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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

You know what can stop google? a search engine that assumes I want every word in my query, or even better a search engine that honors a string in quotes to mean these words in this order. When did google stop doing this?

edit: This wouldn't stop google, it would just make that part of my life as easy as it was 10 years ago.

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I'm also annoyed by this.

Google tries to out-smart the user and often yields garbage or generic popular crap even when looking for something very specific.

I want my quotes back too!

An even bigger issue:

Due to SEO and ranking benefits for popular sites, it's basically impossible to discover quality content by smaller sites/blogs via Google. Unless you go to like page 10+, where you also get a lot of irrelevant stuff.

This hit me very recently when I was doing a crypto project [1] and ASN.1 DER came up. I'm german and "der" means "this" in German so google just treats "der someword" as search for "someword". So when I want to know e.g. how strings are being DER encoded, I google "DER string" and am getting results for G-string underwear and some duden.de website but nothing about ASN.1 DER strings on the first page :/. At least when you google for "DER integer" a post about ASN.1 values is the fourth result.

[1]: https://github.com/est31/rcgen

With regards to your last point, ive had some good luck with millionshort.com, which lets you remove some portion of top sites from your results.

Google never stopped doing this.

I use quotes all the time for exact matches, and it always works. (Unless there are zero results, in which case it says so and falls back to unquoted.)

In fact, they were pretty public about this being the solution when they dropped "+" to mean required... to just surround in quotes instead.

There have been many times in the last few years where I searched a section of a complex error message, and got results that were almost the same thing, but with one word or a few characters changed. I suspect the reason has to do with how they normalize and store ngrams for making results faster, but I would much rather have a slower response with accurate results.

Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and noting how the search changed).

Documentation around this isn't as good as it could be, and it's rough that the search codeset changed when G+ came around so that +word no longer meant "Must include."

You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!

Works for me. Link to a query?

Here is a great example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Documentation+around+this...

Links to this page, but says "no results found, showing related results"

Interesting. If the bolding of the match is to be believed, it looks like the algorithm is dropping joining words and words too common to provide useful search signal, but as a result doesn't have enough data in the backing corpus to be confident it has an exact match, as you requested.

DDG on the same query gives exactly that page but nothing else. I wouldn't be surprised if Google finds that to be an inferior experience (because the common use case is people kind of remember a quote, but don't remember it exactly, so a few words out of place would false-negative the search where the answer the requester is looking for is edit-adjacent to the input).

It looks like this particular example is actually due to the "+word" in the quote.

Here's everything up to but excluding "+word": https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...

And including "+word":https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+can+go+test+it+for+yo...

They say that but I have tried this many, many times in the past few years only for Google to just ignore it. It's possible my search query just has no exact matches, but Google thinks it is being helpful by expanding the query. This just ends up wasting the users time because they scan through all the related results looking for the exact match that doesn't exist.

If they expand your search beyond your "exact" "keywords" it very clearly states at the top of the serp that they're showing you related results.

People keep saying it happens, but I've never seen a Google query that didn't full-match a phrase in quotes.

Also, if you click Tools, you can change "All Results" to "Verbatim", and it will do what it says on the box. I tried leaving it on and got annoyed after five minutes.

Google have become masters at not knowing when enough is enough. Remember when Google Maps was great? Not perfect, and not quite as pretty as it is now. But it sure did work well and was a hell of a lot faster than it is now.

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