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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

Documentation suggests Google never stopped doing this.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en suggests "phrase inside quotes" is still exact match. And if you put a single word in "quotes", that indicates to Google the word must be included in the results (I determined this by searching for something where some words were omitted, then clicking the small "Must include:" link under a result and noting how the search changed).

Documentation around this isn't as good as it could be, and it's rough that the search codeset changed when G+ came around so that +word no longer meant "Must include."

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They say that but I have tried this many, many times in the past few years only for Google to just ignore it. It's possible my search query just has no exact matches, but Google thinks it is being helpful by expanding the query. This just ends up wasting the users time because they scan through all the related results looking for the exact match that doesn't exist.

If they expand your search beyond your "exact" "keywords" it very clearly states at the top of the serp that they're showing you related results.

You can go test it for yourself: it definitely no longer works!

Works for me. Link to a query?

Here is a great example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Documentation+around+this...

Links to this page, but says "no results found, showing related results"

Interesting. If the bolding of the match is to be believed, it looks like the algorithm is dropping joining words and words too common to provide useful search signal, but as a result doesn't have enough data in the backing corpus to be confident it has an exact match, as you requested.

DDG on the same query gives exactly that page but nothing else. I wouldn't be surprised if Google finds that to be an inferior experience (because the common use case is people kind of remember a quote, but don't remember it exactly, so a few words out of place would false-negative the search where the answer the requester is looking for is edit-adjacent to the input).

It looks like this particular example is actually due to the "+word" in the quote.

Here's everything up to but excluding "+word": https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...

And including "+word":https://www.google.com/search?q="Documentation+around+this+i...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+can+go+test+it+for+yo...

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