Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on the page at all

<what I'm looking up> javascript mdn

give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.

It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools.

Tyranny of the majority I guess.

No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles.

There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense.

I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.

We can see the start when HN complained when Google removed + and said use "" instead.

> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.

He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc).

His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results.

Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.

How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!"

> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search.

Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software

I understand the idea, but you are wrong or at least not completely right (I can't speak for all markets).

I know someone who learned to spell as a kid using Google, because if he didn't spell the words correctly he wouldn't get to see pictures of the moon or whatever he wanted to see.

Also after they learned to guess what people meant, Google used to be able to respect +, "" and also the verbatim option hidden beneath a button.

For a while they would also ask politely: did you mean x?

Since then it has become worse and worse: silently rewriting, fuzzing without asking etc.

The problem is that Google can't even get the right search results with natural-language sentences or sentence fragments.

Just today I had to ask Google Scholar for a lot of things since Google itself was completely useless. So it's not like it can't be done. Maybe that's the way going forward, one general search for grandma and specialized search engines for everyone else.

Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back.

Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.

Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more.

Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.

It really sucks being a frequent traveller, and frequent VPN user and having to REALLY go out of my way just to get some useful default behavior.

VPNing through Iceland and now all the Google Flights prices are priced in Icelandic Kroner and not even a clear dropdown to change this preference. Try the URL hack to change the currency code in the get parameters and MAYBE get what I want.

There are so many ways to detect this and assume this preference, and they opt for the most debilitating one. Many services are following this trend, all because of blindly following some A/B test iteration.

Add the human sense back into it.

And god forbid the VPN server you used was used by someone else doing something odd, welcome to CAPTCHA HELL! Where we make all the assumptions about what you want until search is no longer useful for you, but don't let you access search at all by assuming you the current user are the problem based on IP address alone!

That's a really hard issue to solve...

We can argue whether there is place for more operators, or whether it's better on average for an average user to still be "outsmarted" by the engine, but it's clear what's going on - these aren't exact match results and the results often have zero relevance with what user is looking for precisely because the user knows the specific word WILL appear on the page they need and a page without that word WON'T be what they need. I don't know how much clearer we can be :) It used to work (or seemed to). Now it doesn't. It frustrates some people. That's it.

Don't mess with my search terms! Bring exact matches back! Only show pages that match the search terms!

https://github.com/HTTPArchive/legacy.httparchive.org/blob/m...

You can search for anything in the source-code of pages, using any regex or grep you can imagine.

Obviously running your custom filter logic across every byte of data that has ever existed on the internet is compute heavy... But Google has lots of that!

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to use Google Search for searching in Internet. You are only allowed to look up viral memes and query neural networks, trained by other people's searches. Searching for rare and unique things will quickly get you banned. An interesting side-effect: using modern Google to check if name is vacant is meaningless. I used to google for names to see, if something else used them, but Google's search repeatedly returned me 0 results, even when there were multiple pages with that particular name in title, many of them years old. Searching for the same thing couple of weeks later have suddenly returned hundreds of hits.

I wonder, how much it costs to actually query Google's database instead of some distant neural network approximation. Apparently, Google's own employees can't afford it anymore — some of them are using DuckDuckGo instead (they even added it to Chrome, lol)

"azure" devops agent "checkout" "freeze"

I'm obviously searching for something very specific here, and Google helpfully decided to show me results omitting "freeze" and "checkout" so I had to quote them.

I also notice that it looks like Google thinks that check-up is the same thing as checkout, which in context are not synonyms, though this would require Google to infer "git checkout" but I didn't include git because that would introduce another universe of unhelpful results.

https://dzone.com/articles/getting-started-with-jenkins-the-... was included which doesn't include "azure" at all, though this is obviously Google being cheeky.

Of course I could also call this somewhat sinister, as Google is basically saying I should ditch a direct competitor to their services and instead use a self-hosted service. Or maybe I'm projecting since I would like to ditch Azure DevOps and use Jenkins, but in any case there's an example.

Feel free to play with it: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS820US820&biw=1...

Of course, in this case it was a networking problem so I do have to admit that usually when Google starts ignoring what I typed it's because the answer to the question is something else entirely. Though sometimes I know exactly what I'm asking for and Google doesn't get it.

Because anyone who's used Google in the last 10 years knows that Google tailors its results to what it thinks you want to see.

So a search query that fails for one HN reader may work for another, or at least work differently.

A repeated frustration in my life has been explaining to bosses that the search results that appear on their personal phone are not the same as what will appear on a client's computer.

Maybe not the most compelling example, but I think it's usually with really blatant misspellings that Google will second guess my quoted terms, which can be annoying if I'm actually looking for the misspelled term.