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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

See also some context for Google search operators including ones that have been removed: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ and changed: https://www.googleguide.com/quote_operator.html (IIRC this was due to Google+ and was an internally unpopular change, but my memory may be faulty).

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I don't understand why they never added + back after Google+ finally died. When I was at Google I actually went as far as looking for the code to re-enable it in superroot. If I recall correctly I actually found some of the code but never had time to learn enough about superroot to make and test a CL.

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 feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes. Instead of reverting something and admitting it was a bad decision, they’ll at best completely relaunch a half-assed complete rehaul of it and pretend it’s a brand new feature.

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.

>I feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes.

The only one that comes to mind is Apple's mea-culpa on the Trashcan MacPro. They actually sat down with reporters and admitted it was a bad design. That one stood out due to the actual admission vs the typical silently revert design back without admission of bad idea (like the butterfly keyboard, magsafe, touch bar, etc).

The difference may be that the MacPro target audience is less general and very vocal. Nowhere to really hide on that one.

  But god, I wish there were a way to do actual precise searches 
  like there used to be.

It's probably not in Google's best interest to allow that. I assume Verbatim search puts higher load on Google servers, while simultaneously making it harder to confine the user to a Google-affiliated site (eg: AdSense client, Blogger, Youtube...)

I work for Google Search. Quotes replaced the + operator but work exactly the same way. They do precisely search for content with the exact terms specified. They really do. They will not look for translations and so on. If there's no match at all for a quoted term, we will show other matches but also make that clear with a special message. And maybe we shouldn't do that to make it even clearer there are no matches. But we don't ignore quoted terms when there's a match -- if you ever have an example where you think this has happened, I'd love to know if you're comfortable sharing, so we can investigate.

I search things in English daily. The results are translated word by word into similar sounding words in Japanese written in Katakana with zero English on the page.

I’m sorry, but what you’re saying simply is not true. It’s immensely frustrating. Using bing, DDG, or literally any other search engine doesn’t have this problem. And I’m searching common words, common concepts, basic things that even the worst search engines will accurately provide results for.

The most frustrating thing is sometimes the language will flip. I will get English on certain hours of the day. But if I make a single search in Japanese, it flips back into that mode and there’s no unsticking it.

If you are quoting terms, we're not going to match what's quoted and not go beyond that. If you have an example of where using quoted terms, you find this happening, please share if you're comfortable. I'll forward to the team, and we'll investigate.

If you're not quoting terms, we might go beyond the inputted language and the language preference if that seems useful. And if this isn't turning out to be useful for you, again, please share any examples you might be comfortable with (now or in the future). Ping me, and we'll look into it.

Oh, and I meant "we're going to match what's quoted" in the first sentence of my reply. Sorry -- can't edit it now.

Can you provide repro steps?

The shame of this is, sometimes it's nice to be able to indicate to google which words in your complex query should be treated as a phrase, without forcing 100% literal matching. So the ideal for a power user would be to have both quotes for phrase grouping and +/- for exact search and exclusion. (Both of which could be used on either single terms or phrases.)

Working numeric ranges would be nice too. And wildcards. Heck, full logical AND/OR search with parentheses.

I still miss AltaVista :(.

I miss Dogpile.

Comparing everybody's results was fascinating.

oh god yes... just the "NEAR" operator alone put it miles ahead..

"Fred near jones" vs " 'fred jones' 'jones fred' 'jones, fred' 'fred micheal jones' "

yep - quotes are not 'identical' to '+'

> If there's no match at all for a quoted term, we will show other matches but also make that clear with a special message.

I disagree that you "make that clear". It's rendered in the same light grey that the rest of the text on the page is in. I have several times noticed the message only after going through a few links. It's very easy to miss if you're in a hurry.

I think usability has been sacrificed for aesthetics here.

This is one of the most clear examples of one of the worst user interfaces ever. If you can show a match it does show the results if it does not, it shows you show a bunch of useless, to me, pages anyway.

There is little surprise there are so many people here saying quotes don't work at all.

I think part of it's that they just don't index a whole bunch of the Web anymore. You can search things in quotes that must exist, and get "LOL no such results here's some irrelevant shit". That's what people mean when they say quotes don't work as expected—you use them and more often than not get "LOL nothing, here's unrelated trash" even when there for-sure should be results.

What are some examples of sites which don't appear to be indexed?

I've heard that they respect one quoted term, and treat further ones as unquoted.

We respect multiple quoted terms.

> I work for Google Search. Quotes replaced the + operator

Quotes existed before the + operator was removed. Unless the algorithm for quotes changed from exact match to match anything, which seems likely from the results I get.

Quotes existed originally as a way to match phrases, more than one word. + was meant for matching a single word. Quotes replaced the way to match a single word, while still remaining the way to phrase search.

Hmm, that makes it sound like if I search:

> lyrics "walk down the aisle at the store"

it'll do an inexact phrase search, and if I do:

> lyrics walk down the "aisle" at the "store"

it'll do a normal search but with exact-match for aisle and store.

But in this example, that doesn't appear to be the case - looks like the first example is exact match phrase search?

Yes, that's exactly what it will do. But keep in mind that if you do [lyrics walk down the "aisle" at the "store"] by default we'll probably rank pages that have many of the words adjacent to each other because we can tell those are probably more relevant. That's why you might get the same or similar results to [lyrics "walk down the aisle at the store"] -- and it's why the post suggests not even using quotes at all at first, because we might get things fine without them.

I work for Google Search. We have looked at this, and while never say never, reverting is hard from what I understand because it means we'd have to ignore the + symbol which turns out to be useful to recognize when it comes to international phone number searches.

That seems like it is easy to special-case though.

Not so easy, the engineers tell me. Again, never say never. I miss + myself, but quotes do work.

That seems like quite the edge case. I don't think I've ever searched for an international phone number. Is that worth making the search experience rather poorer for everyone?

Besides: if you're searching for a phone number, you presumably are looking for an exact match, so how is treating it as such a problem?

Are you by chance in North America? I suspect this is a much more common edge case in Europe where you have a bunch of countries within close proximity to each other.

I live in the UK and travel regularly in Europe. I've very rarely Googled a phone number. The only times I can think of is when I've had an unknown number call me and I want to try to figure out who it was. (Of course, doing it the reverse way, Googling an org's name to find their phone number, is common).

I'm suddenly curious as to why anyone would search for phone numbers regularly.

The + symbol also gets used in credible search terms like Disney+, Apple TV+, math equations, C++, code snippets (x += 1), indicators of age (e.g 2000+ year old pyramid) etc.

I suppose many of these could be addressed by ignoring the + at the end of a word, but that weakens the robustness to user error in correct spacing.

I thought the + operator only ever worked as the first character of a word

Or if it doesn't, than make it so. And tell people that if they want to search for a word that begins with a symbol, put it in quotes. That doesn't seem difficult.

Thanks! I figured there was a reason something like this. But I have to say it seems like an eminently solvable problem.

Google+ has not died, it still wanders in Google Workspace purgatory.

. works the way _ does, pretty much. So one more operator?

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