HN Explorer

Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches

331 points by bratao ↗ HN
It's been a while since I have felt that Google's results have deteriorated. It takes a lot of tricks to find what I am looking for. Today an interesting case occurred that frustrated me a lot and is worth telling HN.

First, I was looking for a song and searched for: "here were the dreams are born" (I know I mistyped). One of the first results I found was this interesting story (Google results https://imgur.com/a/gUq4XVZ):

https://mechahuggermr.tripod.com/id66.html

I took the following sentence from this story and used it in the readme of an internal project:

"David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born"

Some people wanted to know where this quote came from and could not find it on Google.

I also tested and cannot enter any combination of parameters into Google to find this page. I tried quotation marks, literal search and no hyphen. Nothing, it is impossible to find it.

Does anyone know what is going on here? Can someone do a magic call and find this page on Google?

Has Google's AI/BERT Enhanced Search reached a point where indexed pages can not be found?

All results were tested with a Brazilian connection and replicated in a Private Session on an US VPN.

112 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
MattGaiser
Replicated the problem here in Canada too. Bing does not find it either though.
ergonaught
Google finds it for: "David, is where dreams are born.”"

And: "The voice was deep and melodious when it spoke."

And most other things. Examine the raw HTML for that area and you might give them a pass when searching for an exact phrase that doesn't actually exist in the document itself.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
GistNoesis
You are probably right. In the HTML there are some "br" line returns between each line of the citation. It can find the citation from parts of each of these lines but not from the whole citation.
Retric
I don’t, Google dates to 1996. Stripping white spaces/line breaks etc should be part of basic parsing. Consider someone typing in a poem or song lyrics etc a few extra <br> should be expected especially back then.
lelandfe
Curiously, searching directly on the site with that quote produces "No results found," and then shows an inexact match with just that quote underneath. This is clearly a real bug on Google's side.

https://imgur.com/a/2XFogU5

lelandfe
I may have figured it out. The site is committing hijinks with the text. They're manually wrapping text with `<br>`'s and then manually wrapping the source with spaces. Here's the HTML of the lines in question:

    <DIV>The voice was deep and melodious when it spoke. &#8220;David, we have been <BR>expecting you - this is what you have
                               been searching for - this place, <BR>David, is where dreams are born.&#8221; It was at this moment David realized <BR>the
                               being was speaking to him with its own voice, not by thought. David <BR>stood unmoving. He realized he had never dreamed before
                               or even had ever <BR>slept.
If you search for same-line sentence fragments you'll find the page: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+voice+was+deep+and+me.... Not an excuse: this is a case Google should handle.

For posterity: https://imgur.com/a/DAUpLit

xyzzyz
When every site was full of <br>s and &nbsp;s back in the day, Google had not been at all confused by it.
dnissley
Are we sure about that? My recollection is the same, but it would be nice to have some way of ensuring my memory isn't faulty...
capableweb
Just to remind you of how things were when Google first launched (1996): W3C just started with the recommendation of CSS level 1 (https://www.w3.org/Press/CSS1-REC-PR.html), people were using dl, dt, ul, li and blockquote elements for "styling" (layouting really) websites, Internet Explorer 1.0 was launched the year before and most people who wrote HTML documents were amateurs at best. It's a 100% bet that the markup of yore was messed up compared to todays "standards".
smt88
This (shitty NLP) has been bad for a while, but I did notice it get worse recently in a way that feels crippling to me. I don't have a functional search engine anymore.
Liquix
Does anyone have insight into _why_ google search has deteriorated so rapidly over the last ~6-12 months? Optimizing for NLP or websites learning SEO don't seem like they would have this big of an impact. Everyone seems to agree [0] [1] [2] that this is a problem yet it keeps getting worse

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27379083

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29794372

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29414562

causality0
The voice recognition has gone to shit as well, to the point where it may as well be editorializing. Apparently I'm not allowed to begin a sentence with the word "our" because no matter what pronunciation I use it becomes "how". I just don't get it. I learned my "computer voice" talking to garbage voice command systems in the early 2000s that insisted on crystal-clear speech and had absolutely no issues with Apple or Google voice typing until probably 2018. Since then it's a been a steady decline into near-unusability. I dare anyone to successfully get Google to voice-type the word "o'clock".
duped
My guess is bad regression testing based on subjective qualifiers at best or incentivize poor results that promote as revenue at worst.
evouga
The best explanation I’ve seen is that Google only cares about the quality of the results when using completely natural language sentences (which I guess is how most non-technical people try to use it?) rather than the specialized search engine syntax with keywords, quotes, +/-, etc. we learned to use in 90s/00s.

It may optimize for the common case, but unlike the old system, leaves you completely helpless when it fails to “Just Work.”

wly_cdgr
It's probably become more profitable for them to have the search be shit now that their monopoly is so secure
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
noobermin
As of now, searching the quote brings up this thread. I feel like Google now prioritizes certain websites (like HN) and essentially skips things like tripod websites.
fault1
Hasn't Google more more or less prioritized "authority" since Pagerank?

Of course, the exact heuristics to weight authority are in a continuous flux.

dnissley
Fwiw, the original page is formatted oddly. The line breaks seem like they're part of the content? As opposed to them just being one big paragraph that is wrapped by a single tag?

E.g. try doing this search, with each individual line quoted separately: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22David%2C+we+have+been%22+...

My question at this point is -- did this literal search ever work on Google?

bbarnett
Because Google is... annoying, and silly, try verbatim search tools > verbatim, after you get search results.
Someone1234
Verbatim helps with Google silently altering your query (essentially an alternative to the now-required quoting everything) but it doesn't solve the massive spam issue that has infected Google.

Google, as a company, feels a lot like IBM at the end of its glory days. Google won't suddenly disappear but much like IBM they will slowly shrink in relevance forever.

hamiltonians
google hardly works for anything
User23
It’s still not bad at getting Wikipedia links.
joak
Not true. If you google some Wikipedia entry in some language let's say French, you get the result in English. Which is weird and annoying.

I'm fluent in several languages, whenever I search some sentence in one language google makes a translation, sometimes erroneous, and only give me answers in English (or whatever language is set as default). So annoying.

capableweb
I agree with your general point that the search quality has gone down, quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results.

Looking into your suggested example: That turned out to be interesting and unexpected.

So, the exact string you put here was "David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born", which is what you get when you copy the text from the website. It's correct that it doesn't work on Google searching for verbatim.

The actual DOM of the snippet looks like this:

    “David, we have been <br>expecting you - this is what you have
                           been searching for - this place, <br>David, is where dreams are born.”
If you take any snippet of text that doesn't do a line-break, it seems exact searches do work, like "expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place" or "deep and melodious when it spoke".

If you do take a snippet that does a line-break, then it cannot find anything, like "David, we have been expecting you" or "this place, David, is where "

It seems that Google as unlearned how to treat different type of whitespaces, especially when the author/software has introduced manual line-breaks via the <br/> HTML tag.

I'm sure they have at one point introduced some "quality filter" that gives higher score based on how well the markup is made by the websites, for one reason or another, and eventually it got so "improved" or established that even if it's the only relevant hit for a human, the computer simply ignores the result for low scoring, since the markup is not 100% correct.

pcthrowaway
Can someone confirm if it's also broken then for bits of text that are wrapped in inline elements? I don't have a suitable example to try to search for off hand, but for example:

    <div>
      this is the <span className="bold">best</span> day of my life
    </div>
sorokod
Perhaps "don't attribute to cleverness something that can be explained by incompetence" applies here.
austinjp
For me, 49 minutes after parent comment was posted, searching Google for the quoted phrase "expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place" yields exactly two results: the linked story, and _this HN page_.
Lamad123
What's depressing is that this problem keeps getting worse and worse! It used to be a problem you'd encounter very occasionally, but I now experience this crap every few days, sometimes even for things that seem very obvious.
sshine
I see a silver lining: When Google no longer has economic incentive to deliver quality search results, new search engines can finally take a market share. For a year I've been using DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and they're both great, but sometimes there's something they just don't give me, and I've felt the need to Google it. Now that Google's results are deteriorating, I find myself doing that less. I've been able to quit Gmail, but YouTube and Search have been hard.

"Searching" has for almost two decades been synonymous with "Going to Google and feeling lucky." -- the fact that searching requires effort (and possibly more than one search engine) feels frustrating and refreshing at the same time.

robbedpeter
At some point in the last 3 or more years, Google has been actively optimizing for profit over search quality. Google already has 98%+ of search engagement, maybe they think they can improve quality when competition appears?

Any serious appearing competitor could also be squashed by legal fuckery before getting a chance to earn enough to afford defending themselves in court. Throw in an out of court acquisition as part of settlement and Google can be confident about managing threats.

kypro
I've tried to move away from Google several times over the last decade but always found myself coming back because Google has always provided me with better results and I would often struggle to find what I needed on other search engines. These days I find myself in the opposite position to the point where I'm using other search engines as default depending on what I'm looking for.

Image searches on Google are just terrible now I normally use Bing by default. Anything news / politics related tends to be heavily censored / curated by Google so I normally use DuckDuckGo for that. Really the only thing I still prefer Google for is code related searches which to be fair probably makes up 90% of my searches. As soon as I feel I can get comparable results on another search engine I'm done with Google.

I've also recently been using ProtonMail as a Gmail alternative and I've been really impressed. It's also nice knowing that should Google's AI ever randomly lock me out of my Google account I can still access my emails.

thomassmith65
To a company as comfortable as Google, the fact that users want to find relevant information, as opposed to watch ads all days or buy products, is an inconvenience.

There is incentive to keep users on-site as long as possible; "our engagement metrics are rising".

There is incentive to shovel users, kicking and screaming, to product pages or advertisements.

Google, Youtube, Amazon and other giants have little incentive to improve search beyond "good enough that our users feel like we're trying to answer their query."

dazc
I have a feeling that perfect search is the holy grail that no business is interested in finding. How can it be monetized otherwise?

Maybe 'peak good enough' is where we are at and the sooner a critical mass of people realise that google don't have a monoploy on this the better?

guerrilla
I stopped using Google entirely. I honestly feel violated every time it strips out words that I asked it to search for on the very first page. NO, I said search for this, do not do something ELSE you piece of shit.

I actually use DuckDuckGo exclusively now, not because it got better (it did a tiny bit), but because Google got so absolutely horrible that DDG is now actually better! I have the habit of trying Google if I can't find something with DuckDuckGo, but honestly I don't even know why I bother because not once has it helped since this degradation started.

I do wonder why though. I got the feeling that maybe they just gave up. Maybe they don't have to care anymore being a de facto monopoly and having so many other projects. It's hard not to think that spammers run the internet now... Ad networks run everything and then content is just generated shit spammed into results and feeds.

</rant>

Tempest1981
While searching for info on a virus DLL, Google was pathetic. I only had luck with yandex.com
guerrilla
Pro-tip: Yandex image search is pretty amazing actually.
ajsnigrutin
yandex for images and pirated stuff, bing for porn!
moistly
So many bot-authored and SEO-tweaked garbage listicles and advertiser-funded “reviews” and poorly-written “TIL”/“learn from me” blogs bloated by advertising. In a few ways the web is better now than it was a few decades ago, and in very many ways it is much worse. Advertising has basically leeched almost all the value out of the web.
qualudeheart
I’ve transitioned to a list of manually bookmarked sites.

Search gets unreliable fast for rare topics. We live in an advertising based economy of poor incentives. If good paid search engines existed I would use them.

moistly
The smart money saves the page, or its useful content, to a file. So much good information lost to link rot.
nyadesu
Only problem I had with DDG is search results not displaying a create/publish date, that info is so useful to me to filtering relevant things
privacyking
That's true but I've found in recent years that the date given is wrong. e.g. you see something listed as 2021, but it's actually from 2016 and old.
jeffbee
Web indexing and search is a constant battle between space and time, so it does not really surprise me that results for any given input may not be stable over time. Generalizing from single examples, however, is illogical.
monkeybutton
I was looking for a specific person recently and searched: <name of person> Canada

I guess they were pretty obscure so Google in all their wisdom displayed the results for Canada, with the entire name struck through. Fantastic. Defaulting to the most generic term in a query to the point of absolute uselessness.

laurent92
I’ve always found “lemming” ridiculous, especially in all software that copied Google despite not being generalist. “We’ve seen you are searching for ‘Phillips screw 24x17’, I won’t tell you that we don’t have any but here are results for ‘Screwdrivers’, just in case you want to use a screwdriver instead of a screw. Also here are a few Phillips TVs, in case this might help you fix your car.”
monkeybutton
Product search on websites for traditional brick and mortar stores is the worst for this. I guess they weren't born with the challenge of "if customers can't find the product they want, you will die" that online-only businesses have, but still, it's not like online shopping is a new thing. And people might like to know if the store even has what they need before heading out!
nicbou
Amazon is terrible for this. Their search is practically useless.
ajsnigrutin
Yep, same thing happening to me... three keywords to define what i need, and it randomly chooses to ignore one of them, and show me irrelevant results.

The only worse search is probably on aliexpress, where you search for "red led", get a bunch of red LEDs, then you sort by the number of orders, and the top results are for other random "red" stuff (it seems as if it searches every keyword separately, but I haven't verified it).

emptyparadise
I once managed to get Google to strike through every keyword and show me just vaguely related things.
jaclaz
I can confirm, it must be the worst possible one (but to be honest it is not like Amazon's one is much better).

Of course not what a search should do, but I find the aliexpress search results a good source for fun and learning, through their "random" results I discovered many things I didn't know existed.

vl
Just today I wondered how many people have first name Mickey and middle name Mouse. I couldn't find anything - it just goes to generic Disney websites.
michaelcampbell
DDG does much better with quotes for required/exact matches.
ravenstine
Better, yes, but even they have recently gone down the path of not completely honoring quotes.
tonfreed
I've found the opposite. DDG will often just ignore my quotes entirely
michaelcampbell
DDG is "better", not perfect.

When you find it ignoring your quotes, seeing what Google provides for the same search term might be interesting.

braddeicide
Google results are low quality unless you enable verbatim. Tools, all results, verbatim.

It blows my mind this isn't the default. I can only assume they've adopted the opinion of search engines before them that they could benefit from showing lower quality results to keep the users on their site longer.

kazinator
Is this something accessible through the Settings, bottom right? I cannot find it.
jetanoia
no, not in Settings. The 'Tools' option only appears at the top right of the screen after you conduct a google search in the normal fashion. So search for a term, then click Tools at top to switch to the verbatim option.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
hnburnsy
It doesn't seem to appear in a mobile browser, but I do see it if I put the mobile browser in desktop mode.
clove
DDG's !gvb bang is faster.
anderspitman
Am I crazy or is there room for a good early 2000s-style link aggregator in today's content discovery landscape? It seems like the primary reasons the likes of delicious failed is because they sold out for money. I wonder if an open source federated solution could work.
mech422
I would love an alta-vista rebirth..I have yet to see a search engine that allowed you do target searches so specifically. I also loved the 'near' keyword for dealing names - "john near smith" would match "john smith", "smith john", "smith, john" etc.

Search engines have been 'simplified' to the point they're useless if you actually want to _search_ and not 'discover' :-p

indigodaddy
Reminds me of googlewhack days.. those were fun
westcort
I created a Google custom search engine for the text of about 40,000 out-of-copyright books: https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html and noticed that exact text matches don’t always show up. A RegEx search of the same repository yields many more matches for specific phrases than the Google custom search does. About a year and a half ago, the quality of results went down a lot. I agree something has changed for the worse.
andrewclunn
I recall when YouTube used to refine the "best answer" to a question based on distributed popularity. Ask it, "How do I screw in a lightbulb?" and the video at the top would be one which had received numerous views and likes, crowdsourcing its usefulness in answering the question. Then the algorithm was changed to prioritize more recent videos. This gave rise to the churn of the novel and new over the time tested and approved. This was better for ads, but worse for users. One cannot expect the ad driven model NOT to have an impact on usability.
ttybird2
For a few months now google search has been basically useless. The only thing that you get nowadays is just SEO spam and mainstream sites. At this point even bing/ddg is better.
MildlySerious
I've had several frustrating experiences recently with search engines, Google included. The most notable: I have tried to find a video clip of Merkel joking about the German city of Bielefeld not existing. There are plenty of articles, but the clip, which I know exists, doesn't come up. Not on YT, not on Google, not on Bing. Maybe I've lost my Google-fu somewhere along the way, I don't know anymore.
Jensson
> Can someone do a magic call and find this page on Google?

I just pasted this unquoted into Google and found the site:

> David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born

Why would you quote this?