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Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word.

The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so thanks for the suggestion.

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Still waiting on being able to search for punctuation. Being able to search for "$. ruby" or "$_ perl" or "$: << '.' ruby" would be super handy.

edit: Just realized "$_ perl" actually does work. It would be nice, however, if we could search for these kinds of terms generally and not just in specific case.

1000 times this. I have been waiting a decade to be able to search for '1/2' or '6' 3"' or '£3.50' (not necessarily numbers, you get the point i'm sure), and i was dissapointed to find this post wasn't announcing that.

I launched a search engine that does exactly this just over a week ago, you can see it here: http://symbolhound.com/

I freaked out when I saw this headline and thought it meant google had finally decided to implement this feature a week after my launch.

That's freaking fantastic. Shame it didn't get much notice on proggit. I'll resubmit it at a busier time and share it on G+ and whatnot. You might want to submit it here yourself, so you can answer any questions people might have and let the community get to know you. Try submitting it with the "Show HN:" heading. Send me an email (in my profile) when you do submit it and I'll be sure to swing by and give it one of the critical first upvotes.

Really cool tool; thanks for that.

Thanks! I do plan to post it on HN, I just want to wait until it's a bit better (right now stackoverflow dominates the results, so I need to adjust the ranking system and index more sites).

BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

>BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

Sorry about that. I would have thought putting it in the email field would have made it visible. I've put it in the about field now.

Great! Nice, simple and easy. It can even search for negative numbers without interpreting the - as "exclude". A literal search engine, without Google's well-meaning "intelligence" can be useful in many cases.

This. Half my kingdom for this feature.

One of the biggest problems I have with Google search at the moment is when I need to look up specific functions or symbol names. If I'm looking for documentation on g_find_str, the LAST thing I need is to see results that contain "... are going. Find string is a ..."

That's great, Google does n-grams/symbol search finally. Tho 'f# "|>" ' is way less common than "$_ perl", doesn't work yet.

And i think the folks that did, e.g. hoogle took some time to get it right for 1 language

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

http://scalex.org/

Matt, do you know if there are any plans to once again allow the mixing of exact match with the regular fuzzier search functionality? It's great to have exact matching back, but I often found it a useful strategy to build the search loosely, then refine with +specifics. Perhaps something like this, in exact match mode:

  ~run ~sprint ~hurdle nike

could be the equivalent of the old:

  run sprint hurdle +nike

Yes please allow something like this, mixing verbatim with fuzzier search functionality is powerful.

You still can do that, you just have to use "quotes" "around" "the" "words" instead of +putting +the +plus +sign +before +each +word. This just lets you get that type of search for every word easier.

Isn't

    run sprint hurdle "nike"

what you want?

Yes, and of course that works fine. It's just the ease of using an inline prefix to modify the term, rather than enclosing it in quotes. We're mourning the loss of the +.

I'm not seeing the change yet, will we be able to use "verbatim:hello world" to do an exact search? I don't see myself navigating through the sidebar each time I need to find something specific.

Yes, please, verbatim: or similar would be great, especially for use on a mobile.

This is a good idea, it will allow us to use the string interpolation address bar search functionality we all love in our favourite browsers.

In general, nice one google for once again keeping an ear to the ground.

Although "sad" with where Google search is (was) going isn't the right term, I am now very much unpissed, so many many thanks for this.

How is "literal mode" different from what "allintext:" promised? And is there an option to turn this on permanently?

This isn't really the solution we were looking for Matt.

Can we replace the + operator with something else? How about¬? We don't use that very often to the point I don't even know what it's called, but it's there on the keyboard in one keypress.

Not on US keyboards, I don't think.

Depends on your OS. ¬ is a quick alt+l on any Mac. However, it's the symbol for logical negation[1], and thus probably not a great substitute for +.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%AC

On Windows, you have to do Alt+0172 to get a ¬ unless there's some shortcut I don't know offhand.

I've looked all over my German keyboard, with its crazy-assed bracket locations, and I don't see it anywhere.

My UK keyboard has it left of the '1' key above the qwerty keys

I have carat and a little circle. The bastards.

Speak for yourself. I've been wanting this solution for years.

I'll pass the feedback on. Part of the issue with + is that it turned out a lot of people were mistyping queries with + when as far as we could tell, they weren't trying to match an exact word. Getting further off the beaten path with a more rare character might help though.

Exclamation point? (!this !word !exactly, !darnit!) Or a double exclamation point if that's still too common...

It really was nice to be able to control which words were verbatim and which weren't. Quotes are perfectly logical but just a pain to retrofit onto a query you're refining.

Surely simpler soultion would have been to respond to a search for "+this is a +search" with:

Showing results for this is a search Search instead for +this is a +search

As google does for other "typos".

Failing that, a replacement for + would be welcome. I can't imagine many people type, for example ^word or =word - allowing use of a symbol that indicates promotion of that word word in the search terms, they way + did.

The difficulty will be reeducating the (presumably quite large number of - even if proportionally a small percentage of googles user base) people who have been using + in searches for the last 10-15 years (I'm almost positive this concept existed in other search engines before google) that + isn't + any more, and please use this other symbol instead.

Currently Google offers me the ability to change the background image on the Google home page.

How about the ability to use something like Google "classic" with the old way of using the + sign?

Hide it as an off-home page selection, that way only people who really want it will choose it.

I'd also be interested in something similar for an "advanced search syntax" mode. Probably not very useful for the majority of people, but could be something a minority might be very passionate about.

What about the equals sign?

=exactstring

Westlaw search syntax would be awesome!!!

That's the symbol for logical negation, which would make it a confusing replacement for +.

> This isn't really the solution we were looking for

What? Yes, yes it is. Please don't take it away now!

That character is most often used as a logical negation operator, so it may be confusing to use it as a force-inclusion operator for search.

It's also almost never found on standard US keyboards, which is why the tilde is often used as a logical negation operator in it's place.

Thank you. Irritation has been growing that I can't search for what I want without fielding all kinds of "well what about this variant..." results, without even + prefix and "" squishing into some unwanted twist. Would be nice to make (at least as an option) Verbatim mode the default, with a link provided per search to show variants.

Can you confirm or discuss more about what this does to the "filter bubble?"

In two windows of the same browser, I typed gyros, one immediately offered me an instant search result of gyros Phoenix (where I currrently am), the other window, in verbatim mode offered me gyros, gyroscope, and gyros recipe.

(Don't ask me why I tried gyros as my search example.)

I believe verbatim mode turns off personalization, and it looks like it turns off localization as part of that. So the query [yoga] shows local places to do yoga for me, but in verbatim mode I don't see that.

Out of curiosity, how does google judge search result quality? It seems as though search is trending toward the idea that more results are better, when usually the opposite is true.

A bit speculative: this is more related to Ad revenue. A wider spectrum of search results means more Ad variety and the ability to serve more advertisers per search query.

I'm annoyed by Google's search quality by the day. I'm starting to use DuckDuckGo more (unless there are other alternatives).

I know it's tempting but please don't speculate like that, it raises my blood pressure. :)

Google keeps ranking changes completely siloed from the ad side of the company, and the decision makers about ranking changes don't see statistics about how it might effect ads. We don't even have a way of collecting that data. (At least as far as I've ever seen.)

I couldn't resist the speculation temptation :)

Correct me if I'm wrong; When I'm searching for (unquoted) "Canadian equivalent to SOPA Bill". I'm getting results about Soap, Telenovela, Spas, Dishwasher Soap, TV shows (and 1 related hit). The result, as you mentioned, could be ranked independent of Ads, but the Ad spectrum is wider (Soaps, Spas, Soap operas, TV shows, etc...) [I'm not getting any in this particular case].

If it's restrictive search (quoting each word - sigh!), the search result quality is slightly better (first 3 hits), but the potential of Ads is also low.

I know you put the user first - but wouldn't you speculate in my case?

I'm not sure that logic works. You're assuming that the Ads are matched to the query in the same way that results are matched to the query - that a more restrictive query necessarily translates into fewer ad matches.

There's another possibility which is that the ads are the query and the search query is in fact their match result. In that case, adding or removing quotes within the search query might not have any impact on the ads being shown.

Don't know which way it works, but it seems to me the latter would be better for showing ads without having any negative impact on search results.

Ads has a very sophisticated system of matching ad topics against queries. That's how they make the big money. :) I work in search though, so I don't really know anything about how it works except at an extremely high level. I'd be really surprised if that sort of effect actually happened though.

Moultano: I 100% believe google keeps ranking changes siloed from the ad side, but Google 100% favors its own properties within its search results so you can't be surprised that someone thinks this way? Here are some examples for you that need major changes in my opinion.

www.google.com/#hl=en&q=san+francisco+restaurant+reviews www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hollywood+cauldron

-when i previously used google for retail reviews I would just bypass all of your results to get to yelp. sometimes trip advisor.

-look at those youtube video results for the 2nd query. So off the mark, but you guys keep them in there because it is good for google. it doesn't help your users and makes you look bad. I don't know what you guys are thinking.

I use Bing for 95% of my searches now. For tech searches I still think you guys are better, but for everything else I use Bing.

Here's an official post on the subject: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-...

Thanks Matt. This helps with at least one of my complaints about the direction Google search has been heading.

(Now if you'd just eliminate that godawful slow URL redirector on result links…)

I seem to recall reading in prior discussion on this that +foo included stemming while "foo" does not? (And, therefor, some people were unhappy with "foo" not just due to the syntax change but also due to the difference in behavior.)

Some other people in this thread have suggested ¬ as a substitute (and no, it's not on a typical U.S. keyboard). Others point out that ¬ means negation in a typical context. Do you folks index backticks? If not, what about backtick? I guess that wouldn't be too *NIXy; however, most keyboards seem to have one, and if it's not currently indexed, might be a choice. (It's also "sort of quotish", in nature.)

P.S. Hmm... Backtick could cause unexpected results in the case of someone pasting a single quoted value from Word, or similar. Might not be the common, though, and I never did like Word's "smart quotes", anyway. ;-)

Nice, now search personalization can be turned off!

> With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as <...> personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before

Personally, I appreciate this more than allowing to search for exact matches. Hopefully ‘filter bubble’ just became less… bubbley. =)

I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text".

Was this incorrect?

Could you guys consider bringing out a case-sensitive search feature sometime?

Why aren't you allowing for both; The original +prefix as well as the quotes?

finally... and thanks.

Why does this query not do what one would expect.

    halo -"halo 2" -"halo 3"

Also, removing "Advanced Search" from the main google.com and from the top of a search results page beats out moving "cached" to the preview page in terms of "stupidest decision Google has ever made".

I'll ask about the halo query. In the mean time, it looks like [halo -halo.2 -halo.3] does what you want.

Do you see a gear symbol in the top of main google.com and the results page? I think that's where Advanced Search is now.

Thanks for the query recommendation. Curious why the other didn't work, I feel it (or similar ones) have worked as I might expect in the past.

>Do you see a gear symbol in the top of main google.com and the results page? I think that's where Advanced Search is now.

Seems Android action-bar-esque almost, but yes, thanks.

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