Comment by copx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by copx | Hacker News Reader

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What annoys me the most is that Google seemingly no longer allows searching for phrases at all. In the past I could search for a specific phrase like this..

  "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire"

..and Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works. Nowadays parentheses are largely ignored as far as I can tell. This is super annoying because quite often I am really looking for a website/websites containing a specific phrase.

It seems they internally switched to indexing single words only. So if you search for a phrase Google will instead return websites containing (some of) the words in your phrase in no specific order and maybe not even next to each other.

I think I understand why: Indexing / searching based on words is massively easier and massively less resource intense than a system which can search for specific phrases.

Furthermore the type of searches Google wants/expects you to do e.g. "best hairdryer" work well enough, in fact work better if you only search for single words and then filter / organize the results using AI / using information you have collected about the user.

EDIT: I was wrong. It still does work for many phrases, just not the ones I tend to search for. See below.

EDIT 2: I actually have no idea what is going on there. I know that searching for exact phrases doesn't work for me like it used to but I have no idea why..

Quote marks still work.

Google tries to find your phrase, and fails, then tries to give you results with some of your words missing without telling you.

If you search for "It never rains on a" with quotes it will only show you pages with that exact phrase. If you search for that without quotes it will show you a messy group of results based on what it thought you meant.

No, they don't but I know what you are referring to.

Most of the time I get the result:

  No results found for [phrase]
  Results for [phrase] (without quotes)

..but the thing is that I know websites containing [phrase] exist. Often many of them and they aren't "dark web" either. Google used to be able to find them but no longer is.

This gets more confusing because sometimes it does work. Namely if you look for phrases which are popular search queries e.g. if you search for..

  "hit me baby one more time"

..it will work amazingly well. But for other phrases it won't work at all and you will get the no results reply instead. It used to work for all phrases independent of their search popularity.

But yes, my original post was wrong. It does work for a lot of phrases.. but not for others.

I guess Google's engine dynamically optimizes things, and only indexes often searched phrases.

EDIT: Okay, this assumption was wrong too. I did some experiments to confirm my theory and the results showed that it is wrong..

It seems to work [0].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=f6xdWs2KJq7k_Qb0k...

This is what it looks like to me: https://imgur.com/zre6HdT

Probably this is because such pages do not exist, except for this page. Or at least DDG thinks so: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22It+never+rains+on+a+Wednesday+i...

Indeed a very nice way to prove this thread wrong :-)

I had also wondered whether its ability to match exact phrases has degraded. It would make sense, since keeping individual words on a distributed index is a lot easier than keeping a long phrase. But I had no way of telling, not having benchmarked it in the past.

Can they not index bigrams or trigrams, then chain together index hits? E.g. "It never rains in december" would hit on "It never rains", "never rains in", and "rains in december". Any result that hits on all of the indexes is not guaranteed to hit on the entire phrase but it would be a good candidate for the top result. The longer the phrase, the more likely a candidate hitting all necessary index phrases would match the exact phrase. This would at least put a limit on how large the indexes need to get.

Further, if they retain copies of the full text in their database they could do a filtered scan of the documents that hit on all subphrases to guarantee exact match. I could see that having too much of a performance impact at scale though.

In any case the dumbing down of Google search over the last few years is immensely frustrating to me.

> Google would return websites containing that exact phrase. That no longer works.

Er, what? No search engine finds "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire". Results for "It never rains on a Wednesday" with exact matches

Google - 6 pages

Bing - 3 pages

Yandex - 0 pages

Duck Duck Go - 3 pages

That was just a random example of a phrase. I made it up on the fly.

Not sure what you expect then.

He isn't complaining that the specific phrase "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire" to turn up any results. He used it as an example of the kind of phrase which, even though they exist somewhere on the web, won't be found with Google.

> Er, what? No search engine finds "It never rains on a Wednesday in Rockshire".

Now:

Google: https://imgur.com/a/tbOzE

Yandex: https://imgur.com/a/LB2qx

DuckDuckGo: 0

Bing: 0

Well now it does. Strangely, for Bing this thread is third on the list but does not show any of the searched for text in the text blurb like the other suggestions.

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