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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Another thing that has been annoying me lately is that it seems like like I have to add a + in front of every word or Google might decide without any indication that it will completely ignore it.

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This has been annoying me a lot too. I remember originally switching to Google mainly because it meant I didn't have to keep pressing + all the time. For the past couple of weeks I've been having flashbacks to 2001.

Now you know why they called it Google Plus.

Seriously, though: these are signals that the inmates are running the asylum and it's time to find alternative providers. There are other ways to search.

This is especially annoying as in days gone by if you added + to the query they'd show a message explaining that you don't need to use + as Google only returns results containing all the terms in your query. I wonder when they stopped doing this?

Because that would lead to the dreaded no results, which google doesn't like to show a user.

String literals seem to be ignored now too. ("quoted terms")

No, they are not. Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.

Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.

For me it doesn't, and it violates the Law of Demeter. If there are no results, tell me. Don't make me waste time wondering if any of the results have what I'm looking for, since there is no indication that the results I'm receiving are ancillary. Treating your users like they're idiots is evil.

Couldn't agree more.

No matches _is_ a result. I don't go use a search engine because I must click on a link, any link. I go there to find _relevant_ information. If there isn't any, tell me & I can get on with my day.

But users are, on average, demonstrably ... not as savvy as search engineers as to the optimal way to operate their search engines.

well perhaps somewhat understandable, why should i be happy with an inferior interface because of it? This falls very squarely in the category of "not my problem, but you just made it my problem anyways"

I see this as part of a big trend towards software and software designers that think they know what you want better than you do, and its an endless source of frustration for me, and im sure many others.

Even so, we are all forced to use it at that level.

There usually is a very clear indication right at the top of the page, informing you that the search yielded no results and that it is showing results for a different search.

Here's a good example of "Hey Google WTF?"

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

No,

In my somewhat brief testing, current Google is simply inconsistent. Sometimes it allows searches for fully quoted terms, sometimes is fails and warns you, sometimes it fails but not warning you...

Try: "society of spectacles"

even +"society of spectacles" doesn't do anything different...

Yes, they are. I don't have the example handy, so you'll have to take my word for it. My query was 'sqlalchemy "some quoted phrase"' and the first result didn't contain the phrase anywhere in the page.

Out of desperation, I tried a +, and when that didn't work I sent my first feedback to Google.

That has been happening for years. If you click through to the cached version of the result, which is marked up to highlight your search terms, Google provides an excuse: "These terms were found only in links pointing to this page:".

I've always had my doubts as to whether they really were found in links.

Google couldn’t find anything and striped the quotes away.

To clarify, this was only the first result. The others did have the phrase, and it was highlighted in their snippets.

This reason, wanting my search terms respected, is the reason I switched to duckduckgo. The way google completely changes or ignores my search is maddening.

This is really a problem. I can live with most of the other crap, but this is highly annoying.

I was going to suggest that google should insert a short "your search [A +B 'C D E'] returned x results" and then follow up with "Searching for [A B C D E] returned y results" to separate the results.

Now I think about it, Google is most likely doing this intentionally, to get more data for "natural language search" ie, to infer what people might mean by combining the results, then seeing what people click on to validate the technique.

This does mean that intentional input won't work anymore, unless there is a means to turn this semi-semantic search off.

Hmmmm... maybe DuckDuckGo would be a suitable alternative?

I'm very happy with DDG. Their ! commands are really nice, the red-boxed "this is probably what you want" at the top of the results page is nice, and their habit of identifying sites as "official" is nice.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news

Oh, it's happened to me too. And sometimes it replaces one term with another word with similar spelling but not related at all, the typed term is still in the textbox, but the terms bolded in the summary are different. It started a little after the anti-content-farms changes where applied, so I thought it was some temporary glitch. I haven't seen it recently, but maybe it's because I'm not making complex queries since.

Accurate results for technical topics brought me to Google, and all the extra query formatting that's required these days is somewhat irritating.

Another peeve is that the search box on the results page (with Instant disabled) routinely drops input or moves the insertion point.

The second isn't just a Google problem, all sorts of software with autocomplete / move-the-cursor-for-me items has problems with just accepting what I type and not fucking around with it.

Typically breaking backspace, or filling in unwanted trailing information, but often worse.

intext: and allintext: are useful for this failure, too.

Amazon started doing this about a year ago, too. I think search engines are now catering more to people who aren't extremely adept at using search engines.

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