I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.
Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc).
His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results.
Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.
what is really amazing is how bad youtube search is. I can search for the exact name of a video, and it wont show up in the results. many times I have to use google search to search youtube
How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!"
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search.
Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2].
I understand the idea, but you are wrong or at least not completely right (I can't speak for all markets).
I know someone who learned to spell as a kid using Google, because if he didn't spell the words correctly he wouldn't get to see pictures of the moon or whatever he wanted to see.
Also after they learned to guess what people meant, Google used to be able to respect +, "" and also the verbatim option hidden beneath a button.
For a while they would also ask politely: did you mean x?
Since then it has become worse and worse: silently rewriting, fuzzing without asking etc.
No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles.
There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense.
I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.
Or at least, rather than factoring in the expertise of the clicker, factor in the similarity of the clicker to the new searcher, so as to predict the new searcher's behaviour.
We can see the start when HN complained when Google removed + and said use "" instead.
I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago and I can repeat it: if they pay my tickets and a fair price I'll be happy to hold my course "how to continue being best by not nerfing your market leading product".
Personally I gave up last year and I'm now on DDG. Not perfect but less annoying.
DDG has a feedback mechanism (the almost invisible "Send Feedback" thing in the lower right corner), but I'm unsure if anyone there actually sees the feedback and cares enough to do anything about it -- as I said, the problem is getting worse over time.
And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm going to continue complaining about having to use quote pairs instead of + for required terms. That still _really_ grinds my gears.
Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back.
Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.
The problem is that Google can't even get the right search results with natural-language sentences or sentence fragments.
Just today I had to ask Google Scholar for a lot of things since Google itself was completely useless. So it's not like it can't be done. Maybe that's the way going forward, one general search for grandma and specialized search engines for everyone else.