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I hear you, but if you look at the examples in the link, the before and after the update results, you'll see that there's far less of that kind of ignoring of keywords.

For example a search for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy" used to just show generic information about getting a prescription filled, skipping over the "for someone" bit.

The new results understand what the query is actually asking, which is pretty impressive.

I'm kinda with you, I grew up with a ctrl-f Google so I sort of prefer that behaviour, I think because I don't want to rely on an unreliable NLP AI.

...I was going to say "but" but.. no I think I just don't want to rely on an unreliable NLP AI. It's so frustrating when it doesn't work, which is often.

When you quote the words, do you find what you're looking for?

In my experience, the times google seems to have totally missed the point of what I'm looking for, it's usually the times that the answer I'm looking for isn't anywhere on the web. Things like "datasheet JK45690DFS" or "Types of asphalt available for local delivery today".

I wish Google had some way to understand your query and the results well enough to just be able to say "The answer isn't available on the internet".

Yes, usually it's because there's maybe 4 documents which match the search query. But if there are only 4 documents which match what I asked for then I want to see a page with those 4 documents! I don't want to see a page with 10 results which I have to manually scan through to see that actually more than half of them are irrelevant rubbish because they aren't hits for what I was searching for.

I usually fail to get hits on part numbers. Part of the issue is that part numbers seem to change, even while referring to the same device. Something that might have {8, 12, 16, 24} channels will have shared documentation, but the generic part number that documentation is under will be different than what’s on the package. If google really wants to show that they know better than me then they could identify these cases and show me what I want from a “bad” search term.

I find some luck quoting individual words.

If you can remember any of the queries that failed, I'd be happy to pass them along to debug. If you have it turned on you can look in your search history here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19

I can't at the moment, but as a hint, if I search for X Y Z then I expect the first results to contain all those terms, not 2 out of 3. Like others complain, it seems necessary to quote each on "X" "Y" "Z" to get what I want.

If you have to have a clever read-my-mind search, then instead of blending it into the main search, have 2 search types of 'intelligent' and 'precise'.

Google already offers a "Verbatim" search type just as you describe -- it's the same as quoting all words automatically.

In Chrome, you can set your search engine to "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&num=100&tbs=li:1" to get this behavior by default.

google silently replacing "interesting" with "cool" brings up advice on cooling things (temperature) instead of keeping things "interesting" as in "interesting"

Yikes, that sounds like a software architecture problem. The "infer which words are more likely to get good results" layer and the "search for things using words" layer are blind to each other's behaviors.

How do Google's engineering teams get away with this obvious error? For how much they're paid, you'd expect them to be better about things that passive observers readily notice. Don't they use their own product, anyway?

Do you remember the full query?

how to keep an aquarium interesting

how to keep a cat interesting

looks like that pattern generally

Awesome examples! Thank you!

Duck Duck Go seems to handle that much better, although the first result is still about cooling. I assume it's synonym replacement

Wow..that does fail spectacularly! The first few pages for me are all temperature-related.

Here's one:

when are bonuses usually paid

I had great trouble finding results which were not advice for business owners.

>I had great trouble finding results which were not advice for business owners.

This, so much. There are so many search queries nowadays that have been SEO'd to hell, and there are just pages upon pages of crappy 4 paragraph articles on B2B company blogs just parroting the same information over and over again.

Thanks! Did you finally find a good page?

I never really found the kind of thing I was looking for.

If you're looking for more search feedback, my email is in my profile.

Maybe this is a result of optimizing for most of the population, which probably decreases performance for tiny minority who search for niche things that are hard to optimize for because of lower amount of data.

The ML layer is probably getting in the way of the end user getting to the smaller samples.

Used to be you'd get the best matches from the meta data on a page.

Now there's linear algebra both trying to determine what the meta data means and what the question means, so it's going to have grouping biases.

And do things like exclude seemingly random strings of numbers, because in the training data, that's usually trash, but for you, it's a part or serial number that you're looking for

I don't think that fully captures it, Google is an advertising company, and so its incentives are all out of whack. For instance, Google probably benefits from having the top results be slightly less useful as that makes the ads at the top more likely to get clicks.

Yup, this is a huge problem with google search these days. It keeps trying to figure out what your intent was, and although it works about 70% of the time. the other 30% is a complete disaster.

Especially when it comes to "less acceptable" things. Suppose, for instance, one listened to a rap song and then googled "lean and sprite" (codeine cough syrup and soda, commonly referenced by rappers as a way to get high).

Instead of returning search results of relevant rap songs, you get a bunch of links on drug abuse, rehabilitation centers, etc. Thanks for assuming I'm a harrowed drug addict, Google, but really I was looking for music.

Yeah, when i used google more often in the past, my experience had been more like 60% (google works) vs 40% (disaster). Now that i use duckduckgo as my primary search engine, the resultant hits haven't really improved, but at least i feel like i have more privacy. ;-)

Yea, personally I would prefer google to have predictable results so I can fine tune my search. When I put something in quotes now they can still expand it by synonyms.

But my mom doesn’t type keyword searches like I do, she types out sentence/phrase questions. Maybe the average user benefits from this stuff?

What i want from the search engine isn't an easy life. I want a tool that would give me, the knowledgeable searcher(hopefully) the biggest possible advantage over non-experts.

On one hand, it seems that Google, by aiming for the least common denominator - greatly reduces that gap.

But not really. I still think there's a good advantage to having search knowledge. I hope it stays that way.

This is why I really like the DDG system of !bang operators. Because each search engine works differently, if you're knowledgeable about the different engines, you can pick the best one for the job.

Just for fun, I thought I would try to figure out when the next solar eclipse would be: I'll use the simple phrase "Next solar eclipse"

I'd probably try Wolfram Alpha. On DDG I would type "Next solar eclipse !wa". It returns a date "Thursday, December 26, 2019 (2 months from now)" Nice.

Next I look at plain DDG: I knew it probably wouldn't be useful, but first result is a website that calculates the next solar eclipse. It requires another click, but it gets "Dec 26, 2019" right at the top of the page. Not bad.

Now for Google, who I knew wouldn't be sure (since their interpretation of the very exact phrase would be fuzzy): In big, prominant and confident letters it reads: "July 2, 2019".... thanks Google. Wrong.

The skill in searching is no longer in using the search engine to the best of it's ability, it's in picking the right place to look. This has sort of always the case, but has become more of a skill as Google has strayed away from improving for the knowledgeable searcher.

It's worth to note that the web has grown a lot recently. The number of web pages is more than 100 times larger than 10 years ago thus the size of information to get the exact page that you want should increase as well. Although Google did some works on this area, but it's possible (and very likely) that the speed of web growth simply outpaced Google's algorithmic improvements. I don't know if a single universal search engine can be the answer without very deep personalization plus pervasive tracking; maybe domain specific search engines can do a better job?

This is what ruined Twitter for me.

They hired a thousand engineers to guess what I like when I already followed the people I want to see content from and I don’t (always) want it in some random order they think is best, mixed with liked tweets they never intended to publicly share, I just want a chronological list of actual Tweets from the people I followed again.

Not a dice roll the AI will get it right 51% of the time.

Personally I was surprised how good the "intention search" algorithm is, most times I do not know the right exact terms to search for, especially when looking up things in a domain and the algorithm figures out what I actually wanted quite well. For the cases where I do need exact word match, like you said, quotes work fine.

This is because in this example you are expecting Google to be Ctrl-F for Internet (and not even that because you alse expect it to weed out what you think is spam somehow in the process, which is not a feature of typical Ctrl-F).

This update addresses the other side of the search spectrum which is meaning. Google has a very tough job of moving the slider between exact keywords and meaning every time someone makes a search. This is a step in the right direction, but the fundamental problem still remains - Google interface is optimized for ad conversion, not user experience.

Such is life when we optimize for the majority. We end up optimizing to only about the top 80% of searches, which are sometimes the flavor of "what is that website where everyone is friends with each other and I can see my grandkids' photos?" or "word for ice in latin".

It would be great if the system could infer the level of specificity associated with the query. Some people are just exploring a topic while others want to get to a more detailed document sooner.

is there a reason not to have a setting "i m not the majority" somewhere?

I am getting more and more annoyed as Google increasingly corrects my language to the wrong thing.

Have you calculated how much compute time running a single regular expression over all content on the internet would cost?

$$$$$$'s I'd bet... One big tech company used to let employees do it on an internal internet mirror... It wasn't cheap.

I say regular expressions tongue-in-cheek really meaning I want more mechanical and predictable machines that do what I tell them to in a straightforward way.