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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.

Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially offensive.

That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...

Thanks!

I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly:

  true? scheme

Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

  +true? scheme

Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay.

  "true?" scheme

Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme".

  +"true?" scheme

Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.

Most punctuation isn't indexed. A few terms like C++ and C# are special-cased, and a hyphen usually works, but mostly you just can't search for anything punctuation-related for programming. I was recently trying to learn the difference between the <%= and <%# tags in ASP.NET and Google couldn't even understand the query.

Not that it's an easy problem. How are the spiders and indexers supposed to distinguish "true?" as a programming lexeme versus just an interrogative sentence that ends with "true"?

Sometimes we forget that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte search across the entire web. The pages are all tokenized and indexed, with most punctuation dropped since that is indeed the more common usage case. You don't want a search for a word to miss out on pages where the word was glued to quotes or a comma or something.

Is there a link to "tell google that this autocorrect was wrong" somewhere under the search box?

Because that might be helpful.

They probably keep track of whether you click the "No, really search for my search terms" link.

Ah, this is one of those situations where you'd love to remember an example or more, but everything you try actually works - then sometime a few days later it happens!

I came across this one yesterday when I was looking for more information about something mentioned on HN:

    Search:  carmack +zfail gpl
      Date:  2011-11-02
    Result:  Bad autocorrect; Plus operator broke
    """
    Showing results for carmack fail gpl
    Search instead for carmack zfail gpl
    """

Because the plus operator is broken my final search ended up being `carmack "z-fail" OR "zfail" gpl` because different sources included or excluded the dash. Note that I think it's good that quotes are still exact and they shouldn't do the synonym search, but this is something the plus operator would have worked on, if I remember correctly.

moultano: notice this "fresh" search https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courier

every page in the top 10 organic results were coming from pages that were either added or updated within 2011 except for the youtube results. those 2 videos were added in 2009.

i also noticed that your youtube videoes were higher in the results than articles from gizmodo, arstechnica, engadget, Time magazine and whole slew of other articles that were released 2 days ago.

just asking...

Here's one I just came across.. The search term: where to buy ties in boston

The 4th & 5th results are about car "tires"

You don't have a million yourself? The spell check fires 5 times a day for me and 4 of them are wrong.

Would love to see some of the examples if you have them. Try here if you have search history on: https://www.google.com/history/

I tried this, and began to doubt my stat -- I saw no instances of the problem. But then I tried to repro the problem and I see that history doesn't record it.

E.g. search for [barack obam] (typo intentional). Then when it autocorrects, click the "I meant what I typed" link. Now look at your history: it doesn't mark that in any way.

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