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Comment by Ivoirians | Hacker News Reader

It does work. In the past when I mentioned it, someone provided an apparent counterexample, a search with a term in quotes that wasn't found on the page. When I reported it to the search team, they found that the quoted term was actually in a hidden submenu on the site. So the term was still on the page, but not findable with ctrl-f, except in the source. Try it out and if you find a counterexample, let us all know.

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Okay, I had this issue today and looked it up. Sure enough the term I had to quote and add a plus sign infront of was in the linked page after clicking through.

But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search that "this word right here is super important and critical", they just go ahead and append "page.includes(word)" as a filter to their super algorithm. Instead of using that signal to drive the search. No better than when sites used to stuff their html pages with keywords to trick search engines.

#grumpy

The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to exclude the page from the results in case people expect to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently? If it did, you're right, that should probably be a stronger signal.

It sometimes works. Maybe more so than when signed out than signed in? I spent a huge amount of time at one point trying to search for a "tost ring" when signed in (as an account that has a history of searching for developer-related content, which this is not), and no combination of quotes, verbatim mode, etc could prevent it from being "corrected" to "toString". Eventually ended up going to Bing, and it was the first hit. This was a while ago, though, and today I hit tost rings immediately. No idea if this is a change in my profile or a change in the algorithm, of course.

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