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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Based on the reddit thread, this does appear to be a legitimate issue. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems to be a search quality issue. I do wonder why that support thread was deleted though. It's unfortunate that Matt Cutts (former head of web spam team at Google) or someone else from the search quality team isn't communicating as early and often re issues like this anymore. Some transparency would be nice.

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I'm Google's public liaison for Search, and I communicate on this stuff all the time. Typically I'm most active on Twitter. You can always ping me here: https://twitter.com/searchliaison

I'm looking into the thread deletion, but I believe anyone who starts their own thread can delete it. That aside, as I shared elsewhere here, this is spam, not malware. We appreciate the reports and apologize our spam systems weren't doing a better job. We're working to improve that now.

Matt left google many moons ago and, with the benefit of hindsight, his departure coincidied with google's pivot to the dark side and progressive lack of concern for such search quality issues.

I had the same thought. Matt Cutts seemed very on top of things from the outside at least, and I was wondering when he left how that would affect search quality. Though without any further insight I have of course no idea whether the recent steep decline is really related.

It's gotten very frustrating in the last year or so. I barely leave "Verbatim" mode (and hate that it's so many clicks each time to activate it). But with or without that, I frequently have the situation where I search for something very specific and technical, just to get pages of pages of search results for sites that have names similar to "techgeekhowto", telling me how to reboot my Mac. It's maddening.

Verbatim mode? Never heard about that. In the past using double quotes did something like that, is it the same thing?

Disclaimer: DDG user mostly.

"Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim" in Google. I'm not sure of the exact differences, but Verbatim essentially means "match exactly those words, and all of those words", while I still seemed to perceive some fuzziness with double quotes (unless you put the whole phrase into quotes, I think, but then you also search for only that exact phrase instead of words).

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