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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

I have noticed that searching for exact quotes seems to have been broken on Google for a few years. But only minimally broken. And I've had no idea how to reason with it. This article completely corresponds with problems I've encountered with searching for results on StackOverflow or software documentation sites; it's especially perplexing that "site:..." combined with exact quotes does not work for many cases.

Google certainly doesn't seem to value feedback at all. It's practically impossible to get in touch with a human to ask for help and Google's feedback forms have always felt like a black hole.

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I too noticed that for some queries, Google is becoming really, really unwieldy.

I can't recall the exact search term, but I kept looking for some site I visited some time ago, and no combination of words could get it to actually find the actual site. I finally just gave up and found it in my browser history.

I've "lost" a few sites that way. Forgot the address, can craft several searches that years ago definitely would have brought up the exact site I want. But... nothing. Or it's buried so far in the search results I'll never find it. I need a good search on top of Google search, these days.

To be fair DDG rarely works for me in that way, either. I think that kind of old-school, precise search engine's just dead now. It seems like everyone's indices are a lot "fuzzier" and full of holes, like they're discarding large parts of pages from the index if those parts don't look important to the algo. Not just deprioritizing, but tossing those pieces out entirely. Except the algo's very wrong.

Yeah, I made similar experiences. Also to dive into some random topic, Google is not really helpful and just suggests only really obvious things first like Wikipedia.

On the other hand, for day to day work at least for me it is still indispensable. Googling a random exception out of an unexpected stack trace works far better than with DDG for instance.

> Google certainly doesn't seem to value feedback at all.

As it is with most big companies that profit from ad revenue. They seem to consider performance indicators to be sufficient to know if a new feature is good or bad, instead of worrying about written customer feedback.

Ive noticed lately some of the search operators(intitle, inurl) have more limited results. Feels like a step backwards in functionality, but I suppose its a step forwards in getting the user on Amazon or whatever

Amazon is even worse.

What is your estimate of how much it would cost to respond to every piece of feedback from a >1Billion-user user-base?

What's your point? That google is a for-profit company? Why should the people who utilize the services take a back seat to profits?

I didn't make an estimate because I literally do not care about the monetary cost. Why should Google be exempted from basic standards of customer service just because it's profitable to do so? That's the exact opposite of being a productive member of society.

Fact is, users aren't perfect and will always need help to use services provided by others. A company which does not help its own users because it's less profitable to do so is an unethical company and should not have any business whatsoever in a civil society.

If that makes the company not profitable then perhaps the company should actually sell their services for a cost instead of "free", or perhaps become a non-profit (and reduce taxes), or become absorbed by the government (and citizens' taxes provided the "clearly beneficial but not profitable" services), or... you know... stop being profitable and stop being an unethical business.

you have to go to the options at the bottom

more >>

settings >>

or whatever. Fiddle around until you find "verbatim" and choose it.

Verbatim certainly fixes certain kinds of searches, but it is insufficient.

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