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Comment by uo21tp5hoyg | Hacker News Reader

Some search engines seem to just completely ignore quotes now, it's very frustrating especially when I know what I want to search and the search engine just isn't letting me.

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The irony was that googles original claim to fame was that it was the first engine to start including all terms by default and respecting quotes perfectly. Then they just went back on it. Maybe it’s SEO pressure, or maybe it’s just incompetent product owners who didn’t understand what made their product click.

I think they just assume that they know better what you want than you do.

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.

I work for Google Search. We never changed how we used quotes as a restriction tool. People seem to have had that impression because our snippets changed to not reflect where we were finding the terms. Hopefully our new snippet change will help stop that impression.

If you did not change how the quotes interact with the indexed text for a page, but you did change the mapping from pages to indexed text, then you have changed how you use quotes as a restriction tool.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mapping from pages to index text" but no, we didn't make any change in terms of retrieval. None. Use quotes, we look for pages that have the quoted material and only show those pages. The change we announced this week was about how we display snippets -- descriptions -- of those pages. Now the snippets will show examples of where we found the quoted terms, when sometimes the snippets didn't. But even if they didn't, the quoted terms were on the page.

So in the year 2000 and in the year 2022, for any web page, when that page is crawled the same text would end up in the index? No observable changes were made to the process of computing the text to put into the index from the page in those 22 years?

> 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.

Yes, we didn't make any changes in how quotes retrieve content with the announcement we made. We changed how we show snippets for quoted searches.

You are right. I think what I misremembered you guys changed was that WORDS became optional unless you wrapped each one of them inside double quotes which became super annoying.

Quotes "not working" is because we search for things in quotes that definitely exist (and may even be possible to induce to appear on a search page, by other means) and get "no results, have some trash instead" in response.

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.

My best guess is its because people pasting things in with quotes are met with no results. Stuff like error messages often quote the only unique bit of the error leaving them with no results while ignoring the quotes would give them the result they want.

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.

And the vast majority of the population is who use Google now, rather than web enthusiasts. It was probably causing people to get no results when they had quotes, and most people wouldn't know why.

how hard would it be for Googs to do the search as requested, see no results, then try without quotes?

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's really not what I want quotes to do though, I want a definitive "not found". But it might be a good compromise. Their whole jam now seems to be zero UI except the box, no filters no exact match checkboxes etc. Stuff like that would be really nice to have on the main search.

yeah, but then where's the line? if you start adding checkboxes or other switches to control the search, the next thing you know you have something that looks like a gnarly ffmpeg cmd

A gnarly ffmpeg CLI is exactly what we need for a service as complex as search. The people who can use such an interface are a tiny fraction, but they will produce a majority of economic innovation nonetheless.

Guess what: https://www.google.com/advanced_search

I would prefer a "technical user" mode. Heck, they could hide the option until they've deemed me "technical", by looking at my search terms. Anything is better than giving me pages and pages that don't contain the quoted term I'm looking for.

That mode exists, it's labelled "verbatim".

Verbatim is useful, but it's also going to an extreme.

Also, how hard would it be for the majority of the population to learn this? They're perfectly capable of using the internet to find illegal drugs, porn and dirt on their dating partners. It's not like using quotes to get verbatim results is rocket science.

I work for Google Search and yes, that's something we are considering. No promise it will happen, but we do understand it might help people better understand there's no matches for what they wanted (though we do say that now, when it happens).

If there's no results, you have plenty of room for a "No results. Try without quotes?" bright blue link.

We don't need a checkbox because if you use quotes, we will match only content in the quotes, as our post explains. If there's no content at all that matches, only in that case will we show a message making it clear there's no match and that we've conducted a search without quotes.

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