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Comment by abarrettwilsdon | Hacker News Reader

If it's specific enough, the SERP should stay the same until someone else publishes the same thing

e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"

turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)

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I am skeptical that quotes really work like the plus operator used to work.

For example, try searching the following string in quotes: "the SERP should stay the same".

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20sta...

Now, the logical presumption, assuming Google works as people say it does, is that each result will contain that exact string. If no results contain the string, then you should receive no results.

However, for me, results are returned. Did each of the results from that search contain this exact string? For me, they did not.

When I run that query, it returns

`No results found for "the SERP should stay the same".`

Then defaults to providing the SERP for the fallback query:

`Results for the SERP should stay the same (without quotes):`

That SERP should change when this HN thread is indexed though

I must have missed the line "No results found" and the disclosure that Google has, by default, gone ahead and performed a "fallback query" without the quotes. Perhaps that is the goal. That I, the user, will not notice. If I wanted the fallback query's results then I would not have used quotes. This appears to be another another example of Google second-guessing the user. Perhaps they assume that the user who searches for an exact string with quotes would, in most cases, try the search again without the quotes if there are no results found.

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