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Comment by chrisnight | Hacker News Reader

I myself have found a very clear, objectively measurable, falloff for Google search results when it comes to non-NLP searches. The quotes operator is designed to search for pages containing exactly the phrase given, however I have found that Google has many times where it yields no results, and then does a “did you mean <no quotes>”, while other search engines can easily find the piece of information that was given. No matter the reason for why this is happening, it has dampened my usage of Google considerably because Google doesn’t seem to be able to handle the most basic of queries anymore.

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I remember a Google search with quotes for which Google implicitly removed the quotes, returning irrelevant results, but suggested that I add some extra pair of quotes… which resulted in the same page but suggesting yet another pair of quotes… and so on.

I was literally unable to perform the search that I wanted, and all Google suggested repeatedly was adding a dozen quotes on each side. Most frustrating search experience I've ever had.

Probably a very tight window between when they hamstrung explicit strings and when they still had it a a recommended feature.

Its unfortunate but theres more money to be made being less helpful. For example, google ads pay based on session length.

See youtube killing its short form videos with the 10 minute monetization cliff --> gap filled by vine and then later by TikTok

Once you change the usefulness of your product it's only a matter of time

Are you maybe able to provide an example search that does this? I'm pretty sure quotes still always work as intended for me (although I still miss the loss of + a little, which was used for the same purpose).

> "did you mean <no quotes>"

That makes me want to shout. "Did I say that?"

I just tried to search for "falloff for Google search results", as an example of random quoted string from your comment. Google Search returned one result - your comment.

Then I replaced 'Google' with 'Bing', and Google returned results without the quote which were irrelevant - but that makes total sense to me.

Same observation here. Sometimes I check the "News" tab for a search query, just to find there are 0 (Zero) results, when the regular search returns Millions of pages for the same query. In these situations, I feel like some algorithm has decided to hide these news, from me, for some unknown reason.

I've stopped trying to use the quotes operator because it clearly started ignoring it many years ago. It's very frustrating.

You have to do 2-3 clicks to select “verbatim.” And there’s no way to set this as a preference or setting.

It’s weird. I suspect it’s more expensive to search this way or something because it’s such a basic feature that they haven’t done for a decade.

There is a way to have Verbatim the default, at least by changing the default search engine settings in the browser. Ctrl-k in my Chrome uses a verbatim search (can't remember exactly how I set it up).

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