We're improving search results when you use quotes
blog.google
blog.google
Next, remove content thieves like Pinterest entirely from the index.
Next, invest in recency + relevancy over just page reputation. A huge amount of high value recent content is written but it keeps losing against much worse old content which only ranks because it's old. As the typical example: the 15 year old Stackoverflow jQuery answer.
Invest in location awareness. Including location in your query gives laughable results.
Find a way to down rank sites gaming particular categories with shady tactics.
Counterpoint: Google already gives priority to recency, and it heavily rewards "flip shop" sites that essentially plagiarize existing content. The original researchers/authors who did the leg work get buried in lazy rewrites.
Due credit is not the only thing misplaced; the author who did the legwork is also, by virtue of their legitimate interest in their subject, a better prose stylist. Interesting, readable writing has to be more relevant to a search query than what the content farm produces.
I assume this is reddit trying to game the recency metric.
The open web made you rich, please help keep it open.
Funny how they don't seem to actually enforce that rule on the big guys gaming the index...
I also wish it was possible to be very specific with the recency selector. I want to be able to say: I want to search for stuff that showed up in this month 5 years ago, because I know it was news then.
As a user I would prefer to be the judge of what is relevant. If the results aren't what I'm looking for, then I'll modify the query until they are.
Having the search engine make these opaque decisions on what it thinks I meant to search makes it feel like playing a game of Peggle, where I have no idea if what I'm going for will be what I get.
In which case it isn't relevant. I typed those words for a reason, any result not containing all three is not relevant by definition.
I understand eliding articles and pronouns but when I'm searching for an exact string or you just completely ignore whole subjects and objects - what?
It may seem relevant to google but it's not to its users this is why people are upset. If the result was relevant no one would care that it didn't have the keyword, please listen to your users.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blacklist/jbpccand...
Google should just have a developer/engineer/expert mode that shows results using 2012 algorithms. I don’t mind paying $5/month in exchange.
I guess a VPN could be a workaround, but does the average Joe know what a VPN is?
Even that bit about "don't" being turned into "don t" was interesting. Again, not because I was amazed in any way. More so because Search has been so mysterious for many years.
Please let me turn on verbatim mode and leave it enabled. Ideally across my google account, but I'd settle for just that device/application.
Besides being overpriced, the last I checked, the results returned for the custom search didn't reflect what was returned from the normal search product.
Allow users to permanently remove trash sites like Pinterest from all their search results on both web and mobile.
No problems huh? Why does this article exist? Lol the hubris at Google...
Maybe this is my chance to repeat something I asked the DuckDuckGo CEO today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366664): Are you doing anything about SEO spam?
It seems like Google often rewards low quality results: Sites with tons of ads or where I'm being shilled to buy a product that I'm looking for information on because I already have it. It's so bad that I've half-concluded it's due to misaligned incentives - keeping the user looking at the search results keeps Google collecting ad revenue and steering users to crappy sites full of ads also keeps Google collecting ad revenue.
Person <verbs> blue chair
Should return any text where someone does something to a blue chair (and it's synonyms or similars)
The index is like a dictionary - you look things up by word. But you need to find some way to split up every page on the internet to decide what is a 'word' and what isn't. If you decide that quote marks are part of a word, then you'll end up with apple and apple' making different entries in the index which you probably didn't want.
Of course I probably wouldn't have actually been able to get it changed back just by making a CL but at least I would have learned why it couldn't be changed back.
I guess it’s too hard to find a way to reframe adding back a + as something new.
But god, I wish there were a way to do actual precise searches like there used to be. It’s especially awful with multilingual computing. I can search for things word by word in quotes, and Google will return things translated word by word into a different language. If I wanted that language, I would have input the words in that language. And there’s no escaping it, even if I change my settings to only search one language.
My anecdote was that during the winter Olympics I was looking for a college friend who's name was several characters off of one of the competing athlete's. It didn't matter how much additional information I put in the search. Even quoted, if it included anything that looked like that popular athlete, then that was all that was returned.
When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news.
Interesting that DDG did not find the page even with the username. I do not know why, but it appeared it was not indexed there.
This is exactly what people mean when they say quotes "don't work". Elsewhere are google people in this comment section saying they do, and they may be telling the truth after Google applies some relevance pre-filter to the results. Anything that doesn't pass that, though, basically doesn't exist, which can look like quoting not working at all (and effectively is quoting not working as expected).
I tried it now and it's better, but not perfect. Most pages contain the term (as a misspelling) but a few didn't seem to (one had the word "services" in many places on it, however) and there was still a big Google Maps result and a Wikipedia result at the top for the actual IRS.
I have noticed a general decline in search quality over the last couple of years, but nothing specific to quotes.
I realise I'm not saying anything particularly useful with this comment, but I just thought I'd add another datapoint.
Edit: Thinking more, my biggest issue is when the quoted text occurs in the "recommended similar posts" section of a page (particularly common with reddit). That section gets re-rendered on each view, so it probably won't be there once I click the result.
Proof: https://archive.ph/AAa6k and https://archive.ph/9WGe7
Probably the vast majority of the population have no idea that quotes do anything in searches. Maybe they need some checkbox in the tools bar that makes quotes actually work if you know how they work.
"The magic of Google is gone"
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
Others have pointed this bit out, but I'd like to ask specifically: How do you search for special characters?
I recently came across some R code that used %||% and you cannot search for this. As in, you cannot search the internet for this at all.
Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, all of them will ignore special characters. Even Github search will strip out the special characters leaving you to search for nothing.
And my use cases for Google keep dwindling.
I'm guessing that would work fine on google, but I don't go there so I can't be certain.
In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.
I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.
Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.
https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it
https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth...
Seemingly people using operators would produce additional training for the algorithm which is currently not possible. This could also be a factor leading to the results decay everyone has experienced when trying to find something that isn’t leading popular culture. It’s that peculiar behaviour where tweaking the search terms didn’t affect the results.
To my knowledge Google neither publishes search quality reports, nor acknowledges that there’s a gap between their search quality for average users and above average users. In my experience even their “Search Quality Raters” (contractors paid to evaluate search quality) are rarely above average searchers, they are just good at evaluating what they evaluate.
I absolutely believe that Google has advanced technologically. Whether that's translated to improvements for users, it's not clear.
Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim.
Instead of Google throwing away 90% of your search query and looking for the "top hits" (and returning almost entirely auto-generated pages), it keeps every word you entered and returns actually relevant stuff.
It really is night and day.
I hate modern "search". I understand nontechnical people probably like algorithm-based "enhanced" search fine, but if I search for something specific I want THAT THING ONLY.
"Modern" search made it really hard to ask very specific, strict questions.
What Google needs is a built-in way to block domains, like idk... Pinterest.
But I'm glad to see something finally done about my biggest gripe with Google (and even DDG sometimes does this): search results that don't contain the phrase, or not even part of it, that I'm specifically searching for, quotes be damned. If Google is finally getting the hint, good. This has been driving me nuts for years.
A plain, no algorithmic "enhancements," regexp search would rock. I've wanted that since the Alta Vista days, but I doubt I'll ever see it. It might be a bit expensive to do something like that over a Google-sized search database.
"In my experience" is exactly right, search results degraded for a fraction of users such as developers.
It's good to see Google is going back to making those users happy although that probably means bad news for DDG et al
In their defense, Google now gets right what my grandmother searches.
That's what it seems like to me, moving to a world where technology tells you what you want, and you spend less effort telling it.
I think Netflix did a similar thing some time back, just with their front page. Originally it seemed like a place you went to look for things. At a later point, it seemed suddenly a bunch of things were shoved in your face by default, and looking for a thing seemed secondary.
Recommendation Engine, is that what Silicon Valley believes they're innovating on?
An Orwellian nightmare is what is being created.
FYI, I have my Windows Desktop Firefox homepage set to Google Advanced Search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1 and I never (almost) logon to my google account when I search. It would be nice to add "site or domain:" exclusions.
I've seen a few searches recently (on DDG) where the indexed text is apparently hidden behind an authentication wall.
Google's cached page feature used to fix those sorts of shenanigans.
This used to be a plague in the serps for technical error searches and Pinterest in the image searches.
The problem with the random ip proposal is that it is a cat and mouse game. If I own 1000 sites on various topics and cross reference visits via IP, well now it's not very random anymore. At one point there was even a services (fantomas) that kept an updated database.
This goes very deep in black hat SEO history with mosaic cloaking and other tactics.
I used this as a teen in the earlier days of Google to make decent pocket change, and that was in the early 2000s.
It goes even deeper when you get into parasite hosting tactics with paid backlinks and xrumer.
What's funny is all of these old school black hat seos have moved on to social media. PVA social accounts combined with AI rewriting are where the magic is now and don't even get me started on repurposed content via YouTube. It's no longer economical to tackle organic serps.
Heck I even have a bot that scans popular linked domains and monitors the expiration date on them for quick snatch with a nice grafana ui on it. And I've got quite a few nice domains with easy passive traffic and zero effort. All you do is restore the latest archive.org snapshots and setup a catch all email for leads.
Dall e and gpt 3 are going to turn these into legit businesses.
My point is if there is money to be made people will automate to the extreme. If you dig deep you'll realize an IP address doesn't mean much, hence recaptcha.
Half the article is about this thing. I mean, they don't present solutions, but most of the reasons for "Ctrl+F doesn't find the terms" are entirely reasonable to me.
Seems like they've made the cache harder and harder to find over the years.
Except it's been regressing to where operators are often more necessary again
Keyword indexing and PageRank worked for a while because the underlying data wasn't written trying to game them. Then came spam linking and keyword stuffing and more. I'm surprised search engines are still useful in spite of that.
Terence Fletcher: Really? Adjusting the seat, really? That's been your problem the whole fucking time, the seat height? So now you have it, right? Go!
[Ryan starts playing]
Terence Fletcher: Bullshit! Fuck you!
don t doesn t"
This is one of the most annoying things tbh, when you specifically need to include special characters it just gives you garbage
Now those episodes have been controversial, and I only bring them up because it's the example that came to my head (before someone misses the whole point and starts looking at the finger), and Google Search also censors them, now while I still use google mainly to access Stackoverflow and Reddit threads, I see no point in using it if I'm searching for anything I want a neutral conversation about that I can examine and make my own conclusion.
All in all the internet seems to be getting smaller and smaller, I don't use any social media apart from HN and Reddit, and I only use Reddit because I seem to still be addicted to it since it's probably one of the most censored of all of them.
10 years ago as a 20 year old I benefited greatly from how the internet was, here is an example: I grew up on the idea that there was nothing wrong with porn, and there isn't per se, and no one ever spoke about addiction like behavior when it came to watching it, then one day I discover a controversial post on Reddit and dove down the rabbit hole and lo and behold I had the same problems as this community of people trying to quit watching it, and I benefited from their experiences and knowledge, same about discovering communities against social media like Facebook, which pushed me to research the subject and deleting my account, etc. but now it seems like any controversial community is quickly banned or pushed aside in its own unfindable bubble and that to me is a great loss.
I want to see people have an opposite opinion than mine, and I want to be able to get into heated non censored discussions in comment sections and get suggestions about articles, studies and content to challenge my views.
This is provably untrue. I just searched YT for "JRE Alex" and the first three results are clips from the "JRE" show (I didn't know what that acronym was before now) featuring Alex Jones [0].
Why are people repeating these complotist theories when it takes five seconds to disprove them.
Also, even if it was true (which it isn't), it still wouldn't be censoring. Censoring would mean not returning results when a match exist -- not massaging the SERP. It would also mean not publishing clips from said "censored" content on Google's own video platform, where they have millions of views.
In France there is a controversial (to say the least) comedian, Dieudonné, a holocaust denier and an anti-semite. He's heavily censored by the French government who regularly bans his shows; but canceling his YT channel happened only recently, after a lot of interventions by the state and other non-governmental agencies.
It's been my experience that Google is quite resistant to censoring, in general.
[0] Here are the top three results on YT for "JRE Alex":
Alex Jones - God Doesn't Know Where He Came From | Joe Rogan
2.6M views 3 years ago
JRE Clips
Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1255 w/Alex Jones: https://youtu.be/-5yh2HcIlkU.
3:43:03
Joe Rogan Experience #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo
13M views Streamed 5 years ago
PowerfulJRE
Alex Jones is a radio show host, filmmaker, writer, and conspiracy theorist. Eddie Bravo is a jiujitsu black belt, music producer, and ...
3:11:09
Joe Rogan Experience #1555 - Alex Jones & Tim Dillon
23M views 1 year ago
PowerfulJRE
Tim Dillon is a standup comedian, actor, and host of the Tim Dillon Show. Alex Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and host of the Alex ...I'm not talking about when you click search (even though that itself is censored), I talk about when you're writing on the search bar and see the suggestions in the dropdown, and that isn't untrue for me at all since I verified that it still was there before writing my comment.
- What is the best way to ping you and how do I format my search bugs/features in a way that makes it easy for them to be processed by Google?
- Already pointed out and documented replication issues in another comment in this thread [2].
_____
For search issues, if people are comfortable, it's always best to share the exact query that was used. Putting it within brackets, as if those are the search box, can be helpful. Like if you searched for "this that" as a quoted search, ["this that"] would represent it. Explain what the issue is, list any particular URLs if helpful, screenshots if those are also helpful.
(Same problem with GDP as a measure of economic productivity BTW, but that's a topic for another day.)
"Search results will continue to suck for those who aren't tech-savvy enough to use quotes"
I admit not all of this is Googles fault, but somehow everybody largely optimising (and exploiting) for the Google algorithm, makes it worse for them. Alternative engines seem to fare better, and I guess less Google dominance is a good thing.
Suppose I have some great content "bt its writen lik dis". One could argue saying searching for content with the query 'like this' should yield the previous statement. Others would disagree.
That's basically the crux of the problem. The more exactness you're demanding the fewer results you will receive. The fewer results that are available reduce the perceived utility of the search engine, Google in this case.
Case in point: I've been searching for some "FoundationDB" related stuff. If you use HN's algolia for "Foundation DB" (no quotes) it will show you queries where FoundationDB is a single word.
Is this good or bad?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I disagree, so I went to search for the Joel Spolsky blog post at joelonsoftware.com from antiquity where he complains that search engines prioritise finding 5,000,000 results instead of the result you want, and that's completely useless because you can never read that many results. DuckDuckGo changed my search because "Not many results contain 'joelonsoftware" and then offered to search for what I typed in, if I arm twisted it. I only wanted one result, and think less of DDG for changing what I tried, in order to give me more results, instead of what I wanted.
It's here[1][2] from 22 years ago and says "there are three important ideas from computer science which are, frankly, wrong, and people are starting to notice. I’m sure there are more, but these have been driving me to distraction: 1. The difficult part about searching is finding enough results," then "Most of the academic work on searching is positively obsessed with problems like “what happens if you search for ‘car’, and the document you want says ‘automobile'”. So when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me."
The fewer, better, results that are available increase the perceived utility of the search engine.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-...
[2] I tried a couple of DDG searches including inurl: and site: then switched to Google, went through 4 pages of results, and a couple of searches, before "site:joelonsoftware.com "useless" "results"" got it at the top.
Isn't the use of quotes an explicit request from the user to have fewer results and more exactness ?
If you do a default search, the question of 'lik dis' being included or not is pertinent. Putting quotes puts you straight into the "don't show me variations" camp.
[0] https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/optimize...
My guess is the split will follow the lines of those who were used to do meta search in library indexes and databases and those who started using computers when we already had 'natural language' in computing.
Exactness is the whole point of search queries in my opinion. I am trying to filter out a whole universe of search space, last thing I need is second guessing heuristics.
To me excluding that "great content" that slips through is the price to pay for accuracy.
Unfortunately we are not enough, and ads bring more money to Google on average than what we are willing to pay.
Had a search last week where i specifically stated "-[big european capital city]", and results were chock full of "best [whatever] in [specified big european capital city i didn't want]"... what?!
["-berlin"] ["-new york city"]
These are the correct way to indicate you do not want (the - symbol) a word or phrase (the quote symbols:
[-"berlin"] [-"new york city"]
Am I missing something?
How did this become the #1 story on HN?
Google search is such a shitfest right now, you have to scroll a full page in a 100% 4k screen to get to actual results, it's absolutely disgusting.
I don't care if they search is unoptimal or downright bad. The ad situation is so much worse IMO.
What's up with that? Seems a little stingy.. why go to the effort of HTTP2 to deliver so few hits?
I've never thought of doing this. This would have been helpful in so many past searches.
Even if people aren't finding good alternatives, they might be searching less. Subconsciously, searching ends up feeling futile. The less tech savvy tend to just let one of their algorithms "find" things on its own terms (TikTok, YouTube for short entertainment, Spotify for music , Netflix for shows, Instagram for shopping)
TLDR a true competitor is not needed to see a lack of search volume. To some degree Google search is entertainment and (was once) useful for discovery. Now it can be substituted with other ways of discovering things.
Well, that explains why some technical things are hard to find.
For example "... in javascript" gives unclear results but "ellipsis in javascript" or "three dots in javascript" will provide what you are looking for.
The degradation is part of the buisness model and can not be allowed to be circumvented.
I thought "improving search results" meaning that results itself were more relevant, not only the display.
My 8 year old thinks I'm old fashioned because I don't just talk to the google lady casually like she is my friend, when doing a search/asking a question.
Would additionally be great if Google's autocomplete on filetype:pdf didn't default to "filetype pdf" (i.e. adds a space and omits the colon, nullifying the token).
"We're improving search results when you use quotes"
The first three results are interesting:
1- First result is the Google announcement but not this post. The title is "How we're improving search results when you use quotes" not "We're improving search results when you use quotes" and the search was with quotes, but to be accepted, maybe...
2- Second result is this post
3- Third result is a quackery page made by some SEO spammers. Now what is interesting is that is almost a copy-paste of Google with changes like this:
Google announcement text:
"...We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this...."
SEO Spammers write on page ( with enhancement misspelled):
"...We’ve heard suggestions that folks doing quoted searches worth seeing the place the quoted materials happens on a web page, somewhat than an total description of the web page. Our enchancment is designed to assist handle this..."
And the page becomes the third link from Google results...
Ah, I remember this trick from my college days, using a thesaurus to beat exact match tests so you could copy from wikipedia et al. Glad to see it's still alive and well, and totally not being abused to make the internet a less useful place.
I have no clue what your DDG is doing but it’s not behaving right.
Google Search has always been the dominant bridge between users and sites. Given the obvious complaints over search results, for a company of this stature to talk about explicit search performance during these times is pretty tone deaf.
To me it’s a clear indicator that Google Search is many years away from being their flagship product. It’s truly unfortunate to know there are thousands of people who’d like to change that by working together but simply can’t because Google put their flag up first. And it’s all because this once curious academic project has devolved into a surveil marketing machine.
Fuck Silicon Valley and brogrammer culture
Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users. We generally recommend first doing any search in natural language without resorting to operators like quotation marks. Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary.
By default, our systems are designed to look for both the exact words and phrases entered and related terms and concepts, which is often useful. If you use a quoted search, you might miss helpful content that uses closely related words.
Of course, there are those times when the exact word being on a page makes all the difference. For those situations, quoted searches remain available and are now even better.
Keyword-in-context (KWIC) is useful and well-tested, with a history going back to early scriptural concordances. The context tells the searcher that the right sense of the phrase is talked about in case the quoted phrase is ambiguous.
Snippet extraction has a long history, the standard paper is Turpin et al. (2007), there are regularly new improvements: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=snip...
If some bright spark is sitting around with talent to spare but no idea, the perennial failure mode “search engine for hackers” is an idea whose time has come.
Google is sufficiently beholden to search revenue that grew too much faster than use to be a death sentence for vertical search startups anymore. And modern OSS/cloud compute make the once technically impossible merely absurdly difficult.
And “search for hackers” -> “search for technical stuff of all kinds” -> “search for serious people” -> “…” sounds kind of familiar.
Some colleagues at work have switched off Google since C# regularly gets ignored as a parameter. It didn't use to.
Just annoying having to argue with a tool every day.
Hopefully, showing quoted snippets encourages "fuller", real content rather than the current keyword mash that rises to the top.
Google made quotes basically not do anything forever ago. But there were a few good years when it did what people wanted
This is so annoying for me. Is there a way to get around it, like marking a character to disable this behavior?
On a more related note, I haven't used G search in at least 5 years except on mobile, so this is kind of shrug announcement to me, but good on them for restoring functionality that they clearly didn't want to support.
______
TLDR: It’s impossible to report issues when Google makes it impossible to replicate the issues. In the below text, found four errors: (1) feature mentioned in Google’s blog post is not working; (2) quoted search is not working; (3) + search operator does not work as it used to work; (4) it is impossible to replicate results. — Aware of likely hundreds of bugs like this, wish Google would listen.
______
This comment was a response to another comment, but given all the bugs I found, decided to make it a top level comment.
______
It does not, at least in one way, which was as a substitute for quotes when injected into a string where +’s replaced spaces; just confirmed this does not work, indifferent about it returning; see links below for proof.
My core concern is Google list ALL search operators OR operations AND publicly make SERP experiments per each that are reproducible without millions in resources AND whitelist for automated execution of these tests; if in unlikely chance Google’s looking for strong opinions how to radically improve search quality, I am willing to do it for free or paid.
Here’s the example searches that show + does not work in at least one way it once did as mentioned above:
- millions of results
https://www.google.com/search?q=test%2Btest%2Btest%2Btest%2B...
- 3 results
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
* This is not the same as the +keyword syntax mentioned in thread; I will try to find an example.
EDIT: weird...
If I click this link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
I get zero result results, but if I click:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
Then edit the a to z without making any other changes, like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
I get 3 search results... which clearly is a bug.
EDIT: Grr... I was able to reproduce it, but then Google broke it. Using method above, here’s proof it returned 3 results:
- Note: if you look at the screen shot above, you will see a SERP that breaks the feature Google announced that in the blog post; specifically that the query is not highlighted in the SERP description. More importantly, I searched for "test test test test test z" but got results for "text text text text text z" — which means quoted search itself is broken.
And proof I then got a bug (zero results) using the exact same search:
____
* Conclusion: To me, if you cannot share a search result and get the EXACT same search results (and possibly ability to see different ones AND annotations of why they are different) — how this not a bug; how can anyone independently test Google’s search quality?
EDIT: Tested if verbatim flag fixed the issue above, it did not; Google still randomly returns or does not return results, returns description with the query shown in description (or does not), etc
Proof verbatim does not help:
Oddly, if you get no results, and add [stack exchange] to query, which in theory should be from same index since it a more narrow subset of the prior, does return results, which is odd:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
And if I type in a year ... 2020 ... at least make some effort to limit the top results to those that contain it.
I actually started to use RSS again this year. For the first time in a decade.
Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship?
I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.
Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore.
Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.
Instead this appears to be restoring functionality that was lost. I swear Google used to actually do what this blog post says Google will now do, and I’m not sure when it disappeared, just that I stopped looking at the text blurbs since what they show usually isn’t what I got. Maybe that will change now with this backpedaled change?
At least they’re not ruining it.
it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
And if that seems dramatic, in the intervening period do you want to know what Google served me for very specific search terms? Malicious content and very little else.
thank you google overlords for your brief allotment of sanity
I'll agree about synonyms, if you use quotes you shouldn't see those.
Why can't we have a Google Advanced Search? Is it that hard? Is it rocket surgery? Is it forbidden by the powers that be? Would it start WW3?
I've always found it baffling that we have to play guessing games with a capricious search engine that tries to interpret what we want. There are some times when we know exactly what we're looking for!
There ARE between alternatives now. I like Kagi the most. Worth every penny.
It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved.
Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.
This exact discussion is pretty common on HN. Some people complain that quoted search no longer works, and generally someone from Google will show up to tell us that it does.
It's very interesting to me that this change is specifically targeted at quieting the complaints rather than improving the search functionality. The results are the same as before, but they will now show you the match they found so you can't say "but the string I searched for isn't on the page!".
That will certainly address one half of the complaint. But I have also seen it mentioned that quoted search may fail to find pages that do contain the quoted text. The example given was along these lines:
Website: "peering through reverent fingers <br> I watch them flourish and fall"
Query: "peering through reverent fingers I watch"
Result: "no results found for 'peering through reverent fingers I watch'"
Unfortunately, highlighting where the quoted string occurs on the result page will do nothing to solve complaints that google fails to find pages that contain the quoted string.
I sent a comment about 3 months ago about a bug in night mode and it got fixed. No idea if my comment was the cause, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815
Hopefully for Google's sake they've finally decided reverse the feature removal trend that's been happening for years.
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