We're improving search results when you use quotes
blog.google
blog.google
Next, remove content thieves like Pinterest entirely from the index.
Next, invest in recency + relevancy over just page reputation. A huge amount of high value recent content is written but it keeps losing against much worse old content which only ranks because it's old. As the typical example: the 15 year old Stackoverflow jQuery answer.
Invest in location awareness. Including location in your query gives laughable results.
Find a way to down rank sites gaming particular categories with shady tactics.
I also wish it was possible to be very specific with the recency selector. I want to be able to say: I want to search for stuff that showed up in this month 5 years ago, because I know it was news then.
The open web made you rich, please help keep it open.
Funny how they don't seem to actually enforce that rule on the big guys gaming the index...
In which case it isn't relevant. I typed those words for a reason, any result not containing all three is not relevant by definition.
In other words, not a blanket 'the results for this query suck, but if I just stick my fingers in my ears and completely ignore one your words I get much nicer results so why don't I show you those?' - but a more intelligent presumption.
With, of course, the option to force the search to show specifically what you exactly searched for with no such helpful alternatives applied.
However, as of right now they only offer it for actual typos/spelling mistakes (like your example with the missing space) as opposed to semantically similar wordings.
As a user I would prefer to be the judge of what is relevant. If the results aren't what I'm looking for, then I'll modify the query until they are.
Having the search engine make these opaque decisions on what it thinks I meant to search makes it feel like playing a game of Peggle, where I have no idea if what I'm going for will be what I get.
Funny you should mention that workflow, because Google highly values reducing the number of times users have to do that kind of iteration. If they can work out what you actually mean and give you that first time, they count it as a win and stick with that approach.
> Having the search engine make these opaque decisions on what it thinks I meant to search makes it feel like playing a game of Peggle, where I have no idea if what I'm going for will be what I get.
I think on average this kind of "semantic search" works out for the better, for most people, most of the time.
I tend to like precise results too, but I often appreciate Google applying its "magic," so I'm not sure Google running in a "all magic suppressed" mode by default would be better. E.g. I recently searched for help with an issue I'm having with my refrigerator. I searched for "Samsung BLAHBLAHBLAH drawer freezing" where BLAHBLAHBLAH was my fridge's model number. The search results included stuff for other similar Samsung refrigerators, which are all very similar, so the results were quite relevant to my problem.
Yes, but sometimes it's explicitly NOT relevant. Different models differ.
What's infuriating is that searching for "Samsung MODELFOO drawer" IN QUOTES doesn't even return the right thing. The spam bots win this race nearly every time. TFA gives several reasons but doesn't address the core issue that searching for something in quotes often only shows unrelated garbage that just happened to be SEOd to hell. To beat this "new solution", a page needs just to include a bunch of pixel images with all the samsung models in the alt text.
Let's say that maybe before this "magic" was introduced, people needed to refine their search a few times but eventually got what they needed. But now, the majority gets a relevant result on the first time, but a few percent of searches don't go anywhere because you can't find a way to trick the AI and people eventually give up. You've improved your average metric, but arguably the search is worse since a few cases fail completely, when before they took just a bit more effort.
HN users need to understand: You are not a representative demographic. If they include results that only include words you typed, Google search will objectively degrade for the majority of non-HN folks. Even I sometimes find what I'm looking for because I didn't know the correct words, but Google presented me with docs with words of similar meaning.
As dannysullivan pointed out, Google is providing you with the tools to do what you want: Just put the words in quotes if it really, really has to include it.
My beef with Google is it returns too many results. I get that by including similar words in the results we'll dramatically increase the number, but I really shouldn't get 1M results for many things I type. Anything after the first 100 or so is almost always completely irrelevant to what I was searching for.
In this particular case, perhaps just providing your own frontend that transforms the input to what you need with the settings you need probably will suffice. So make a form where this string:
Python aphorisms
"Python" "aphorisms"It may seem relevant to google but it's not to its users this is why people are upset. If the result was relevant no one would care that it didn't have the keyword, please listen to your users.
I understand eliding articles and pronouns but when I'm searching for an exact string or you just completely ignore whole subjects and objects - what?
Counterpoint: Google already gives priority to recency, and it heavily rewards "flip shop" sites that essentially plagiarize existing content. The original researchers/authors who did the leg work get buried in lazy rewrites.
I assume this is reddit trying to game the recency metric.
Another consequence of the redesign, much worse than useless dates, is that you get completely useless results just because the same "related post" (the title of which Google happens to deem "relevant") appears over and over again at the bottom of different pages.
To get around this you can search for "site:old.reddit.com" or "site:i.reddit.com". One downside is you get fewer results.
Due credit is not the only thing misplaced; the author who did the legwork is also, by virtue of their legitimate interest in their subject, a better prose stylist. Interesting, readable writing has to be more relevant to a search query than what the content farm produces.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blacklist/jbpccand...
Google should just have a developer/engineer/expert mode that shows results using 2012 algorithms. I don’t mind paying $5/month in exchange.
Not kidding.
I guess a VPN could be a workaround, but does the average Joe know what a VPN is?
Even that bit about "don't" being turned into "don t" was interesting. Again, not because I was amazed in any way. More so because Search has been so mysterious for many years.
Or this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=modXC5IWTJI (terrible audio)
Both are very old, but extremely well aged.
IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well.
Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.
Then again maybe i'm underestimating how often I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and just grab the first result.
Or is that not how it's done, and each search, for a given person, follows the same process?
I've always been curious about that.
While there's some very short caching of results, to my understanding, there's generally still going to be a lot of hitting the index because there's just a lot of new information coming in all the time. We can't somehow store a set of results for say "cars" and figure it's going to be the same info from one minute to the next.
And results don't really have a lot of personalization for individuals. When you see differences, it's usually due to language and location.
And face it, for all its flaws, Google's index is larger, it has more servers, has way more signals to use - including its own web browser, DNS and ads - more money to spend and actual computer scientists who've been banging away at the problem for decades. Bing is just Microsoft's way of siphoning off some search revenues from the most technically illiterate users who don't know better and never change their defaults on their Windows box they bought at Walmart. MS has zero incentive to improve the results.
DDG is a cute little boutique web site. Good for them. But their impact on Google Search is so small as to be non-existent.
When a competitor's results are 10 times better than Google's - not a little better, or sometimes better, or better if you add a special character to your search, or subjectively better based on your personal preference, but an actual order of magnitude better - then and only then will Google even begin to start worrying about its dominant position in search.
"But Russ," I can hear you say, "How can a search result be 10x better? That's a straw man. What does it even mean to be 'better'? Faster? More accurate? More contextual? More personal? More predictive? Less spam? More niche sites? Less niche sites? More photos? More videos? More news? Less photos? Less videos? Less news? More languages? Less languages? More international? More local? More convenient? More customizable? How can you even measure something like that?"
Exactly.
Well, when you can't get the result on Google no matter how you finesse your query, but you can get it on another search engine, is that infinity better?
Because that's the situation.
If a service can consistently deliver good results on the first page (like Google used to, 20-odd years ago), they could definitely dethrone Google. Of course, the moment that appears to be the case, all SEO spammers start focusing on the new rival and the newcomer's job becomes a lot harder.
Sometimes I get terrible results and add a !g to my search query to see if le gouglè gives me something better. Almost every time it's just as bad. Usually because of SEO crap.
I felt that for technical searches past a certain number of keywords (2 or 3), ddg and brave tend to lose focus where google doesn’t, a problem exacerbated by the lack of quote search on either
google also much better answers local questions, like “[supermarket] [location] opening times”, and indexes wikipedia more usefully, plus ten other integrated features you don’t miss until they’re gone (e.g. imdb)
I didn’t notice a change in SEO spam between the alternatives. I would imagine brave have made an effort here, but as far as I know, duckduckgo filters their content less than google does
finally, brave lacks maps, which is incredibly annoying
I think as a society we need to think what it means to have one private company control access to all information.
After a while, things started to change. I don't feel the need to fall back to Google nearly as often anymore, and when I do I'm very unhappy with the results from Google. They're often worse than what I get from DDG.
YMMV of course. And yes, DDG's impact on Google Search is probably negligible, but market share is often only verly lightly related to quality.
To be clear, I wasn't saying the current state of affairs was a good thing, I was simply stating in detail that Google is still a gargantuan machine. Unless a competitor is somehow able to fire a couple of torpedoes down a hidden exhaust port, they're all going to be outgunned for the foreseeable future. But sure, the unpredictable vagaries of public sentiment could somehow turn against them, I guess. I mean, it's going to be a while. Their company name is a verb.
I wish there was a way to aggregate the two results together.
I would not be surprised if the ads situation gets worse or some other egregious action takes place, as if to say, "Remember how we fixed search results for you? Well, here's how we plan to pay for it".
I would change one little word:
Well, here's how we plan _you_ pay for it.
Too little, too late. Pity they didn't listen years ago.
Mojeek is hit or miss, but occasionally does better than Google.
I haven't really used it myself, but I've heard good things about Kagi.
Please let me turn on verbatim mode and leave it enabled. Ideally across my google account, but I'd settle for just that device/application.
One request from me would be for them to bring back the + operator and favour it instead of quotes, since Google Plus integration doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.
How about a heuristic of: If the user phrases their search as a natural language query ("what is...?", "how do I...", etc...) then use whatever weird relevancy metrics and search word substitution your research suggests will answer the question best. OTOH, if the user appears to phrase their search as just a list of keywords, search for all the words verbatim.
They already do query classification for things like Google Calculator. Extending the classifier to switch between "natural language query" and "strict keyword search" seems like a reasonable extension of that idea.
The entire reason I ask is because I don't want google to try to interpret my search query and change it - I don't want it to guess what I'm looking for using [insert classifier of choice] - I want it to do as close to a text scan for the exact search query as I can get.
Inconsistent tools are much harder to use. I really don't want to have to play a cat and mouse game with my search tool, and I don't want to have to have memorized all the "games" google is playing with my query and understand how to turn them off.
Person <verbs> blue chair
Should return any text where someone does something to a blue chair (and it's synonyms or similars)
No problems huh? Why does this article exist? Lol the hubris at Google...
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-m...
Besides being overpriced, the last I checked, the results returned for the custom search didn't reflect what was returned from the normal search product.
Allow users to permanently remove trash sites like Pinterest from all their search results on both web and mobile.
Maybe this is my chance to repeat something I asked the DuckDuckGo CEO today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366664): Are you doing anything about SEO spam?
It seems like Google often rewards low quality results: Sites with tons of ads or where I'm being shilled to buy a product that I'm looking for information on because I already have it. It's so bad that I've half-concluded it's due to misaligned incentives - keeping the user looking at the search results keeps Google collecting ad revenue and steering users to crappy sites full of ads also keeps Google collecting ad revenue.
The index is like a dictionary - you look things up by word. But you need to find some way to split up every page on the internet to decide what is a 'word' and what isn't. If you decide that quote marks are part of a word, then you'll end up with apple and apple' making different entries in the index which you probably didn't want.
Language models need to account for a sentence like
> Will Will have enough will to see this through?
Google has managed fine with this since the beginning.
Of course I probably wouldn't have actually been able to get it changed back just by making a CL but at least I would have learned why it couldn't be changed back.
I guess it’s too hard to find a way to reframe adding back a + as something new.
But god, I wish there were a way to do actual precise searches like there used to be. It’s especially awful with multilingual computing. I can search for things word by word in quotes, and Google will return things translated word by word into a different language. If I wanted that language, I would have input the words in that language. And there’s no escaping it, even if I change my settings to only search one language.
The only one that comes to mind is Apple's mea-culpa on the Trashcan MacPro. They actually sat down with reporters and admitted it was a bad design. That one stood out due to the actual admission vs the typical silently revert design back without admission of bad idea (like the butterfly keyboard, magsafe, touch bar, etc).
But god, I wish there were a way to do actual precise searches
like there used to be.
I’m sorry, but what you’re saying simply is not true. It’s immensely frustrating. Using bing, DDG, or literally any other search engine doesn’t have this problem. And I’m searching common words, common concepts, basic things that even the worst search engines will accurately provide results for.
The most frustrating thing is sometimes the language will flip. I will get English on certain hours of the day. But if I make a single search in Japanese, it flips back into that mode and there’s no unsticking it.
If you're not quoting terms, we might go beyond the inputted language and the language preference if that seems useful. And if this isn't turning out to be useful for you, again, please share any examples you might be comfortable with (now or in the future). Ping me, and we'll look into it.
Working numeric ranges would be nice too. And wildcards. Heck, full logical AND/OR search with parentheses.
Comparing everybody's results was fascinating.
"Fred near jones" vs " 'fred jones' 'jones fred' 'jones, fred' 'fred micheal jones' "
I disagree that you "make that clear". It's rendered in the same light grey that the rest of the text on the page is in. I have several times noticed the message only after going through a few links. It's very easy to miss if you're in a hurry.
I think usability has been sacrificed for aesthetics here.
There is little surprise there are so many people here saying quotes don't work at all.
Quotes existed before the + operator was removed. Unless the algorithm for quotes changed from exact match to match anything, which seems likely from the results I get.
> lyrics "walk down the aisle at the store"
it'll do an inexact phrase search, and if I do:
> lyrics walk down the "aisle" at the "store"
it'll do a normal search but with exact-match for aisle and store.
But in this example, that doesn't appear to be the case - looks like the first example is exact match phrase search?
Besides: if you're searching for a phone number, you presumably are looking for an exact match, so how is treating it as such a problem?
I'm suddenly curious as to why anyone would search for phone numbers regularly.
I suppose many of these could be addressed by ignoring the + at the end of a word, but that weakens the robustness to user error in correct spacing.
Probably the vast majority of the population have no idea that quotes do anything in searches. Maybe they need some checkbox in the tools bar that makes quotes actually work if you know how they work.
they do this for other things that annoy the F out of me. for example, searching for a phone number. it's a specific set of numbers that is unique. if there's no results for that number (or very few), it gives me results for numbers that are similar like same area code, same prefix, different number. nope. that's not useful. in this situation, I'd much rather see that no results are found rather than making me think there's a result but forcing me to look closely that it is what I wanted
That you probably don't want the thing you're searching for, but some alternate spelling, even if it's something completely different.
I imagine this probably ends up being the case for the majority of their users, but for advanced users and people searching for specific technical strings, they've cheapened their service.
> we didn't make any change *in terms of retrieval*
Users don't care which part of the system was changed to cause the results to be worse.
It looks like maybe your reply is only about what changes recently shipped and are mentioned in the blog post. A lot of the discussion in this comment section is about changes much older than these changes.
It may be true that quotes are working the way we expect, but the data set to which they apply is very obviously restricted before they get a crack at it.
I have noticed a general decline in search quality over the last couple of years, but nothing specific to quotes.
I realise I'm not saying anything particularly useful with this comment, but I just thought I'd add another datapoint.
Edit: Thinking more, my biggest issue is when the quoted text occurs in the "recommended similar posts" section of a page (particularly common with reddit). That section gets re-rendered on each view, so it probably won't be there once I click the result.
Proof: https://archive.ph/AAa6k and https://archive.ph/9WGe7
To any google engineers reading:
Please add `really-verbatim` mode, indicated by backtick quotes, which also requires strict matching of punctuation.
[::]
I wonder if that will ever be worth the hardware cost. Back when I did some coursework on information retrieval, it seemed that you get superlinear savings via reducing the cardinality of tokens. So you'd do stemming, remove all punctuation, words that are too frequent ("do", "be", "and", "or", ...)... Basically remove all grammar. You do the same to your search query and the index. This intuitively reduces your compute by at least an order of magnitude, especially for languages with rich grammar (e.g. stemming nouns in Polish reduces the cardinality of tokens by a factor of 7 and verbs by a factor of 162).
More and more frequently I was getting this for the actual search terms, in quotes or not, to the point where I would Control+F any words just to find none of them existed on the page. It's the reason I switched to dumber search engines.
I've assumed the "fast path" is to search for "phrases with similar meaning", rather than actual words. But that really destroys technical searches.
My anecdote was that during the winter Olympics I was looking for a college friend who's name was several characters off of one of the competing athlete's. It didn't matter how much additional information I put in the search. Even quoted, if it included anything that looked like that popular athlete, then that was all that was returned.
When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news.
Interesting that DDG did not find the page even with the username. I do not know why, but it appeared it was not indexed there.
I tried it now and it's better, but not perfect. Most pages contain the term (as a misspelling) but a few didn't seem to (one had the word "services" in many places on it, however) and there was still a big Google Maps result and a Wikipedia result at the top for the actual IRS.
This is exactly what people mean when they say quotes "don't work". Elsewhere are google people in this comment section saying they do, and they may be telling the truth after Google applies some relevance pre-filter to the results. Anything that doesn't pass that, though, basically doesn't exist, which can look like quoting not working at all (and effectively is quoting not working as expected).
"The magic of Google is gone"
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
"Hast du besondere s9y eventplugins installiert?"
This leads to https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+even..., which so far has only one search result, to http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten.... Which by the way does not contain the target sentence, but that might be because the search moved over into non-verbatim mode.
If I search without the quotes I get more results, but I think not the target thread.
Admittedly, this is not "" not working by showing pages that do not contain the target keyword. But it is "" failing by the search not properly searching its own index.
What's going on there? Why is the index of a rather stale 20 year old forum not complete? The site is indexed in general.
Thread after thread of hundreds of people telling you your wrong and then you going "actually the community is wrong". Month after month, year after year, you pull this crap.
Admit it, Google search is worse now than it was before, and partly because they are abjectly failing at handling quotes.
what the ... ? Why do you delete stuff from your index? Even if it's down there's a good chance it'll be archived ...
Others have pointed this bit out, but I'd like to ask specifically: How do you search for special characters?
I recently came across some R code that used %||% and you cannot search for this. As in, you cannot search the internet for this at all.
Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, all of them will ignore special characters. Even Github search will strip out the special characters leaving you to search for nothing.
And my use cases for Google keep dwindling.
I'm guessing that would work fine on google, but I don't go there so I can't be certain.
In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.
https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it
https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth...
It's even nicer for some sites like Wikipedia because it goes directly to the page if theres an exact match instead of the intermediate search results page
I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.
Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger.
Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation.
It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.]
Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.
We have to move towards a system where profit maximization closely correlates with consumer good.
That's easy to say but IMHO requires the consumer to pay directly rather than the whole advertising nonsense that has nothing to do with the consumer searching for stuff.
Starting to think the only way to stop this kind of thing is to remove the profit motive as much as possible. The whole 401k plan idea for retirement savings is causing huge inflows of cash into the market which is probably where a lot of the money looking for returns is coming from. When a whole society is seeking profits it seems like that's going to make things worse. I'm not even sure how much return rich folks were looking for in the old days - if you owned a big company and it was making money, was there such thing as "enough"? There definitely isn't today.
If we could ensure that people are more like to get rich doing valuable things (value != money, value == things that match our values), then we wouldn't see the brightest minds of each generation slave away in ad-tech and finance. Spending their work lives manipulating people into buying things they rarely need or fighting it out in a zero-sum financial game for negative societal gain.
This isn't a flaw of capitalism. If search ever became onerous or inaccurate enough - a paid service will emerge.
For the moment, we've collectively "decided" that the current state is still worth it.
That's your plan? THAT'S YOUR PLAN? For the people in charge to magically start valuing your quality of life without beating them over the head with regulation?
Look, I hope as much as the next guy that a competitor emerges with a better offering, against all odds beats the incumbent, and unlike the last 5 times this happened does not follow the market incentive to become evil, but hope is not a strategy.
Oh, but that's the thing, obviously there already are co-ops; my impression was that you wanted all companies to be co-ops.
A regulatory moat, is in my view homologous to niches in biology. Things settle into a sort of equilibrium where evolutionary change drastically slows. The main solution to this: aggressively break up monopolies(I would argue duopolies too). Other ways this equilibrium breaks is just that the environment changes. E.g some new technological breakthrough makes older technologies obsolete. Or a natural disaster in biology, throwing the ecosystem into disarray.
What Google needs is a built-in way to block domains, like idk... Pinterest.
But I'm glad to see something finally done about my biggest gripe with Google (and even DDG sometimes does this): search results that don't contain the phrase, or not even part of it, that I'm specifically searching for, quotes be damned. If Google is finally getting the hint, good. This has been driving me nuts for years.
A plain, no algorithmic "enhancements," regexp search would rock. I've wanted that since the Alta Vista days, but I doubt I'll ever see it. It might be a bit expensive to do something like that over a Google-sized search database.
I hate modern "search". I understand nontechnical people probably like algorithm-based "enhanced" search fine, but if I search for something specific I want THAT THING ONLY.
"Modern" search made it really hard to ask very specific, strict questions.
To my knowledge Google neither publishes search quality reports, nor acknowledges that there’s a gap between their search quality for average users and above average users. In my experience even their “Search Quality Raters” (contractors paid to evaluate search quality) are rarely above average searchers, they are just good at evaluating what they evaluate.
If you care, in my opinion, you’re not an average user, since if the average user cared, so would Google.
We haven't done a very good job of explaining how the web or browsers work to the general public, let alone the landscape of search engine companies.
"In my experience" is exactly right, search results degraded for a fraction of users such as developers.
It's good to see Google is going back to making those users happy although that probably means bad news for DDG et al
Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim.
Instead of Google throwing away 90% of your search query and looking for the "top hits" (and returning almost entirely auto-generated pages), it keeps every word you entered and returns actually relevant stuff.
It really is night and day.
Seemingly people using operators would produce additional training for the algorithm which is currently not possible. This could also be a factor leading to the results decay everyone has experienced when trying to find something that isn’t leading popular culture. It’s that peculiar behaviour where tweaking the search terms didn’t affect the results.
I absolutely believe that Google has advanced technologically. Whether that's translated to improvements for users, it's not clear.
In their defense, Google now gets right what my grandmother searches.
works perfectly, and i use it in my all queries where i search for images.
Another thing is probably how images are indexed in the first place. Historically image search could only look at the text surrounding the image (and the alt-text, if provided) to get some sort of tenuous idea what an image was about. Pinterest provides some additional tags for each image, which can help make it more discoverable.
Of course these days Google also runs image recognition (and OCR) on the images it indexes, but I suppose sometimes the tags added by Pinterest still provide some additional context without which the original image wouldn't have been found.
Both founder/ex ceo and current ceo came from Google. Pinterest directly deposits >$xxxmil/quarter into google.
+: the term following must be in the text (but may be stemmed)
"": search for exactly this phrase (not stemmed)
So for example: +hiking => a term like hike, hiking, hiker, etc. must be on the page
+"hiking" => the string "hiking" must be on the page
"hiking" trekking outdoor => look for the string "hiking" and preferably return results that contain it, though hits for trekking and outdoor (stemmed) suffice
But apparently I'm wrong, and "" and + don't mean that any longer?
I know people (me included if I'm truly honest with myself) are still peeved about Reader but Google Plus was the Search service's sharkjump for me I think.
Don't teach me how to use your engine perfectly for 20 years then change it for some half baked social thing lmao.
I hope someone got a pisstake massive raise off it so it was at least worth something to someone!
Only one of the first six results contains the exact phrase, the others all have other characters between these two words.
Search +"napoloen" And it insists on including napoleon.
Please include an 'expert' mode or something for people who know what they are looking for.
Can it be set as default?
Verbatim will still include results with other characters between "franciscus xaverius"than a space. Like a ( or a dot. It includes results containing a phrase that ends with Fransciscus. And the next phrase beginning with Xaverius. This is useless when searching ancestors.
I know the service is free, but it would be really cool to be able to search for any (ASCII) string verbatim.
Showing results for "napoleon" Search instead for "napoloen"
So while you said you wanted a quote search, our systems are really really concerned that for this spelling, you're making a terrible mistake. Which, I get as a power user, is annoying. And which, we probably should review and perhaps never substitute a different search.
But ... we are telling you that happened. And providing a link to override what we did and say yes, I really know what I'm looking for, do it. Which -- if you click on, we'll do.
About 'napoloen', I often search for non-english words that differ only one letter from an English word (English is my fourth language). I wish there was a way to permanently disable "Did you mean?"-results.
A new one... I just got this, searching for: libmad +tutorial
Several results with "Missing: +tutorial"... Why are results included that do not contain the word 'tutorial'?
So with that search, we're trying to show you things we think are relevant, and there aren't a lot of pages relevant with the word +tutorial on them. Tutorial, yes -- but not +tutorial.
In this case, what you really want is this: [libmad "tutorial"] -- that says get pages that have both words or words related to libmad but ONLY pages that actually have the word tutorial on them.
The search I printed was trying to omit some addresses (and I now realize quotes are not necessary and do not help for this specific case), but it did find a result with the term I was trying to avoid as a string.
teste de lingua portuguesa -site:.br
Should downvotes be used when a comment states a fact, but the voter knows or believes that fact to be false?
This has not been my experience. I regularly use quotes and get back pages that don't contain the phrase.
The article suggests that content might not appear because it is in the source of the page, or the page has changed since it was crawled. However, I've grepped the source of the page, and checked Google's cache of the page, and not found the quoted phrase.
I used to report bad results to Google, but it's a complete black box and I have no idea if anyone pays attention to them, so I don't anymore.
If I take the quote: "At the beginning of this section, we posed the question: can we show that our two definitions of the nearby-relation are equivalent?"
Searching on google lead to 2 dead link, and another website republishing the book as pdf.
Others search engines give me the link of the page I got the quote from, as the first result.
Two of three are dead links, so not really.
While indeed google doesn't look to have indexed this particular page, it looks like others search engine successfuly indexed it.
The "relevant"(where this verbatim string came from) result looks like a pdf dump websites, which is less relevant to what I want.
For whatever reason any effort to use the time range can remove _many_ search results that Google knows are from that time range and that should be included. That can make it almost impossible to find old articles, particularly since Google pushes new less relevant hits if you don't restrict the time range.
The only way I was able to find this article the first time was by searching through social media, which sometimes has less crazy search algorithms.
Planning your trip ahead, you search for pizza restaurant Chicago. Google ignores 2/3 of your terms and returns local restaurants that serve Vietnamese.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32354078
Core issue being it feels unnecessarily hard to replicate search results; as documented in comment linked to above.
Assuming this is going to improve, were I would submit an example of this not working in the future?
A tangent. You have what I imagine is a hard job and, despite the many threads here about recent apparent quality decreases, the product brings enormous value to its users.
Thanks for taking the time to discuss in this thread, it is very helpful to see your insights.
That's what it seems like to me, moving to a world where technology tells you what you want, and you spend less effort telling it.
I think Netflix did a similar thing some time back, just with their front page. Originally it seemed like a place you went to look for things. At a later point, it seemed suddenly a bunch of things were shoved in your face by default, and looking for a thing seemed secondary.
Recommendation Engine, is that what Silicon Valley believes they're innovating on?
An Orwellian nightmare is what is being created.
Also explained here: https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Hopefully we'll get these even more detailed in the future.
FYI, I have my Windows Desktop Firefox homepage set to Google Advanced Search: https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1 and I never (almost) logon to my google account when I search. It would be nice to add "site or domain:" exclusions.
[+find +all +of +these +"words and phrases"]
After the + operator support ended years ago, in favor of quotes, this is how you would (and still should) do it:
["find" "all" "of" "these" "words and phrases"]
I've seen a few searches recently (on DDG) where the indexed text is apparently hidden behind an authentication wall.
Google's cached page feature used to fix those sorts of shenanigans.
Yet another actually-useful-for-users feature that got removed because profits.
I think the publishers should go ahead and create their own paywall content search engine but I would like the option to have my search results actually be available when I click them.
This used to be a plague in the serps for technical error searches and Pinterest in the image searches.
The problem with the random ip proposal is that it is a cat and mouse game. If I own 1000 sites on various topics and cross reference visits via IP, well now it's not very random anymore. At one point there was even a services (fantomas) that kept an updated database.
This goes very deep in black hat SEO history with mosaic cloaking and other tactics.
I used this as a teen in the earlier days of Google to make decent pocket change, and that was in the early 2000s.
It goes even deeper when you get into parasite hosting tactics with paid backlinks and xrumer.
What's funny is all of these old school black hat seos have moved on to social media. PVA social accounts combined with AI rewriting are where the magic is now and don't even get me started on repurposed content via YouTube. It's no longer economical to tackle organic serps.
Heck I even have a bot that scans popular linked domains and monitors the expiration date on them for quick snatch with a nice grafana ui on it. And I've got quite a few nice domains with easy passive traffic and zero effort. All you do is restore the latest archive.org snapshots and setup a catch all email for leads.
Dall e and gpt 3 are going to turn these into legit businesses.
My point is if there is money to be made people will automate to the extreme. If you dig deep you'll realize an IP address doesn't mean much, hence recaptcha.
That's crazy. How does restoring an archive.org snapshot work, you just dump static html on the domain?
Are those mostly just content sites?
https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader
You just dump and sync to s3 and use terraform to provision the route53 and bucket setups.
Yes they are mostly content sites. The hardest part is filtering adult domains assuming you don't want them. There are a staggering number of adult domains that expire every year and get huge traffic.
Can you grab assets like images or even video from archive.org?
Yup ! I find it MOST frustrating on "Google Discover" news-feed-stories on my Android phone.
Seems like they've made the cache harder and harder to find over the years.
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
EDIT: or it can be added as an X-Header, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/ro...
EDIT2: I checked it for 4chan and Instagram, they use the HTML head meta tag.
Half the article is about this thing. I mean, they don't present solutions, but most of the reasons for "Ctrl+F doesn't find the terms" are entirely reasonable to me.
Except it's been regressing to where operators are often more necessary again
Keyword indexing and PageRank worked for a while because the underlying data wasn't written trying to game them. Then came spam linking and keyword stuffing and more. I'm surprised search engines are still useful in spite of that.
Terence Fletcher: Really? Adjusting the seat, really? That's been your problem the whole fucking time, the seat height? So now you have it, right? Go!
[Ryan starts playing]
Terence Fletcher: Bullshit! Fuck you!
don t doesn t"
This is one of the most annoying things tbh, when you specifically need to include special characters it just gives you garbage
Now those episodes have been controversial, and I only bring them up because it's the example that came to my head (before someone misses the whole point and starts looking at the finger), and Google Search also censors them, now while I still use google mainly to access Stackoverflow and Reddit threads, I see no point in using it if I'm searching for anything I want a neutral conversation about that I can examine and make my own conclusion.
All in all the internet seems to be getting smaller and smaller, I don't use any social media apart from HN and Reddit, and I only use Reddit because I seem to still be addicted to it since it's probably one of the most censored of all of them.
10 years ago as a 20 year old I benefited greatly from how the internet was, here is an example: I grew up on the idea that there was nothing wrong with porn, and there isn't per se, and no one ever spoke about addiction like behavior when it came to watching it, then one day I discover a controversial post on Reddit and dove down the rabbit hole and lo and behold I had the same problems as this community of people trying to quit watching it, and I benefited from their experiences and knowledge, same about discovering communities against social media like Facebook, which pushed me to research the subject and deleting my account, etc. but now it seems like any controversial community is quickly banned or pushed aside in its own unfindable bubble and that to me is a great loss.
I want to see people have an opposite opinion than mine, and I want to be able to get into heated non censored discussions in comment sections and get suggestions about articles, studies and content to challenge my views.
This is provably untrue. I just searched YT for "JRE Alex" and the first three results are clips from the "JRE" show (I didn't know what that acronym was before now) featuring Alex Jones [0].
Why are people repeating these complotist theories when it takes five seconds to disprove them.
Also, even if it was true (which it isn't), it still wouldn't be censoring. Censoring would mean not returning results when a match exist -- not massaging the SERP. It would also mean not publishing clips from said "censored" content on Google's own video platform, where they have millions of views.
In France there is a controversial (to say the least) comedian, Dieudonné, a holocaust denier and an anti-semite. He's heavily censored by the French government who regularly bans his shows; but canceling his YT channel happened only recently, after a lot of interventions by the state and other non-governmental agencies.
It's been my experience that Google is quite resistant to censoring, in general.
[0] Here are the top three results on YT for "JRE Alex":
Alex Jones - God Doesn't Know Where He Came From | Joe Rogan
2.6M views 3 years ago
JRE Clips
Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1255 w/Alex Jones: https://youtu.be/-5yh2HcIlkU.
3:43:03
Joe Rogan Experience #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo
13M views Streamed 5 years ago
PowerfulJRE
Alex Jones is a radio show host, filmmaker, writer, and conspiracy theorist. Eddie Bravo is a jiujitsu black belt, music producer, and ...
3:11:09
Joe Rogan Experience #1555 - Alex Jones & Tim Dillon
23M views 1 year ago
PowerfulJRE
Tim Dillon is a standup comedian, actor, and host of the Tim Dillon Show. Alex Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and host of the Alex ...Interesting that the first version of your comment didn't include that; you added it as an afterthought.
I don't know what you think "this whole Elon/Twitter thing" is about. What I think is, it's about Musk being bored and saying one thing one day, and another another day, and having armies of lawyers scrambling around to clean up the mess he makes. Musk hates lawyers; I think he enjoys giving them unwinnable cases.
But do you think Musk is trying to fight "left wing censorship"? Or was? (since he doesn't want to buy Twitter anymore).
Please share your opinions or insights, because we can't guess what's on your mind.
>But do you think Musk is trying to fight "left wing censorship"? Or was? (since he doesn't want to buy Twitter anymore).
You probably don't see the bias in what you say but if I say that say some left wing tech guy did something to push his agenda you'll probably say "that's conspiracy theory" then you go on and say the exact same thing about Elon, sure he probably doesn't care about it that much as to spend 44 billion $ to try and fix it, but he's been talking about it for a very long time, if you see some of his interviews from 2018 where he speaks about AI (in that context he means something different) he gives the example of the emergent system that's made from Twitter and its users becoming by itself an entity with its own motives, etc. (imagine the brain where each neuron is a used and the rules between their communication is twitter, the neurons can't conceptualize what the brain wants or means or tries to do, but as a whole it's something more than its components).
I'm not talking about when you click search (even though that itself is censored), I talk about when you're writing on the search bar and see the suggestions in the dropdown, and that isn't untrue for me at all since I verified that it still was there before writing my comment.
You claim you want to see Alex Jones because you want to be challenged in your opinions, but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people? It might not cause you harm, but if we suggest it to people that might not have looked for it otherwise, we are sending people down the line of starting to harass parents of victims. It seems clear to me why it's not suggested. Perhaps for you it doesn't matter, it' just to "challenge" your views. Obviously, your kid wasn't shot in a school and you don't have people calling you every hour of the day to tell you you're a criminal that just made it up and have random people going to your house and fire at your house.
Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.
Again.. those videos are still there in the search results, just the suggested terms are not there.
Just about everyone agrees that personal freedom does not extend to causing violence. The difficult bit is what constitutes 'causing'.
As you can see in my initial post.. or maybe you don't, I avoid talking about things like this on HN because most people here are smart enough to look between the lines but some only pretend to look at the finger to win an argument, well..
I was talking about censorship, and I don't "want" or "not want" Alex Jones to be suggested, and I won't pretend to tell a private company how to do their business, so I just stopped using Youtube and most other social media.
>Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence. Of course if you call for violence on others, but if I say that people of party X are liars, then my fans start attacking them on the street, am I causing harm or are my fans the ones who cause the harm? If it's my fault then most politicians call each other liars and criminals every other week...
Also about the children thing I'm not up to date with it, but I know he said Sandy Hook was fake and something happened (I'm not American), but the guy says lots of crazy stuff and always has, it's still not a reason to censor anyone.
I doubt you'll understand how small steps like this can lead to somethings that in hindsight we see as catastrophic, but a system (like soviet russia or nazi germany) is built step by step, today we censor you, tomorrow we deepfake the president's face and post it on twitter, very soon we throw you in a concentration camp.
>but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people?
There are videos of kids challenging each other to balance on the rooftop of a skyscraper, videos of Islamic priests calling for the death of unbelievers, ads for fast-food with a shit ton of sugar and fat, videos on how to make high powered infrared lasers that can blind someone without even being visible to the naked eye, videos of home made guns, etc... and they all get suggested in the search bar once you type in a few words.
Other thoughts:
Also an important thing to note is that the Alex Jones lies (that he maybe believed since he's not 100% in there) on Sandy Hook resulted in zero deaths. Mainstream media and CIA misinformation on weapons of mass destruction resulted in 1 million+ innocent Iraqis dying in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" yet no one has ever tried to ban them from anything, are those Iraqi kids just not that important? Are they less than us because they're not white?
Alex Jones and Johnny Depp gets publicly televised trials but none for Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, all the "terrorist suspects" in Guantanamo, Julian Assange, and so on and so forth
I never would have thought that in the 21th century in the first world I'd be arguing FOR freedom of speech while being talked down to as the bad guy.
In my opinion, showing a suggestion in a drop-down box in a YT search field with "Alex Jones" in it does not equate to "causing violence". I get your point about some people (such as parents of Sandy Hook victims) being caused harm just by seeing his name, but equating that to "causing violence" just waters down the term. I lost a parent to leukemia years ago and seeing references to the disease causes me slight bits of "harm". I wouldn't even call it that, though maybe I would have directly after they died. It's not "violence" though, because that presupposes a type of deliberate one-on-one physical harm that even the most well-engineered drop-down menu can be expected to achieve. It's also not something I would expect the developers at YouTube to be working hard to shield me from.
In my opinion, personal freedom needs a much higher bar before it can be restricted than seeing personal names in drop-down menus in search boxes. I get that this sentiment is going the way of the dinosaurs these days, but I at least still believe in it.
If you think any tech company doesn't do this then you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years. All you have to do is look for some videos or upload one yourself about certain subjects and see.
>If you really care about "conservative censorship", ask your Republican representatives to make Google a common carrier instead of virtue signaling about how bad big tech is to score cheap political points.
I'm not American, and don't care about conservatives or democrats, and the only politician I admire is Bernie Sanders, but we all know he'll never win because (even though he's on the left), he's a good man. I just used to admire the freedoms you guys had that's all, how Nixon had to resign because of Watergate, meanwhile Clinton did worse to Sanders and no one even cared, Biden's daughter's journal got out where she describes weird things and no one cares, his son being a crackhead and no one cares, imagine if Trump's son got pictures of him doing crack and tell me how you think the media would have reacted.
The ideal world would be libertarian, do whatever you want without hurting others, a few decades ago it seemed like the world was moving towards this direction but not anymore, it doesn't matter anyways since humans have the same DNA we did 100 years ago so we'll probably repeat the same mistakes over and over again, we seem to organize in systems that eventually move towards violence and oppression, and people in 100 years from now will ask the same question we ask about "how could X people allow Y to get into power".
None of this will ever change until maybe we figure out a way to transcend our genetic encoding or evolve out of our current situation (which is unlikely to happen since usually the bad people are the ones who survive our wars, famines and dictatorships).
The YT search box suggests "JRE Alex Jones" for "JRE alex" not once but twice, once in the second position and once in the 9th position as "JRE Alex Jones Returns".
Conspirationists used to infer evil motives behind random events. That itself was bad enough. But now they are inventing new facts entirely, that never existed, or pretend things that did happen in plain sight didn't. (Such as... Alex Jones and Sandy Hooks).
It's a sorry state of affairs.
- What is the best way to ping you and how do I format my search bugs/features in a way that makes it easy for them to be processed by Google?
- Already pointed out and documented replication issues in another comment in this thread [2].
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For search issues, if people are comfortable, it's always best to share the exact query that was used. Putting it within brackets, as if those are the search box, can be helpful. Like if you searched for "this that" as a quoted search, ["this that"] would represent it. Explain what the issue is, list any particular URLs if helpful, screenshots if those are also helpful.
Apparently Google search has been optimized for the lowest common denominator of an idiot.
Truly shameful. If anything, it's the idiots who should be forced to use the UX of lesser idiots like myself. Let them select the "Hazy" constraint from the advanced menu.
If DDG (or any alternative not incentivized to serve dimwits) would do this by default, I'd switch in a heartbeat and never look back.
Instead, it should be possible to set that as a preference so that it persists across your searches.
If I could opt out of this shitty Big-G reality by means other than suicide, I gladly would.
As for the "hazy" mode, I suspect it's the defaut because it uses a cheaper, smaller index limited to popular queries.
Or are you saying it returns pages without the text on it at all? I don't think that's the case.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not Search.
>string of bytes which I have quoted
That's tricky. What if there's a line break? What if you search for "some text" but the html contains "some <b>text</b>"? Punctuation would be a problem too. What if you searched for something with "-" (hyphen-minus, unicode 0x2d), but the page contained a "‐" (hyphen, unicode 0x2010)? What if you searched for something with a dumb quote, but the page contained a smart quote? What if you searched for something with a space but the page contained a non-breaking space?
Are you suggesting that people will discard a result based on the snippet presented? I ignore the snippets entirely, as they are seldom relevant, and click each link in the results.
Especially if I have put quotes around a word I really want.
(Same problem with GDP as a measure of economic productivity BTW, but that's a topic for another day.)
"Search results will continue to suck for those who aren't tech-savvy enough to use quotes"
I admit not all of this is Googles fault, but somehow everybody largely optimising (and exploiting) for the Google algorithm, makes it worse for them. Alternative engines seem to fare better, and I guess less Google dominance is a good thing.
Suppose I have some great content "bt its writen lik dis". One could argue saying searching for content with the query 'like this' should yield the previous statement. Others would disagree.
That's basically the crux of the problem. The more exactness you're demanding the fewer results you will receive. The fewer results that are available reduce the perceived utility of the search engine, Google in this case.
Case in point: I've been searching for some "FoundationDB" related stuff. If you use HN's algolia for "Foundation DB" (no quotes) it will show you queries where FoundationDB is a single word.
Is this good or bad?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[0] https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/optimize...
I disagree, so I went to search for the Joel Spolsky blog post at joelonsoftware.com from antiquity where he complains that search engines prioritise finding 5,000,000 results instead of the result you want, and that's completely useless because you can never read that many results. DuckDuckGo changed my search because "Not many results contain 'joelonsoftware" and then offered to search for what I typed in, if I arm twisted it. I only wanted one result, and think less of DDG for changing what I tried, in order to give me more results, instead of what I wanted.
It's here[1][2] from 22 years ago and says "there are three important ideas from computer science which are, frankly, wrong, and people are starting to notice. I’m sure there are more, but these have been driving me to distraction: 1. The difficult part about searching is finding enough results," then "Most of the academic work on searching is positively obsessed with problems like “what happens if you search for ‘car’, and the document you want says ‘automobile'”. So when the big Internet search engines like Altavista first came out, they bragged about how they found zillions of results. An Altavista search for Joel on Software yields 1,033,555 pages. This is, of course, useless. The known Internet contains maybe a billion pages. By reducing the search from one billion to one million pages, Altavista has done absolutely nothing for me."
The fewer, better, results that are available increase the perceived utility of the search engine.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/22/three-wrong-ideas-...
[2] I tried a couple of DDG searches including inurl: and site: then switched to Google, went through 4 pages of results, and a couple of searches, before "site:joelonsoftware.com "useless" "results"" got it at the top.
My guess is the split will follow the lines of those who were used to do meta search in library indexes and databases and those who started using computers when we already had 'natural language' in computing.
Exactness is the whole point of search queries in my opinion. I am trying to filter out a whole universe of search space, last thing I need is second guessing heuristics.
To me excluding that "great content" that slips through is the price to pay for accuracy.
Isn't the use of quotes an explicit request from the user to have fewer results and more exactness ?
If you do a default search, the question of 'lik dis' being included or not is pertinent. Putting quotes puts you straight into the "don't show me variations" camp.
Unfortunately we are not enough, and ads bring more money to Google on average than what we are willing to pay.
Had a search last week where i specifically stated "-[big european capital city]", and results were chock full of "best [whatever] in [specified big european capital city i didn't want]"... what?!
["-berlin"] ["-new york city"]
These are the correct way to indicate you do not want (the - symbol) a word or phrase (the quote symbols:
[-"berlin"] [-"new york city"]
Am I missing something?
How did this become the #1 story on HN?
Google search is such a shitfest right now, you have to scroll a full page in a 100% 4k screen to get to actual results, it's absolutely disgusting.
I don't care if they search is unoptimal or downright bad. The ad situation is so much worse IMO.
What's up with that? Seems a little stingy.. why go to the effort of HTTP2 to deliver so few hits?
I've never thought of doing this. This would have been helpful in so many past searches.
Even if people aren't finding good alternatives, they might be searching less. Subconsciously, searching ends up feeling futile. The less tech savvy tend to just let one of their algorithms "find" things on its own terms (TikTok, YouTube for short entertainment, Spotify for music , Netflix for shows, Instagram for shopping)
TLDR a true competitor is not needed to see a lack of search volume. To some degree Google search is entertainment and (was once) useful for discovery. Now it can be substituted with other ways of discovering things.
Well, that explains why some technical things are hard to find.
For example "... in javascript" gives unclear results but "ellipsis in javascript" or "three dots in javascript" will provide what you are looking for.
The degradation is part of the buisness model and can not be allowed to be circumvented.
I thought "improving search results" meaning that results itself were more relevant, not only the display.
My 8 year old thinks I'm old fashioned because I don't just talk to the google lady casually like she is my friend, when doing a search/asking a question.
I often search for things I don't know how to spell, typically a proper noun, and often specifically because I am trying to figure out how to spell it and that is the quickest way.
Would additionally be great if Google's autocomplete on filetype:pdf didn't default to "filetype pdf" (i.e. adds a space and omits the colon, nullifying the token).
"We're improving search results when you use quotes"
The first three results are interesting:
1- First result is the Google announcement but not this post. The title is "How we're improving search results when you use quotes" not "We're improving search results when you use quotes" and the search was with quotes, but to be accepted, maybe...
2- Second result is this post
3- Third result is a quackery page made by some SEO spammers. Now what is interesting is that is almost a copy-paste of Google with changes like this:
Google announcement text:
"...We’ve heard feedback that people doing quoted searches value seeing where the quoted material occurs on a page, rather than an overall description of the page. Our improvement is designed to help address this...."
SEO Spammers write on page ( with enhancement misspelled):
"...We’ve heard suggestions that folks doing quoted searches worth seeing the place the quoted materials happens on a web page, somewhat than an total description of the web page. Our enchancment is designed to assist handle this..."
And the page becomes the third link from Google results...
Ah, I remember this trick from my college days, using a thesaurus to beat exact match tests so you could copy from wikipedia et al. Glad to see it's still alive and well, and totally not being abused to make the internet a less useful place.
I have no clue what your DDG is doing but it’s not behaving right.
Google Search has always been the dominant bridge between users and sites. Given the obvious complaints over search results, for a company of this stature to talk about explicit search performance during these times is pretty tone deaf.
To me it’s a clear indicator that Google Search is many years away from being their flagship product. It’s truly unfortunate to know there are thousands of people who’d like to change that by working together but simply can’t because Google put their flag up first. And it’s all because this once curious academic project has devolved into a surveil marketing machine.
Fuck Silicon Valley and brogrammer culture
Using quotes can definitely be a great tool for power users. We generally recommend first doing any search in natural language without resorting to operators like quotation marks. Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary.
By default, our systems are designed to look for both the exact words and phrases entered and related terms and concepts, which is often useful. If you use a quoted search, you might miss helpful content that uses closely related words.
Of course, there are those times when the exact word being on a page makes all the difference. For those situations, quoted searches remain available and are now even better.
Keyword-in-context (KWIC) is useful and well-tested, with a history going back to early scriptural concordances. The context tells the searcher that the right sense of the phrase is talked about in case the quoted phrase is ambiguous.
Snippet extraction has a long history, the standard paper is Turpin et al. (2007), there are regularly new improvements: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=snip...
If some bright spark is sitting around with talent to spare but no idea, the perennial failure mode “search engine for hackers” is an idea whose time has come.
Google is sufficiently beholden to search revenue that grew too much faster than use to be a death sentence for vertical search startups anymore. And modern OSS/cloud compute make the once technically impossible merely absurdly difficult.
And “search for hackers” -> “search for technical stuff of all kinds” -> “search for serious people” -> “…” sounds kind of familiar.
Some colleagues at work have switched off Google since C# regularly gets ignored as a parameter. It didn't use to.
Just annoying having to argue with a tool every day.
Hopefully, showing quoted snippets encourages "fuller", real content rather than the current keyword mash that rises to the top.
Google made quotes basically not do anything forever ago. But there were a few good years when it did what people wanted
This is so annoying for me. Is there a way to get around it, like marking a character to disable this behavior?
On a more related note, I haven't used G search in at least 5 years except on mobile, so this is kind of shrug announcement to me, but good on them for restoring functionality that they clearly didn't want to support.
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TLDR: It’s impossible to report issues when Google makes it impossible to replicate the issues. In the below text, found four errors: (1) feature mentioned in Google’s blog post is not working; (2) quoted search is not working; (3) + search operator does not work as it used to work; (4) it is impossible to replicate results. — Aware of likely hundreds of bugs like this, wish Google would listen.
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This comment was a response to another comment, but given all the bugs I found, decided to make it a top level comment.
______
It does not, at least in one way, which was as a substitute for quotes when injected into a string where +’s replaced spaces; just confirmed this does not work, indifferent about it returning; see links below for proof.
My core concern is Google list ALL search operators OR operations AND publicly make SERP experiments per each that are reproducible without millions in resources AND whitelist for automated execution of these tests; if in unlikely chance Google’s looking for strong opinions how to radically improve search quality, I am willing to do it for free or paid.
Here’s the example searches that show + does not work in at least one way it once did as mentioned above:
- millions of results
https://www.google.com/search?q=test%2Btest%2Btest%2Btest%2B...
- 3 results
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
* This is not the same as the +keyword syntax mentioned in thread; I will try to find an example.
EDIT: weird...
If I click this link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
I get zero result results, but if I click:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
Then edit the a to z without making any other changes, like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
I get 3 search results... which clearly is a bug.
EDIT: Grr... I was able to reproduce it, but then Google broke it. Using method above, here’s proof it returned 3 results:
- Note: if you look at the screen shot above, you will see a SERP that breaks the feature Google announced that in the blog post; specifically that the query is not highlighted in the SERP description. More importantly, I searched for "test test test test test z" but got results for "text text text text text z" — which means quoted search itself is broken.
And proof I then got a bug (zero results) using the exact same search:
____
* Conclusion: To me, if you cannot share a search result and get the EXACT same search results (and possibly ability to see different ones AND annotations of why they are different) — how this not a bug; how can anyone independently test Google’s search quality?
EDIT: Tested if verbatim flag fixed the issue above, it did not; Google still randomly returns or does not return results, returns description with the query shown in description (or does not), etc
Proof verbatim does not help:
Oddly, if you get no results, and add [stack exchange] to query, which in theory should be from same index since it a more narrow subset of the prior, does return results, which is odd:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22test+test+test+test+test+...
And if I type in a year ... 2020 ... at least make some effort to limit the top results to those that contain it.
I actually started to use RSS again this year. For the first time in a decade.
it’s a website. not everything needs to be found, let alone searched for
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
You can still use something while lamenting that the product is not as good as it used to be.
Back then, they created Google Talk which rivaled MSN. Android started as a "open source mobile Linux" which rivaled Windows Phone.
People trusted Google as the good guys open source powered company and, when it got big enough, it screwed everyone over.
And that disappointment and outrage is still there
How did it screw everyone over? Almost all my non tech friends adore most Google products.
Seriously though, the only actually valuable thing Google has at this point is its market share.
(Hint: nothing)
But stating "Google made Linux mainstream" ? I can't see how ? I'd wager orgs like Ubuntu had a lot more todo with making "Linux mainstream".
It's not unusual to have more Android users on any given day than windows, Mac and Linux together.
How is that not mainstream?
And if that seems dramatic, in the intervening period do you want to know what Google served me for very specific search terms? Malicious content and very little else.
Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship?
I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.
Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore.
Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.
https://source.chromium.org/chromium
For example, if you are interested in knowing how people typically tag raw strings in c++:
https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&...
Disclosure: I work at Google.
hacker news -site:ycombinator.com
office -microsoft
picard -"star trek"
japanese fish and rice -sushiI'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem
Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results.
If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.
Filtering retailers out of search results in Duckduckgo can be very difficult because of it.
An trivial example that springs to mind recently was trying to search for information on the manufacturer of Hycosan Extra eye drops.
The results are swamped by ecommerce sites with no actual information on them. Adding terms like "-pharmacist" or "-retailer" actually boosts sites with pharmacist in their URL to the top of the results.
I sometimes have the same issue searching for programming topics where the results are swamped by Microsoft related tech. That would be fine if that's what I was searching for but when it's not it's a real pain in the arse. Using "-microsoft" or some other exclusion just boosts the incorrect results from Microsoft's own site even further.
Sometimes Duckduckgo fix this behaviour but it seems to break randomly for me.
Instead this appears to be restoring functionality that was lost. I swear Google used to actually do what this blog post says Google will now do, and I’m not sure when it disappeared, just that I stopped looking at the text blurbs since what they show usually isn’t what I got. Maybe that will change now with this backpedaled change?
At least they’re not ruining it.
thank you google overlords for your brief allotment of sanity
I'll agree about synonyms, if you use quotes you shouldn't see those.
"dog" --> exact match
+dog --> stemming allowed: i.e "doghouse, doggies, dogs"
That would be nice to have
["dog"] or anything in quotes means exact match, and that's what we do.
[dog] or anything without an operator means we'll generally try to exact match but also might do stemming or synonym or other matching, if it seems helpful.
Why can't we have a Google Advanced Search? Is it that hard? Is it rocket surgery? Is it forbidden by the powers that be? Would it start WW3?
I've always found it baffling that we have to play guessing games with a capricious search engine that tries to interpret what we want. There are some times when we know exactly what we're looking for!
There ARE between alternatives now. I like Kagi the most. Worth every penny.
And for all practical purposes, switching to an incognito tab is pointless against Google. If there are 99 searches from IP 1.2.3.4 using Firefox version 123.4 with Google cookies, and now 1 search from IP 1.2.3.4 using Firefox version 123.4 without Google cookies is practially "good enough" to assume it's still the same person.
Anyway, I'm also sold on Kagi, and DuckDuckGo before that. I didn't even know Google had broken quote searches, but I'm not too surprised.
(richard, ceo of you.com here)
It’s an onion of nonsense. At no point is any user involved.
Edit: or as another sibling comment aptly points out, they also might have just heard feedback… from annoyed employees.
....hmmmmm....
I'd pay money for regex search.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421815
Hopefully for Google's sake they've finally decided reverse the feature removal trend that's been happening for years.
I sent a comment about 3 months ago about a bug in night mode and it got fixed. No idea if my comment was the cause, though.
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This exact discussion is pretty common on HN. Some people complain that quoted search no longer works, and generally someone from Google will show up to tell us that it does.
It's very interesting to me that this change is specifically targeted at quieting the complaints rather than improving the search functionality. The results are the same as before, but they will now show you the match they found so you can't say "but the string I searched for isn't on the page!".
That will certainly address one half of the complaint. But I have also seen it mentioned that quoted search may fail to find pages that do contain the quoted text. The example given was along these lines:
Website: "peering through reverent fingers <br> I watch them flourish and fall"
Query: "peering through reverent fingers I watch"
Result: "no results found for 'peering through reverent fingers I watch'"
Unfortunately, highlighting where the quoted string occurs on the result page will do nothing to solve complaints that google fails to find pages that contain the quoted string.
He was right, I was wrong. And I haven't seen printed conference proceedings for some years now.
Many of the qanon "baker" sites aren't indexed on Google. You can type in the domain, try to feed Google as much leading information as possible and it'll simply not tell you the site exists.
They'll give you articles about them but if you want to see the content you'll have to find it another way.
I've explored multiple of these. There's no robots.txt asking you to go away. The pages are readily scrapable. It's clearly a proactive decision.
Also dangerous medical quackery (such as ingesting heavy metals, infecting yourself with deadly diseases as medicine and bleach enemas) that's led to numerous deaths they simply will not provide to you.
I'm guessing the lawyers told them to de-index these sites. Some see this as "censorship by the liberal woke left".
You can go to a Yandex or Bing index to get these things if you're curious although Bing is starting to follow suit as well because I'm guessing their lawyers are equally insistent.
Listen to the Qanon-anonymous podcast back catalog (investigators of the far right) and you'll run into this constantly - they'll have entire episodes dedicated to some document or video Google claims doesn't exist. But then you open up, say, baidu and get 10,000 results