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Comment by ad404b8a372f2b9 | Hacker News Reader

In the category of features that think they know better than the user, I hate whoever decided they should start using word embeddings in searches.

For example, you get the same results for "expand" and "extend" with both words highlighted in results when you search for either. This makes google entirely useless for complex technical topics with decades/centuries of established jargon. Searching for mathematics has become a torture.

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Try searching "median height" and all you get is "average height". Goddmit

Works in WolframAlpha at least: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=median+height+in+males

On DDG you can type "median height -average" and that seems to do the trick. Not sure if it works on google search, I don't use that.

Interestingly, when I Google for "median height" including the quotes, I have to go to page 3 to find "average height".

You know, yeah. my bad. My original search was actually: median height women. My daughter had wanted to know if she was short at 5'4"

Put the word you actually want in quotation marks. (It used to be "prefix it with +" but then Google+ happened and they changed it.)

As has been discussed and demonstrated many times before on HN, this doesn't always work. No one seems to understand why, but Google ignores quotation marks for some people and not others.

Moreover, how is a regular human being supposed to know this? How is this useful to someone not in the tech bubble?

Google's solution to the problem is to make people jump through a hoop. That's not a solution. That's a kludge.

I wish I could mail a postcard to Google and Microsoft to be put on some kind of "not a goddamned moron" list so they'd stop treating me like an ignorant child.

I don't think that works anymore, I might be mistaken but I recall trying it and still getting non-word-specific results.

I tried it just now with ' "median" height ' and still got "average" and "mean" results highlighted. (Couldn't reproduce with "expand"/"extend" because I didn't recall the query that produced both.)

wow, you're not joking. search {"median" height} and the first result is mean height. that's infuriating.

The first "result" for me--which heavily focuses on mean--is a Google Snippet, which I imagine could have an unrelated semantics engine and, frankly, too often (I am not saying most of the time, though) shows ridiculous garbage anyway (as it is trying to be more intelligent than computers really can currently pull off).

wow, this is so upsetting

I tried DDG and Bing, same thing

You probably need to enable verbatim results. Click on the Tools button (below the right end of the search bar) and select "Verbatim" instead of "All results".

That was a very useful future a while ago, but it doesn't (reliably) work anymore, google ignores quotation marks most of the time nowadays.

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