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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, these "personalized results" have become mostly useless. For more technical (or simply specific) queries, Google seems to vomit useless only vaguely related links instead of, you know, pages that cover what i searched for.

This does more to encourage me switching to some other search engine than any privacy concern.

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That's a separate issue, but a real one.

Practically speaking, many non-technical users _do_ want to formulate their query in an imprecise, sloppy manner and have the search engine figure it out.

Programmers are capable of and accustomed to putting a lot of care and precision into exactly how they communicate (especially when communicating with a computer), but regular people don't usually do that. They may not even be capable of it.

The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication. It could either learn/guess (on a per-person or per-query basis) or just let you tell it how to behave.

But yes, Google web search could definitely use improvement here. There are times when there are VERY obvious clues that I'm being precise, and Google totally misses it. For example, my printer is a DCP-L2550DW. If I search for "DCP-L2550DW margins", it will include results that don't have "margins". I could have just typed the model number, but I went out of my way to keep typing. If that's not a strong enough signal that I definitely want results related to margins, I don't know what is.

Likewise matching DCP-L2550DW to pages with DCP-L2550BW or something similar. It is so obviously specific a no results answer is better than a misleading one.

I think this is due to people more often than not finding the top page useful regardless which just reinforces the link.

But it's super annoying to find you've just waited for a 300mb download of the wrong driver.

I think this is a lot more defensible. Eg (real example) if I search for 74HCT350, I would probably be okay, if not actively happy, to get results for 74ACT350 (a socket-equivalent chip in a somewhat faster logic family). It's much less defensible if "DCP-L2550DW" is quoted, since that's a clear indication that you want the exact string, but it's still better than outright ignoring half your query the way google does.

I agree very strongly with this. I don't understand why people complain about having to read the search results.

In so many cases slightly different product numbers are equivalent and differ in things like the market they are for, or the color, or something else you may or may not care about.

It seems to me that hiding these results required both Google to do mind reading and to decode spec sheets to see if they match what you had in mind.. all from a single string of semi-random characters.

Even worse: "<model number> manual". I don't google that because I like reading manuals in general.

You can try putting double-quotes around the model number. This is Google’s syntax for exact matches. For a good example, try searching for NYC both with and without quotes around it. Without quotes, you will get a much larger set of results where Google is trying to figure out what you mean when you say NYC… including results for New York City.

This doesn’t always work exactly but in general if you are looking for exact matches for certain terms, put those terms in quotes.

Double quotes keep getting less and less effective -- Google is progressively ignoring them more often when similar results are available. Worse, I've seen Google tell me that a term in double quotes simply doesn't exist on the web, when other engines will return many thousands of results. I seriously doubt that the competition has a bigger index!

This is what finally put me on using DDG.

So DDG aka (bing / yandex) is better for double quotes.. maybe, but it could also be just an illusion, try same queries there and see.

I have, that's actually why I switched. I was getting better results with DDG.

I think what I've noticed with technical searches is that Google tries too hard to "predict" what I am looking for. It always ends up showing me irrelevant (but surely highly ranked) fluff related to prior searches. The thing is, I don't need to see something related to my prior searches. I need to see what I am looking for TODAY. For me the "personalization" is often actively harmful.

If you put the word "margins" in quotes in your query, all of your results will contain that word. Similarly, you can force words not to appear by prefixing them with a "-".

> The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication.

Isn't this exactly what you're asking for? Non-technical users can be imprecise and let Google figure it out, while technical or power users can get more precise results with the various search operators?

If you put the word "margins" in quotes in your query, all of your results will contain that word.

This seemed to be true at one time, but I noticed last night that it doesn't always work.

These days it seems to put include results without the word, then provide a tiny link below each deficient result with a link to "must include" the missing word in a new search.

That used to be the previous behavior, but now it's inconsistent.

Do you have an example where adding quotes doesn't work? As far as I can tell, it always works for me (yeah, we may be getting different personalized results, but still...)

It’s kind of hard to share links because google personalizes results against our wishes. But a search for ‘"monkeys" burritos san diego “fries”’[0] returns a first link [1] that doesn’t include ‘monkeys.’

There are also other results [2] that include ‘monkey’ not what I asked for.

It’s infuriating. I just want to grep the internet. Is that too much to ask?

[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en-us&ei=P1oH...

[1] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/481463016388903842/

[2] https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g55543-d4580159-...

In your first example, >90% of the text on the page is in the "More Like This" section which is heavily personalized by Pinterest. So I'm seeing different content than you are, and Googlebot saw different content than either of us. Given the complete randomness of the content in there, I wouldn't be surprised at all if "monkeys" appeared on the version that was indexed.

In your second example, the word "monkeys" does appear on the page, in the "Show reviews that mention" section.

More importantly, did you have a result in mind for this query that isn't showing up? It seems somewhat nonsensical.

Thanks for the reply. I’m on mobile and searched on mobile and I don’t see “show reviews that mention.” I do see “read reviews that mention” but that includes stuff but not monkeys [0].

The Pinterest page perhaps has monkeys at some point, but doesn’t now.

This isn’t a real search, I just added something whimsical (and I miss San Diego burritos). This is behavior I remember but don’t typically track so it’s hard to remember on command.

Note you can use search tools | verbatim and it will return pages will all terms. The Pinterest page is still there, but the trip advisor page is missing [1].

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/Xlp8lsk [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22monkeys%22+burritos+san+d...

As loathe as I am to invoke Inception, having an advertising platform index advertisements and then sell my traffic to advertisers feels like a recursive death I don't want to die.

All that link appears to do is add the quotation marks around that keyword.

That used to be the case, and it was fine, but they started breaking those operators a few years back (maybe when they tried to make “+” search for Google+ pages, but I’m not sure).

I'm aware of quotes, but I have two issues:

1. It's tiring to type quotes around every word every time.

2. It takes you to the other extreme. Just because I'm being more precise than Google thinks I am doesn't mean if I have 8 words in my query that all of them are mandatory. There is potential for a useful middle ground that quotes don't get me to.

Quotes are one of many operators google has for search (1). You can build very powerful search arguments with a handful of easy to use operators. Sometimes taking the time to type in the proper operators can save you much more time by bringing you to the content you are looking for faster.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Please quit helping. The thing is, until like 4 years ago, Google worked just fine without any operators. Then they improved it to the point you can't find anything specific any more.

Edit: Actually you could help. Show me where I set "Verbatim" as a permanent option :)

The only solution I can see is for a search engine to support both styles of communication.

It would be great if Google had some kind of, let’s call it “Code Search” feature that searched all open source repositories.

> They may not even be capable of it.

Come on now...

For a lot of topics I just find myself with a lot of fake answer sites these days. About once a week I’ll get almost an entire page of results that way.

Seems like dark SEO is winning.

I had actually forgotten about those until just now. I use Bing for most of my searching (I fall back to Google in the semi-rare cases where Bing doesn't work), and fake answer sites don't seem to be as prevalent on Bing. Maybe those sites tailor their SEO to Google's algorithms?

Or maybe I've just grown numb to their presence.

Fake answers are another problem, I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it.

Edit because I can't reply any more: As dsfyu404ed says below, it tends to drop the central term of the query, making the results 100% useless. Not that they're particularly useful even if it doesn't do that...

> I'm talking about stuff like Google dropping a word from my query because it feels there aren't enough results that include it.

It's particularly infuriating when it drops the location word from a search query for info on law and regulation.

I don't care if broad form automotive insurance is available in some non-specific state, I care about if it's available in the state that I put in the query.

Edit: Why is this downvoted?

Edit: Why is this downvoted?

It's lunch hour at Google, and people there are hitting their phones and HN.

You can see a lot of interesting trends on HN by day and time of day. Watch what happens to any story critical of insert nation here after 6am in that nation.

Or notice how on Fridays (NA time), HN is pretty much a ghost town.

I've observed that too. Then force the words to be there with quotes, finding that I still get plenty of resume. Which seems weird to me, because most people don't travel to the second page. I'd rather have an exact result than more pages.

But then again, it doesn't seem like a simple problem and one that has companies in either way.

I suspect this is one of those features that helps the less technically inclined majority, while hearting those who know what they're doing. I can see the average Googler including words that aren't actually relevant to their query.

As long as I can force it with quotes, I'm happy. Google has even started suggesting next to the results "include only results with the word XXX", to remind me the quotes might be needed.

I have noticed this too. I tend to include all the key words and the problem domain in my search and get bad results on google and then other people just type a whole sentience exactly like you would say it to a human and get back good results.

Sadly DDG has recently adopted this antifeature too. A page of irrelvant results is served with a small disclaimer that "Not many results include ${DROPPED_SEARCH_WORD}"

I should investigate how to write a search plugin for Firefox that " puts" "every" "word" "in" "quotes"

I hear this sometimes but have never seen anyone giving proper examples of it.Which queries were answered better before, or by other engines? It is always vague.

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