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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I have an Intel Realsense camera, which sometimes reports the error "Failed to recconect" (there being a typo in the drivers) [1] - that's a pretty unique error, so in combination with the product name that should be a very easy keyword search, right? Especially if I throw in some quotation marks, to make it clear I want a literal match?

Yet when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google, in its infinite wisdom, returns pages that contain neither realsense nor recconect [2]. They offer me a supreme court opinion, a review of a car dealership, and a facebook church service.

Correcting the spelling of a query is one thing - but also completely ignoring other keywords? Even when there are pages available that match the query? [1]

[1] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/5ff27fca... [2] https://imgur.com/a/okYV5V2

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That is insane. I've had similarly idiotic "decisions" made by Google when searching for error codes --- things which are also similarly unique, and their uniqueness is the key to finding relevant results. Instead, searching for e.g. 1234 gives 1235, 1236, 1233, and even 12345, but no 1234. I used to use quoting but even that doesn't work now. Absolutely useless.

Looks like DDG gets it right (very first link).

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=realsense+"failed+to+recconect"

It corrected the typo, but it shows you the option to put it back.

Click the: Search instead for realsense "failed to recconect"

Then you get some very plausible looking results (idk how well they'll solve your problem).

Putting quotes or other search flags and instructions should - as a rule, interpret that literally. Anyone using them wants them to work.

The only time it may annoy someone is if they're copying and pasting ... Quotes, as text, from some website? A plurality of quotes on Facebook are images of text.

It's just Google's interest to keep you faffing around on their search page longer. There's no other reason - this stuff used to work!

There's a "verbatim" option under search tools for that.

I agree with you that that's what I expect from quotes, but... I really think there are way more Google users who do not expect that. A lot of people think quotation marks are the way you do emphasis in English, for instance!

I would think Google has more information on whether attempting to correct typos even in text within quotes, on average, is an improvement than the typical user of their product.

I also think they’re smart enough to try and use that information. They clearly do not succeed at all times, but I would think they do, statistically. People likely make many typos, even when typing quoted text.

Google probably gets 100000 queries with unintentional typo's. Then Maybe 10 queries where the typo is intentional. They're simply gearing their features towards the larger use case.

I don't suppose you're using an Android phone and tested this in the search bar widget? I was able to reproduce your results that way, but it did provide me with a search instead option that did lead to the relevant GitHub page. I then tried again to reproduce the test in mobile Chrome and immediately got the right result without being promoted to search instead for what I'd actually searched for.

realsense "recconect"

works. I guess it does words but is buggy with phrases?

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