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Comment by 1_player | Hacker News Reader

I hate how smart it tries to be.

Sometimes you need to search an intentional misspelling, say, "Aple" (just an example), Google will helpfully try to correct you with "did you mean Apple?", and even if you put the word in quotes you still get results for Apple, not my intentionally misspelled search. Listen to what I'm trying to tell you, dumb machine.

They've tweaked it so it only respond to what it thinks you want to search, not what you've asked of it, and there's no way around it.

Computers are so much better when they take your input literally.

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The smartness gets me, especially with the image search. It used to be pretty useful.

Now Google seems to really want me to see what its ML model thinks is in the image. No, when I upload a picture of an actor, I'm not trying to search for pictures of "adult" or "man". Or, my recent favorite that had three people in the image, a suggested search for "sharing".

I tried your example both with and without quotes and I got Apple Hospitality which seems to be correct.

Humans make so many typos that for the majority of people, autocorrecting is a net win.

I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"

They have it. It is called verbatim search. Just that it doesn't do what it is supposed to.

So they don't have it.

> I wish there was a mode for "do as I ask"

There is verbatim and back in the day this is also what doublequotes meant.

Google has gotten away by blaming it on spam since back when matt_cutts was here, but I fail to see how spam can possibly be the reason why neither doublequotes nor verbatim works (edit:) unless spammers have found their way into Googles ranking algorithm to neuter all exact match operators.

They should call it sudo. It would be an absolute hit.

They had it. The fact it doesn't work anymore is probably because some big brains at Google strongly believe that their AI knows better. Such hubris is the reason why Google sucks today and it absolutely rocked 20 years ago.

I knew someone would try, which is why I specified this was just an example, I'm sure this time with that made up word it works, but when it doesn't it's pretty obvious and infuriating.

And autocorrect is a net loss if you can't correct the autocorrect.

Why not use a real example instead of "Aple" (which returns what you expect: the stock for Apple Hospitality REIT)? Shouldn't be hard at all if this really is such a common problem.

I can't speak for others, but I move on in frustration. I don't meticulously document Google's myriad failures. Even if I dove into my search history to find one, odds are good you wouldn't have the same experience. And the divergence would increase with time and further training of the AI, to the point that even I wouldn't get the same result.

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