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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

Back when Google search was good this query would have returned no results. As it should do. Now it desperately tries to dig up anything it can find just so the number of results is not zero. Somebody at Google wanted to the increase search 'hit rate' KPI and this is the result.

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If you put quotes around the string (the "exact match" operator), the only results are this very thread. So it seems to be working as intended.

Basically, you did a fuzzy search and got a fuzzy result. Usually that's what people want. Quotes will let you fine-tune results. Or if you want all results to be strict by default, use verbatim mode. I tested that with the above string and again, only this thread showed up.

But it’s clearly not what people want. Ask any person if a search for a hex encoded ID should be a fuzzy match for a different ID and the answer will be no.

As technical people, it’s easy to infer what’s happening under the hood and make excuses for the weirdness. But food product design is about having strong opinions about what should happen, and ignoring our bias is around the limitations of the tech or the status quo.

In an age where I can have an entire conversation with a computer or generate a video from text the world’s greatest search engine still doesn’t understand that you can’t fuzzy match an ID? It increasingly feels like Google search is stuck in the past.

Who is this "any person" who's searching for random hex, and how much do you think they care of Google shows them a car instead of whatever thing they're not even actually looking for?

the idea that this mythical "any person" even cares about the difference between a useless car result and a page that says no results and then they just move on with their lives is projecting a lot of your own biases onto a hypothetical.

Obviously no one would search a completely random hex, but it may represent an ID somewhere, and they want to find out more information about it. e.g. a SHA or MD5 hash.

Agreed, you can look up d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e for example. The question is how critical is it that Google returns a non-useful result vs a page that says there are no results. I think most people don't care, it's not useful either way.

As an aside, for those curious, it's the MD5 of the empty string :)

I search id's all the time. Google is becoming more and more worthless.

>the world’s greatest search engine still doesn’t understand that you can’t fuzzy match an ID?

No, not without telling it to run an Exact Match search by enclosing the string in quotes.

> But it’s clearly not what people want. Ask any person if a search for a hex encoded ID should be a fuzzy match for a different ID and the answer will be no. >

in a search field explicitly for hex encoded IDs it shouldn't be

In a generic web search that has to guess if my term was a hex encoded id ('cafe' is but almost certainly isn't intended as one..).. it's less obvious.

in the case of a clear hex encoded id of sufficient length, i would like to know there are zero exact results, but as long as it's still fast I would love some fuzzy matches after in case there was a typo in my term or in the indexed document.

I get that that's the default now, but can't help but hate it. When you search for like `dog house` to have a bunch of results for just house (marked "Missing: ~dog~" ) it's so dumb. Why would I have typed dog unless that was important to me??

Meanwhile if I search for a specific Bosch solenoid part number there's a 50% chance that any one result will point to some different part number that contains 90% of the digits - even though the specific part number actually exists!

Same for electronic part numbers. Search engines will just go "eh, pretty close" and mix in results for, say, TPS562201 with those for TPS56221.

This sets things up for all sorts of problems when people don't notice that the IDs aren't exactly the same.

At the moment, Google happens to be choosing car dealers as a fallback, but what if it instead fell back to a page "transaction a67cedf has been confirmed"?

Garbage in garbage out is fine here, no? I hate google quite as much as the next person here, but this seems like a non-issue. If I type in a random string, it should be assumed that I'm searching for something.

Sometimes you really do want exactly that "random" string. This is common with error messages, model numbers, build hashes, etc. If I'm searching for B9GDSIGH as the model number for my refrigerator, I really don't want to see B9GDSIGY.

But if it links to the B9GDSIG series refrigerator, which has the 240v H and 120v Y subtypes, then it would be correct in suggesting that?

Same with error messages - they often have timestamps, or local object IDs/memory addresses, which you also want to be fuzzy-matched.

I think the issue is the de-emphasis of "power" modifiers for google - it's less obvious how to say "This part of the string needs exact match, this can be fuzzy"

In that case, click the "must contain" link and it resubmits with the query wrapped in quotes. Or, just quote the query yourself on the first go if you know it must match

Google no longer (hasn't in a while) respected quotes. It's very hard to get Google to actually say there aren't any results even when in fact there are no matching results.

They respect it when they submit it then, as every time I've used that function to see them update the query with quotes it comes back with different results. I've never cared to look at the search query in the URL, so maybe they also add and additional parameter that tells the back end specifically to obey the quotes on this resubmitting???? So at some point, the quotes aren't ignored

that's not my experience.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kgirbudidndijrjjr%22 gives me "Your search - "kgirbudidndijrjjr" - did not match any documents.", at least it will until they index this comment and find kgirbudidndijrjjr

Quotes are more like guidelines these days.

on the advanced search, there's still the option to specify that it 'must contain' something, but I'm not sure if it's just a suggestion like quotes or not.

I "love" how we've reached a point where we so distrust this company specifically but dark pattern UIs in general where we almost anticipate placebo like buttons.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Search is ambiguous enough by nature IMO. No liberty zone!

Agree with the peer - specificity matters. Model numbers are a good example. I feel like I've developed a weak form of dyslexia because I can't trust Google like I once did.

Things I want fuzzy searches for... will be presented fuzzy. Not as an opaque string of usually-quoted characters, but wrapped in keywords

A reply makes a good point - double quotes don't seem as effective any more.

I miss when Google had thousands of results, and you could browse past page 5. Now it just lies to you.

Is there anyway we can somehow find out that is true?

I could have sworn google always was happy to return some odd url matches, typically when the given results weren't great.

Unless you have a time machine there's only anecdotal evidence, but there's plenty of it on HN. Seen many comments here reporting the same thing.

There was at one time a kind of game where you tried to find a search term that would return only say 3 results. It was hard, but some did get found.

Having said that I have recently had some kind of "nothing found" result on several occasions. So it still happens.

--edit--

In fact I just tried "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c9" (omitting the last digit to avoid HN) and got:

Your search - "ca7112b7167c15e621412c0fbc0a6c9" - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure that all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords.

Google-Whack as I knew it.

Where you tried to find only a search with one result.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack

I've seen it come back with something along the lines of "it looks like there's not a lot matches" with some useless cartoon graphic.

I see this a lot when searching for phone numbers. I've also seen the opposite like the forced "find something no matter how terrible of a match to avoid no results" as being described. You search for a number and no exact matches, but it returns things with different area codes same prefix different numbers. Or same area code, different prefix, same numbers. Or some such randomness that I can't even venture a guess as to why it thought the not one number matches would be interesting to me. Unless you're brave, I'd suggest not searching for random phone numbers with Safe Search off as you'll find some very interesting pages displayed that have absolutely nothing to do with the number being searched.

I remember when Googlewhacks[0] used to be a thing. Zero result search queries weren't interesting enough because they were too easy to find.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack

Just do an image search for "google search returned no results screenshot". Plenty of examples.

I can't tell you the number of times I've searched for random serial numbers and gotten the exact product I seek. I'm glad Google indexes this random crap.

An experiment would be to create high quality, non-commercial websites with pages containing these hex strings and see if the pages appear in Google SERPs.

The fact that Google returns car dealerships when the user is searching for hex strings is telling.

That doesn't sound right to me: Google used to suppress results with string matches?

Why?

If so, would that be a good thing?

Why shouldn't I be able to find the vehicle via its ID?

These aren't string matches. Check again.

Ah, doh, thank you.

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