to "" as a restriction option removed no "agency" from users. It provided exactly the same functionality, allowing anyone to require that a particular word or phrase be present in Google Search results.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
I don't see that particular page appearing to be indexed by us. If we don't have it indexed, we can't match it. Ideally, we'd index all the pages out on the web. But the web is really big.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Oh, and I meant "we're going to match what's quoted" in the first sentence of my reply. Sorry -- can't edit it now.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Thank you. Forum discussions here and in other places are really useful ways to gather feedback. It directly drove the improvement we launched this week.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
No, we don't. Which is why I specifically said local box (it's when we show local results almost always with a map -- the post explains this more). If it's a regular web search, and these are web pages about a local place, q
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Yes, I'd be happy to review an example if you have it come up in the future.
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
Every result I looked at on the first three pages have those words, and those words being clearly indicated in the snippets. Some of them have punctuation between the words. As the post explains, we see punctuation as spaces -- please do lo
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by dannysullivan 4y ago
You can ping me here on Hacker News, probably best to reply to this, and I can watch for replies. I'm also on Twitter, @dannysullivan For search issues, if people are comfortable, it's always best to share the exact query that was

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