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Comment by IAmEveryone | Hacker News Reader

Google corrects spelling in the way you mention, but removes quotes only if there are zero results for the search with quotes. Example, finding one result; https://www.google.de/search?q=%22but+when+therefore+is+an+a...

Getting this wrong is probably why people think we need more than definitive assertions from people operating from subjective impression.

Changing a letter in the query, it says, right at the top:

    Showing results for "but when therefore is an adverb"
    No results found for "but when therefore is tan adverb"

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I have an Intel Realsense camera, which sometimes reports the error "Failed to recconect" (there being a typo in the drivers) [1] - that's a pretty unique error, so in combination with the product name that should be a very easy keyword search, right?

But no, when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google returns pages that contain neither realsense nor recconect [2]. They offer me a supreme court opinion, a review of a car dealership, and a facebook church service.

Correcting the spelling of a query is one thing - but also completely ignoring other keywords? I can see why there are so many people posting about the poor quality of Google's search results.

[1] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/5ff27fca... [2] https://imgur.com/a/okYV5V2

This has only happened to me twice so far, but it has given me the "Did you mean:" even when using quotes for searches that definitely have results (as I found them with duckduckgo). I can't remember what they were now

This seems to depend on a lot.

I rarely see "No results found".

That is a completely valid result in my opinion.

I often see pages that doesn't contain my search string.

Sometimes is is something trivial like

query: "something about x y and z"

result contains: "... something about x. Y and Z however..."

which is understandable.

Often though I have no clue how a result got there. Maybe it is linked to using a certain text (link bombing)? I don't know.

This isn’t completely true, Google search is very complicated and definitely had the ability to rewrite queries in some cases.

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