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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.

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First of all, wow. It's there (under Tools, you don't even need to go to Advanced), it works, and yet I've never once seen anybody talk about that feature's existence on HN until now. And people have been complaining about not being able to do verbatim searches for years and years here on HN.

Second, I just looked up when this feature was introduced (assuming it was fairly new), and it was in... November 2011. It's been there for the past twelve years. See:

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/google-verbatim-search-back/

https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/11/18/google-introduc...

Thanks for letting us know! It's been right under our noses the whole time -- and it's not like the Tools menu is even particularly hidden, at least on desktop.

There's been lots of talk about it over the years: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+%22verbatim%22+site%3...

I think I also mentioned it a couple of times when the same complaint came up.

The problem I think is that "verbatim" is not a word that one thinks of, so nobody searches for that. Plus it's hidden in a generic "Tools" menu. Sometime you get a link to search for the exact phrase at the bottom of results, but that too is subtle.

> I've never once seen anybody talk about that feature's existence on HN until now

Every time I tried it, it didn't work.

It certainly changed a lot on those years, but the reason nobody acknowledges it is probably because it's a coin-toss if Google wants "verbatim" to mean verbatim today.

Quotes actually stopped working (they became a hint, instead of filtering the results) a long time ago, and many people insisted for years that the verbatim search worked. Probably because those tried it on the days when Google decided to use a standard dictionary. Nowadays even those people gave-up.

Can you (or anyone) supply an example where it doesn't?

I just tried a whole bunch of queries on seemingly generic-sounding sentences from old pages on niche blogs and it found every single one.

So I'd love to understand when it doesn't work and if there's some pattern -- like if certain punctuation trips it up, or if it's simply pages not indexed in the first place.

It didn't work for any query. A verbatim search was very similar to putting every word in quotes. That's very obviously not your experience, so it's either a personalization thing, or Google silently changed it. Anyway, there isn't a pattern to find, it works or it doesn't.

But then, I've seen it work too. And stop working again.

OK, so can you supply any query then? Any example will do.

This is just about verifying the behavior, that it's not finding a verbatim result that it should. And it has nothing to do with personalization -- it's easy to run these logged out.

Also, "A verbatim search was very similar to putting every word in quotes" is not an example of it not working. The question isn't whether they're similar -- your claim was that it "didn't work", which I take to mean it was returning incorrect results, that correct results were missing.

I think OP's point is that this isn't a deterministic system for a given query. The feature flags set for the particular user (are you in the verbatim or no-verbatim branch of today's AB test), and the timestamp are also inputs.

Yeah, I've never had much luck with verbatim search either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36618104

On the search results page, there's a "Tools" button in the upper-right that expands two dropdowns. Change "All results" to "Verbatim".

Wow, that's a good tip.

Here's a URL Link to the advanced search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1

wow, thanks! how did you find this link? I don't see it anywhere in the main interface.

I tried it and it looks like it does nothing but wrap my query in quotes… and then return non-exact results if not found. How is this any different than what people have historically done?

That isn't different, Verbatim search isn't on the advanced search page. You can only get to it from the search results page like in my earlier comment.

It's not on that page, you can only switch to Verbatim on the search results. OP was mistaken.

Great tip! Seems like this adds the query param "&tbs=li%3A1", so this might be something you can configure as an extra search engine in firefox. But then I am a happy kagi customer, and I was just thinking that I can't recall the last time I had to do a !g to find something. For me, google search si pretty much dead. I only use it now when on someone else's pc

Sounds like a good case for an extension even! "Auto add this when I go to google"

You can also adjust your browser's search engine defaults.

> You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.

I actually use that, but it has its faults. You get more spam results and iffy sites (e.g. Wikipedia clones). It's also missing some of Google's convenient features (like doing unit conversions and arithmetic).

IIRC, Verbatim mode is closer to the raw results of Google's underlying search engine, before some of the massaging they do. Some of that massaging is bad, but some of it's all right.

Why would they make their very expected functionality something you have to dig around to find now? That just seems like really bad decision making that should have been spotted by someone on top and screams that the people on top are now disconnected from reality.

I swear that it used to work for certain strings I'm trying to find now which I was able to find information on and now it isn't even returning, with "verbatim" set, something that is in a very well-known program's documentation. Bing finds like three results. Google has dropped the ball so hard it's embarrassing

It's also possible they they're correct, and the average user of today has much less need for verbatim searches than the average user when the search engine was first designed.

This is definitely the case. Sit down next to a casual user one day, and you'll find that 'verbatim' is the absolute last thing they need.

Nah their product is broken and I'm going to avoid using it from now on except when I need to find something on a map or mess around on SEO for work

If they break a key feature to MAKE a verbatim search happen with literally two keys pressed, and are apparently not even indexing what they used to anymore, they're dropping the ball. Most people know the quotation trick now and are probably assuming it still works

This is almost certainly the case. Those of us who learned to use and mastered keyword-style search are the minority. Most people search whole phrases, expecting a contextual answer.

The quality of search results I get from Google has seriously degraded over the past several years (I think about the time they decided to start interpreting my searches rather than just search for what I asked for). From my point of view, verbatim searches are more necessary now than ever before, to work around that issue.

I tried using verbatim searches to make Google decent for me again, but Google defines "verbatim" rather differently than I do.

Yeah, it's Google. I feel like, at this point, Google is basically synonymous with "bad decision"

My guess (complete speculation, but I worked with the Search Quality folks about a decade ago):

1 - By interpreting your search, it leads to better "search quality" by having one model say "i think this is what they want" and another execute the search. P90 accuracy is increased at the cost of P99 accuracy.

2 - If you search for a literal string you know exists, you expect to find it. By interpreting, fewer search inputs with literal strings make it to the search function.

3 - Since Google is interpreting more searches, this gives ad-placement a route in to favorably interpret "they want to buy something" even when this isn't the case. This makes Google money.

4 - People that used to use literal searches either stop, learn how, or switch search engines.

5 - After a couple years, business metrics show that literal searches represent 0.1% of queries and make less money, is it really worth investing in? When it was a P99 issue it fell off the radar and now the P999 is lost.

So a series or rational decisions by rational actors leads to a decline of a used feature because of business incentives and chasing P90s at the cost of P99s.

So they're basically just as good as some malware search engine that inserted itself into grandma's computer now

Fantastic

At least those entertained people.

I couldn't get my fiancé's mother to stop re-installing bonzi buddy or whatever that toolbar was called because she 'loves the purple monkey, he's so cute!'

Man that's crazy in the early 2000s I was volunteering with developmentally disabled adults and had to explain to them how bonzi was a 'bad monkey' and that he was 'not a friend' and they got it

I thought this was a joke.

What it is like anti-user design. Why take away a decades long precedent to hide it in a menu?

For now, this seems to work: https://www.google.com/advanced_search but, given the pace at which Google "improves" things, I don't have much hope that it will last.

That page has been there forever. Here's the version from Dec 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20001202041000/https://www.googl...

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