Hacker News Reader

Comment by izendejas | Hacker News Reader

Bing does not support literal searches. This is a dealbreaker for me, particularly since their language models aren't very precise if at all employed.

I believe this is why many developers will find Google is a lot better. A lot of our searches are very specific error messages, for example.

View on HN

I haven't used Bing and I mostly use Duckduckgo and Google. It's really surprising to hear that Bing doesn't support literal searches. Genuine question - for a search engine, aren't literal searches much more easier to implement?

Btw DuckDuckGo is based on Yahoo search which itself is based on Bing. I tried DDG but I cannot live with its high response time (obviously can't be improve due two times indirection) and the Bing results are worse.

are you suggesting that DDG makes a call to Yahoo which then makes a call to Bing ("two times indirection")? Surely it's implemented differently than that, right?

It is definitely implemented differently than that. Yahoo has plenty of search engine knowledge and technology. There is surely some sort of process that inlines and caches any sort of query and result in Yahoo's backend. It's also fairly likely that they are using their own backend still for index storage and delivery, and they have some formal method of syncing the index from bing fairly regularly -- or even on demand for more long tail searches.

In other words, the most likely case where "double indirection" occurs is in very long tail searches that Yahoo has not seen recently.

Yahoo "had" plenty of own expertise - they created Hadoop afterall and used it for their own search engine. Until they closed it around 2010 for a deal with Microsoft Bing.

DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo BOSS search API (closed down for everyone but DDG nowadays) which relies on the Bing search engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS

If Yahoo hosts the BOSS API on their servers or in on Microsoft servers as part of their deal, isn't known. As DDG recently started to provide the search results from a Yahoo sub-domain (and from Yahoo (or Microsoft?) data centers) to minimize the huge latency (that everyone hates) a little bit.

"To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net." Of course they mention only the first part, as Yahoo itself relies on the Microsoft contract to access Bing search directly.

See: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

I'm not knowledgeable about Bing, but Google doesn't support literal searches either if you mean that in the sense of exact string matching.

Of course Google supports exact string matching. Just put your term in double quotes.

Mind you, it's overloaded now; double quotes also mean "this term must appear in the results." Used to be that prefixing with + meant that, but they killed that function so they could use it for Google Plus. You used to be able to search for, say, "annie oakley" "wild bill hickok" and find pages with either or both of those complete phrases; now there's no obvious way to do that.

Many years ago, IIRC, Google Search also supported boolean AND/OR, but that was also removed, for no obvious reason.

Probably because it produces confusing effects when people type in full sentences.

That wouldn't prevent them from denoting booleans with special characters (which they already do with other functions--see https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en), or having some kind of "advanced" interface. As far as I've been able to tell, boolean searches have been entirely removed from Google's public-facing search. There was no need to do that.

It feels like they haven't for a while, eg this http://i.imgur.com/zEDt5tD.png

People have had this misconception for a long time about Google, I remember having this debate on HN 4 or 5 years ago. I'm not sure Google has ever supported truly exact string matching.

It still prioritizes exact string matches I think.

Nope - that does not do what you think it does.

If you append &tbs=li to the end of the query URL, google does a literal search.

If you want it as a default, add it to your browser as a search engine plugin: http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...

Or: Search tools → All results → Verbatim

I am trying this right now, and it's not doing exact string matching. I mean case sensitive, special characters, etc.

To the poster below, putting the query in double quotes definitely does not do exact string matching.

It does. It's called verbatim mode, if I recall correctly.

Edit: verbatim not verbose

Reply on news.ycombinator.com