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> Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for. It's become difficult on Google to search for a non-popular thing that happens to be close to a popular search target.

This has been getting me lots lately. It used to be 1 attempt, maybe 2, to find what I'm after.. lately I find myself regularly needing to try >4 different searches before getting what I'm after. I've consciously noticed that Google seems to have lost the whole thing that made them so great in the first place.

I don't see a reason to search twice if I already know a key word I am searching for.

If Google returns a "popular" result, I usually add a second keyword to specifying the domain which usually returns the correct result.

I have been using ddg for a good amount of time now and every day I have to use !g to search on Google because the results are too literal. I like the privacy stand that they are taking but it's not close to the search relevancy for a lot of queries.

Being literal is one of its best features, I think, at least in comparison to other search engines. I don't want a google-style filling my search in with long lists of antonyms, related words, or context-changing term reordering... Words that literally mean the same thing are fine (although ideally that would be a selectable setting), but substituting words for something only peripherally related is not.

I try to use Duckduckgo, but end up resorting to google a lot, because the personalized searches are useful. I end up looking up Django documentation a lot, and if you try searching for "Django" on DDG, I end up with the film. Google knows I want the web framework.

Would there be a way to be personalized and anonymous at the same time? Or is that an oxymoron?

Well, they could do client-side filtering/sorting, saving the personalization parameters in local storage. It'd require the server to send a bunch more results up front, though, otherwise the client would have little to work on.

I use DuckDuckGo mostly, I always want a specific part of the Django documentation, say so I don't get the movie links (except for an ad).

As you say "django" gives you the movie, but "django class based views" gives you what you would expect.

For most search I feel that DuckDuckGo has become increasingly good, while Google has become worse. It might be because I don't login or flush cookies when I close my browser, but that would mean that Google rely on personalization to a disturbing degree.

Sure, but it was a kind of general example I was giving. My problem when I specify class based views, is that it usually takes me to version 1.3, while Google points me to the dev version (usually I want the most recent stable version so neither is perfect in that respect, but Google is usually closer).

ProTip: !sp will give you StartPage proxied Google results. Google search goodness without Google tracking.

My progression is DDG => !SP => !G

Try verbatim mode, available under Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim or by adding &tbs=li:1 to the URL.

Perfect usability.

Why am I only learning about this now? :(

It's like the mode to disable 'personalised results' (AKA filter bubbles) - I've explained it to several people in the last few months and they were all amazingly grateful. Of course, we still don't have any way to measure where there is no filter bubbling with them off, or just less... :(

Project Mycroft has hundreds of configuration files for browser search plugins, including Google verbatim.

http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...

But if you'd like to search Verbatim and also restrict your results to the most recent month/year/etc., even though these are separate dropdowns under Search Tools, you're out of luck. Google seemingly just won't allow this.

Astounding - this small feature dramatically improves my results with google.

This is the first time I've even heard of this mode. As with the original article, I think this speaks to the massive power of the "default". Once upon a time Google's "default" was excellent for my use case, but it's slowly degraded over the years, and rather than dig through all of its options trying to make Google useful again, I just whined about it and started looking at competing services.

Changes in default behavior should be embarked upon with extreme caution. This is especially true when considering the way google does this (with many incremental changes that are totally invisible individually). I feel like if they more prominently highlighted 1) what they were changing and 2) how to work around it they could avoid much backlash from "power" users.

Firefox, in contrast, makes it very clear what they're doing when they change the default search engine, and it's pretty easy to switch back to google. But clearly for a large number of users, that "default" will be good enough.

Thanks for the pointer, here's a forum thread on using verbatim mode: https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/websearch/Q...

To disable search result personalization: https://www.google.com/history/optout

It gets harder and harder to search for your search terms (the plus operator and quotes no longer work for exact matches for example)... now you have to be logged in, add text to the address bar or add a modified 1-click search engine to the Firefox toolbar...

They seem to be aiming for a TV-like experience by showing you whatever they want and not what you search for (maybe Google should be called an inspiration engine nowadays, for lack of a better word)

When smart engineers try to guess what non-smart non-engineers would be looking for on the Internet, they end up with an over-algorithmized mess that Google has become lately.

And now, among other things, Google is losing power users. They shouldn't forget that they gained popularity in the beginning by word of mouth which in this industry literally means: by power users' recommendations to others. It's the power user who would (or wouldn't) be replacing Bing with Google on his family member's new laptop.

This is crucial in my opinion: don't try to guess what people want to find, just guess how they want to be looking for something - anything.

Unfortunately, that always happens. New product gains power users, starts to dumb down to appeal to room temperature IQs, loses power users again. See also: Firefox.

Yes, but how do we prevent this from happening? That's the big question!

Be in touch with your power users.

the problem is that the mainstream non-power users are where the money is at - power users are just the foot in the door, and when you get in, you don't care about them anymore.

Well then ignore your power users and lose the non-power ones along with the money they bring. That's exactly what Google has been doing in the past years. They lost me on almost everything except GMail which is also hanging from the cliff already.

Speaking of GMail, it's the same attitude basically. For example they added these automatic labels with some nonsensical heuristics, which don't work most of the time and are impossible to remove. One more "smart" improvement and I'm closing my GMail account for good, seriously.

I recently opened an Outlook account because I'm finding Google's business model creepy and so far it's been pretty nice. It integrates well with my BlackBerry Passport (switched from Android) and two-factor auth was pretty straightforward to set up. I've moved my entire calendar to outlook.com and I'm forwarding my GMail there for now and hopefully will migrate completely over the next year.

When I started to think about how Google was privy to just about all of my online and some of my real-life activity, it occurred to me they could build a disturbingly accurate profile on me, and while I'm just a boring 30-something middle-class white guy, I still found that creepy. Now I spread my data out between Google, BlackBerry, Outlook, and Yahoo and it's not really any less convenient than having it all integrated (the phone does integrate it all I suppose, but BlackBerry is not trying to use that data to show me ads).

Outlook isn't much better. I ditched gmail ~2010 and switched to running my own mailserver. Also means I can DKIM sign my messages, I get unlimited aliases, full message headers, etc...

What are you missing in Firefox that you can't get back 100% with add-ons?

Well this is unrelated to 'dumbing down' but setting a minimum tab width below 30 pixels is remarkably painful these days. It used to be a single config setting, then a single rule in userchrome, but now it takes an add-on that removes Australis and a couple dozen lines of custom fragile CSS that took far too long to write.

As far as I'm aware as a long time Firefox user it has never lost any functionality.

The menus may appear a bit mor simplified at the surface but if you dig down you will find what you are looking for.

>non-smart non-engineers >room temperature IQs

Boy, this bubble doesn't think too highly of the outside world, does it? What an attitude. We're not all idiots.

As someone who has run product before, I can tell you there's always some self-entitled blowhard who feels you owe them something for the time they spend on your product, or their "help". No one is upset when they finally leave (and they always do).

The fact that you have switched away from Google products (and are threatening to leave the last) means your value to Google is likely slightly above zero. But I'm sure the competition are beating down your door for your business.

Try using a Google+ account. That way, Google can learn about you, and it doesn't need to resort to "popular" search results.

So the solution is to have your privacy invaded? Count me out.

You could use different user profiles to protect yourself from excessive privacy invasion.

Because it isn't like Google love to share data between services and cross reference user activity or something, is it? Oh, wait...

You want a company to omnisciently select from billions of webpages the most appropriate result for you.

You refuse to tell them anything about yourself.

That's not having your privacy invaded, that's wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

No, I don't want omniscience. I want them to actually match the fricking keywords I give them. Is that too much to ask in these days of privacy invasion for profit?

Yeah, I don't want search results based on my personality just gimme the facts!

I want the most appropriate results for my search text, not me.

It's a human language question, not an FMRI.

> Bing is currently more literal-minded than Google. Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for. It's become difficult on Google to search for a non-popular thing that happens to be close to a popular search target. Google does not treat quote marks as a mandatory exact match any more, just a hint.

One of the biggest things that irks me now about Google. Sometimes I want to search just for the word, "sofa" I don't need you to match it with "relevant" other words like "couch"

Why not? I consider sofa and couch to be synonyms. This lets me do two searches in one.

Well, you used to be able to use "sofa" with google, which would exclude 'couch' etc. but then they killed that. Still works with other search engines.

sofa -couch still works. Also, verbatim mode: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en

Won't sofa -couch exclude pages that have both words?

sometimes you dont want that eg try to find solutions for open directory problems on OSX Server (as the docs for OSX server are F%$^ S%^t) you get lost a low quality results about how to make OSX work with Micrsofts AD!

if I wanted those results I would search with Acive directoy as part of the flipping query!

> Why not? I consider sofa and couch to be synonyms. This lets me do two searches in one.

For you. For this one use-case. Which may or may not be good.

It's the effect of this scaled up, for all use-cases Google's cluster can identify, for all users which is bad. It's one of the reasons I use DDG instead of Google these days.

Not quite the same, but I quite like the fact that Google is way better at spelling than I am.

Bing won't go away. Search is more than 'searching for a term in a browser', it can and should be integrated deeply into the OS (well, at least a consumer OS) and other software products. Bing will be -- and to some extent, is -- the basis of information lookup in Microsoft products. A first, simple example of this is the 'Insights' menu in Office Online (see http://blogs.office.com/2014/12/10/whats-new-office-online/). Microsoft cannot possibly risk relying on Google in these cases as Google could break the functionality of core Microsoft products in a second.

Hang on, are you saying that an online search engine should be responsible for indexing all a user's information?

I'm not talking about indexing user info -- it's more about responding to various queries during normal workflow. The link in my post above is a good example (even if I'm not sure it's very useful): you are editing some kind of document and you want to get quick, in-place info about certain words, names, concepts. Or another example is universal search in the OS (it is present in OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, ChromeOS): there is one single location where you can search for everything (local files, web stuff, etc.). That needs to be powered by something, and a 3rd party engine represents a HUGE risk if that 3rd party is one of your biggest competitors. Same goes for voice recognition, etc.

>it can and should be integrated deeply into the OS

No, it shouldn't. Some people care about their privacy.

I also hate this fascination with search in general. If I want somefile, I know it's in Documents/stuff/foo_project/ ; I don't need to search for it.

Well, I don't need it either, but I clearly see why and how others do need it. At the moment, the industry goes towards search instead of manual structuring -- it's an interesting topic to think about, but that's a fact. Google tries everything to move people in this direction. You don't even need to look at the search engine, just think of how Google Maps or even Google Keep works. Menu entries, options, basically explicit filtering/search is transformed (dumbed down? maybe, maybe not) into a single search box where you tell it what you're looking for. When the most popular Linux distro integrates Amazon search into it's desktop search, then you know this has arrived. :)

Well, obviously it needs to be switchable, and it certainly will be both in Linux and in Windows. Not so much in Google OS, obviously.

Again, I'm not voicing my personal opinions and preferences on whether and how I want to see search integrated into a desktop OS. I'm arguing that Bing won't go away because the current industry trends require Microsoft to have a reasonably good search engine under its control.

Forgetting the location of a file is one use case. Another is that it's just convenient to type 'som' and have somefile pop up. Or to extract 500 similarly-named files from some program's convoluted directory structure. Frankly I'm surprised that we still store data resources as 'files' in rigid hierarchical databases after all these decades.

I don't find that convenient, I find it creepy.

If that's creepy, grep must be downright sinister.

Because grep really sends my data to an online service, right?

Neither does searching for a local file in the documents folder. I was referring to the "fascination with search in general" which can be invaluable when you have a lot of data shoehorned into directories or other inappropriate structures.

As for local searches commingling with online searches, there are some cases where it makes sense, others where it's a blatant violation of privacy, and many more in a subjective grey area. It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed (really informed, not small-print-in-the-legalese informed) and needing to opt in, not out.

>Neither does searching for a local file in the documents folder.

It does on Ubuntu/Mac OS.

>It's basically a matter of making sure people are informed... and needing to opt in, not out.

Shame nobody actually does this though. Also, does opting out actually stop the data grabbing, or just hide those results?

Search is useful when you have shared folders that lots of people are working with. Unless you have very strict control everyones seperate mental models are mashed together into one big mess.

Search in the OS is killer, now tHe jury is out if that means I get a Wikipedia page, a definition for my search term, abriviated Google results AND the files on my disks that match my search term. For most of those, I'll always use search in a browser and not in my os.

Personally, I think that's just bad ux, it's simplification one step too far. The user might not want these search services to know they are searching for some terms. That's a distinction that I know many users clearly don't care about though.

>Running a search engine is so profitable...

2005-2013 Microsoft online services, including Bing lost $10.9bn [1] and "continue to report a loss of $1.3bn/year" [2] as of early 2014. I think people are projecting breakeven 2016. Competing with Google is not easy.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-reorg-earnings-repo... [2] https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-...

At one point, MS were paying people to use Bing. Their loss was probably in a large part due to marketing it aggressively (see: that horrendous "Bing it" product placement in whetever TV show it was), while DuckDuckGo/startpage spread mostly by word of mouth, and Yahoo maintains market share via inertia (and shady third party referral deals that cause malware to often change your search engine to yahoo, but that's another discussion...).

They still are. Sign in with a Microsoft or Facebook account and you accumulate Bing points which can then be redeemed for Amazon gift cards or various other things.

This is actually the main reason I use Bing; if search engines are going to track me I might as well get paid for it. The search results are usually as good or better than Google; YMMV. It's very rare I have to resort to a Google search and when I do it's usually just as bad.

How many dollars of gift-card credit do you receive in a year?

Roughly $60/year. You can do better but I don't go out of my way to do the extra searches (I don't change my workflow for it), and I sometimes throw the points away on relatively useless things like sweepstakes and Skype subscriptions.

I use Bing because they pay me as well. I don't go for the money, I typically use my point on gift-like things. For example, for the holidays I used them on the photos printed on metal or glass, which is worth more than the $5 gift card I could have gotten instead. I also do a lot of sweepstakes entries; I've never won, but meh it's free anyway.

Duck Duck Go is an interesting alternative example.

I think the expense of developing Bing is as much about the problems of a very successful company with lots of cash developing a new product as it is about the problems of developing a search engine.

Google does not treat quote marks as a mandatory exact match any more, just a hint.

Unless you use the "Verbatim" option. Shame it can't be enabled by default, though.

How do you use this option ?

Search tools (below search bar) → All Results → Verbatim.

Even with verbatim mode it still screws with the search a little bit.

Bing, on the other hand... last time I tested it was very strict, where did all these trash result come from, ugh.

>One would think that Mozilla users would turn off Yahoo search immediately, but apparently some do not.

Mozilla recently reworked their search bar to make it much harder to change the default (coincidentally, at the same time as they changed it to yahoo... imagine that ;) ).

You can get the old one back in about:config:

browser.search.showOneOffButtons = false

Completely agreed on google and matching - it's got too 'smart' for its own good, and when I'm searching for specific words, it often 'helpfully' includes results for the complete opposite too, or for reversed word order that completely changes the meaning (e.g. foo guide for bar users == bar guide for foo users according to google). If I'm looking for anything at all specific or complex, I use DuckDuckGo or even Yahoo. I try to use DuckDuckGo day to day when I can too, of course, for privacy reasons.

The rot started when google stopped supporting boolean operators, +, and "".

In light of this move Mozilla actually did the opposite of what you're saying and changed the interface of the search bar to make it easier to pick or add a new search alternative, along with a prominent link shown to the search settings, allowing one to change the default as well (an action that takes only 2 clicks).

https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2014/11/find-it-faster/

What are you talking about?

The new search interface is awful. Let's see...

* Extra clicks to use non-default engine, especially for multiple searches in a row.

* Options to add/remove engines or change the default are very well hidden.

* No way to get suggestions from the non-default (or just stop asking the default for suggestions at all, if your default is Google/Yahoo/etc.). Prime example is Wikipedia autocompleting from page names - now not possible unless it's your default.

* Always by default assumes you want the default search engine when you might want to switch back and forth with your active one.

* No indication of what the default search engine even is.

* Looks stupidly messy with 12+ search engines (seriously, do you only use google or something? Once you have Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, Google Images, various wikis and news sites all added, it's a total mess with the new clusterfuck of a UI).

* Searching through a list of favicons sucks compared to having a dropdown with favicon and name.

* Broken keyboard shortcuts.

In the search bar (in the nightlies) you have a clearly visible "Change search settings" menu-option:

http://imgur.com/7IqYMHD

(Notice also how the current search engine being used is represented with icon and name.)

Clicking "Change search settings" brings you to a dialog which clearly gives you the ability to set the default and remove unwanted search-engines:

http://imgur.com/qSM0BAd

Yes. It's one more click than it used to be. But now it's visually 100% clear what it does and how it does it.

The previous incarnation required one less click, but my guess is that most users didn't even know they had the option to change defaults or remove search-engines since it was not spelled out explicitly.

It may not address all your concerns, like suggestions on non-default engines, but I think overall it's not 100% a degradation either.

98% degradation then, maybe. Still took a nice feature Firefox has that other browsers don't and made it significantly worse.

Wow, this is by definition hidden. I did not realize that I was using yahoo (bing) search.

On one hand I find it kind of useful for Google to figure out what I mean for me. Sometimes I just struggle to put what I'm looking for into words so I'll just give it a few keywords and it generally finds what I want. On the other, sometimes it's just frustrating. I made the switch to DuckDuckGo last month, but I still find myself slapping a "!ge" at the end of a query because DDG isn't cutting it.

I did turn it off, then it turned itself back on. As in one day I noticed my right click over highlighted text suddenly said Yahoo again.

Perhaps each upgrade resets the choice, I cannot confirm as I haven't seen an upgrade since 34.x (I do wish they would have handled the ssl 3 issue with more care, having to use the about page to neuter protection to access many devices is a chore)

> The only reason to search with Yahoo is if you want their in-house content.

Or wish to support Mozilla through their deal with Yahoo!.

I'd rather pay £5 for firefox (one off, or even yearly...), especially if it stopped them making rash "must copy chrome!" reactionary decisions that just make the browser worse and frustrate users. Mozilla could do a registration/donation scheme in the manner of Vim, where it isn't strictly required, but allows people who do so to vote on new features etc.

Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for.

This is exactly right and something I have been arguing for a while. Google's algos are good for finding what is popular, not necessarily what is right (though these things often overlap).

>> The only reason to search with Yahoo is if you want their in-house content.

I live in China, and recently switched from Google (blocked) to Yahoo Japan (not blocked, but Google has a majority share in them meaning it uses Google in the back). Yahoo Japan is the only Google way to access Google that is not blocked in China.

How can yahoo Japan possibly be majority Google owned? It was a joint venture by SoftBank and yahoo inc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/technology/28yahoo.html

Google does not have majority share in Yahoo! JAPAN. There reason Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google instead of Bing (unlike the rest of Yahoo!) is because Yahoo! JAPAN felt that Google offered a better search product in Japan than Bing.

Considering Microsoft's efforts on Cortana and AI in general, I don't see them closing Bing.