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Comment by _urga | Hacker News Reader

Google seems to be getting worse with technical queries. I spend many queries just trying to craft a query that gets the results I am looking for. This is especially true for keywords where case is important. Google seems to just neglect case as a signal.

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Yeah, I also feel the "" to force Google to find an exact match is simply ignored in most requests since a few months.

Do you remember any examples I could debug? You can check your search history here: https://history.google.com/history/ if you have it turned on.

One of the most annoying for code searches is that the engine seems to ignore punctuation, even in quotations. For example, searching for

"the quick brown fox; jumped over the lazy dog"

returns hits for the version without the semicolon

I think that "A*" (the algorithm) has started to work only since recently, even without quotation.

I don't appear to have search history enable, but I can shoot you an email as soon as I stumble upon another one.

"" always works for me, but the annoying part is how often I have to use it these days, because Google so often second-guesses my queries.

I suppose for the average person this "fuzzy searching" is an improvement, but I wish I had the ability to flip a switch somewhere that says: "Please only use exactly the words I gave you, always."

I've noticed this as well, and I think it's because 1) technical queries have a different optimal algorithm than non-technical queries and 2) as Google's audience grows, the proportion of technical queries shrinks.

For a technical query, you essentially want something like PageRank-weighted grep, which is, of course, what you used to get. All of the fancy NLP/fuzzy-matching stuff that Google has been adding recently, while helpful for all sorts of other things, is going to be a detriment for technical queries.

When you're doing something like googling an error message or a code snippet, you're basically querying machine-generated speech, and much of Google's recent work has been on improving querys of human-generated speech.

It seems like it should be simple to implement a little "technical query" checkbox...

It really isn't as simple as adding a checkbox. Just think about the design implications...

For error messages I think it helps if you put them in quotes, to mean "these words are needed in that sequence".

Have you tried "Verbatim" mode? It's under the Search Tools drop down along the top menu bar (where News, Images etc. are), then under "All results", and basically seems to minimise the amount of clever business Google does with your search (synonyms, "did you mean?" etc) and so can be quite useful for technical searches

If I am logged in, I get so-so results for the first few queries on a topic, and then really good after that once Google realizes what I'm actually looking for (e.g. it will learn that when I am looking for "Unity" it knows I mean "Unity3D", not "Unity Ubuntu").

Of course, being logged in all the time makes me uncomfortable...

Sometimes this feature works against you. E.g. I need to do X in java, maybe someone already has an implementation I can look at so I search for "how to do X in java". Turns out there's not really any good solutions so I broaden the search figuring I could learn from an implementation in any language, but now "how to do X" is just filled with the same useless java focused results as my first search.

Totally agree with this, I've come up against this problem in the past week. I've found that I get the same list of results regardless of how I phrase a search term involving two JS frameworks. It's like it only matches those keywords and ignores the rest of the words.

I don't think it's just technical queries. I have to look up a bunch of tech and nsfw stuff, and when google tries to think for me, it ends up going to shit. I usually end up just "searching" "like" "this". Even then, it tends to ignore words in quotes |:(

If you can remember any examples, I'd love to debug.

Another one from today:

"does ctime always change"

Google returns:

Showing results for "does time always change"

Search instead for "does ctime always change"

None of the results are relevant because Google thinks I made a typo.

If I then search instead for "does ctime always change" the top result is:

"Does directory mtime always change when a new file ..."

Google has fuzzed ctime to match mtime which is not the same thing.

My intention was to see whether ctime would always be updated if there was any data or metadata change to a file or folder, or if there would be some edge cases where it would not change.

Thanks. Those are great examples!

Thanks, here is one I tried today:

"ALPN websocket handshake chrome"

The first 3 results are all acknowledged by Google to be "Missing: ALPN". I get this often with queries, where Google returns results which are missing the keywords I am most interested in.

My intention was to see if there was any progress with WebSocket handshakes over ALPN (to save a roundtrip).

From the descriptions of the results it is also not clear if any of the top 10 matches are relevant.

Case and (as someone mentions below) punctuation have never been part of google search. You could search with those in Code Search, but sadly that's long gone :(

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