Yes, this. 50% of the time or more I need to flip to the burger "advanced" menu and add the "Verbatim" constraint.
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.
Not a good idea, because it's much easier to figure out "google is treating my query too loosely" than "google is treating my query too strictly and there is such a thing as 'looser'". People would just think the results suck.
Instead, it should be possible to set that as a preference so that it persists across your searches.
I added a search engine called "google verbatim" to Chrome with the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1 and the keyword "g". So I just type "g whatever" in the address bar and get verbatim every time.
When I quote "two words" in a group I expect to only get results based on those two words, spelled with those characters, exactly as quoted. Not split, not with different spelling or related meanings, not with anything but actually the string of bytes which I have quoted.
Google doesn't replace them with split versions (except that it ignores punctuation), nor does it replace them with different spellings or related meanings. The words you search for will be there, in order, the only difference will be all whitespace and punctuation is treated as a space.
>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?
It could also be that the quoted term was in the page source, but not visible when doing a ctrl-f search from within a web browser. Whenever I have been frustrated that a term didn't appear in the visible text, it did show up in the source. So my searches were paying attention to the term, but not in a way that I cared about as a user.
What I'm reading again and again in the comments is that people are 100% sure this wasnt happening. But that would suggest they were clicking on the results that weren't what they wanted according to the snippet and Ctrl+F'ing. I'd be surprised so many people do that
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.
Somebody got a good review for breaking it (but improving some other metric), somebody will get a good review for fixing it. Net result for users is zero, but all the churn looks like productivity in a "metrics based" GAMMA review process. I've seen worse.
(Same problem with GDP as a measure of economic productivity BTW, but that's a topic for another day.)
I'm glad to hear that they are working on fixing this, but I would be keen to understand why quote searches have been so much worse over the last ~2 years.
PageRank isn't new at this point, has been publicly available for more than 10 years. If I were less of an idiot myself I'd found a fresh search engine. Other than Dear Bing (who doesn't support the "Verbatim" filter), there are no public independent full-web indexes left.
What makes you think that Search still runs mainly guided by page rank?
If that were the case then search engines would differ only on how big their database is, but unless you care about the long tail you wouldn't be able to notice much of a difference.
I don't work in ranking, but considering how the web has changed since the early 2000s I'd guess that page rank's quality has gone down as spammy websites and walled gardens appeared.
i've got my issues with brave but iirc they're actually doing an independent web index not just using bing (i think they still use them for images tho). it was really nice to hear somebody else is working on that even if i'm not using it rn.
Didn't know about Brave's Index. I just emailed them to find out how I can help with the bottom line of making human knowledge accessible for lesser-idiots. Thanks!
I have issues with the Brave browser but I am a big fan of their search product. Just the fact that they are building their own index was enough for me to switch, but I've had better luck with finding useful search results than I previously had with DDG. YMMV, of course. Their forum search results section has been very useful, too.
PageRank is basically worthless at this point. Its baseline assumption, that keywords and in-links correlate with relevance, is now broken. The vast majority of stuff out there is SEO'd and link-farmed to death. If you want to find anything relevant with PageRank these days, you first need to find a way to filter out all of the spam. This is why search is so hard now.
Google now has moved to model based ranking. In the current (search-hostile) web environment, PageRank or whatever simplistic algorithm doesn't work anymore.
If it were me, I'd be waiting for his "sources" so I can tear them to pieces for not being the NYT or something trustworthy and 100% truthful, all of the time.
Why would there be sources? [Unrecorded] phone call / encrypted-channel deals happen all the time. Do you want to pretend it doesn't happen and the world is actually fair? What a nice dream.
I was a DDG user for the past year, and I consistently found myself falling back to the big G due to poor result quality.
I recently started paying for Kagi[1] and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I haven’t felt the need to use a different search engine since switching. (No affiliation; just a happy customer)
I still give DDG first shot at my searches, but their results have been getting worse and worse. I'd blame the people they scrape their results from but nobody is stopping DDG from handling search operators correctly so we can narrow down whatever gets spewed back at us. Even worse several times recently DDG just returns a blank page.
They're absolutely getting gamed (by sticking clickbait keywords into the meta description or invisible content or even just in plain text at the bottom of the page - you'd think they'd have learned their lesson on Youtube but alas). This doesn't change that.
remember when sites would load keywords up with the same font color as the background, or in divs with display:none or visibility:hidden type of shenanigans? they supposedly penalized sites for that. so you're saying that keyword stuffing is back?
It soumds like they are only modifying the presentation of results, rather than the quality of the results. Useful, yes, but it's not necessarily what people are looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I hear this a lot, but it I haven't personally noticed any real problems with quoted search (other than the occasional difficulty actually finding the content on the resultant webpages).
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.
Quoted search is provably broken for some queries, try a google search for "[::]" (with the double quotes), it has no results. Similarly, try a search for 'linux next hop "[::]"' (with the double quotes), none of the results will contain [::].
They don't necessarily have to inflate their indexes. Backtick-quoted results ought to be a subset of double-quoted results, so they can use the standard quoted search algorithm, and then filter out imperfect matches from those results.
I did read what you said. Imagine trying to search for
[::]
as 8192kjshad09- suggested earlier in the thread. What standard index results are you going to filter? Since "[::]" isn't in the index, you won't have anything to go on. To do your back-tick really-verbatim searches, the index has to be enlarged.
I'm a Google engineer way too far organisationally to ever have any say in this.
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.
If you haven't read our post, I'd encourage doing do. Quotes do work to find the exact terms specified. But control-F won't locate some of the terms we find when fully rendering a doc -- that's why the list explains using developer tools to search if control-F comes up with nothing.
It might be useful to offer people a way to search for content that is rendered in the page, rather than content that is only visible in developer tools.
The content is rendered on the page. For example, say someone has an email sign-up box. When the page renders, the box appears and it might list all the countries in the world, so that you can pick your country from the list. All those countries are rendered, available if you use the box. But if you ctrl-f search, you might not see that text even though it did render. Real case I looked into which prompted the tip of using developer tools.
In my experience, quoted search works very well. I do a lot of really, really obscure searches with quoted search and Google finds the pages for me. Maybe other people get different results, but I'm puzzled by all the complaints about quoted search. You're all using double quotes ", opening and closing, right?
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 once tried to search for a scammer named "internal revenue services" (with an S at the end) and it just wouldn't let me, quotes or not.
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.
> 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.
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).
Regular unquoted search has declined in the eyes of many people. Quoted search worked and works fine (if you take into account the caveats about tokenisation etc). They are improving the snippets. It is all in the fine article.
I work for Google Search. Nothing changed in how they worked over the past two years. I think it's just that our snippets weren't reflecting where we were finding the quoted terms, causing people to think they were ignored. Hopefully this change will now help avoid that impression.
It's just not true. Some years back (I think around 2017) I was showing to my colleagues how the phrase
"The magic of Google is gone"
in quotes brings a ton of irrelevant results, none of which contained the phrase or sometimes even any of the words (and no, it wasn't the suggested "results without quotes"). I also posted about it on an online forum which Google could at one point find as the only result, but now it's gone even though that page is still there, on the same forum. Today this phrase yields zero results and suggests some without quotes.
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
Quotes searches bring back pages we can see have the quoted terms. That's how it is intended to work, and that's how does work. I've looked into many of these cases, we find the quoted terms there. In this example, we don't see any pages with that quoted phrase. If there is a page with it out on the web, like the forum post you mentioned, it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it. Do you recall the URL? It would help me look into that more.
I have a different example of Google not finding a page with "" that ought to be found. Assume I want to find https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685, which is on a ~20 year old phpBB forum that is certainly indexed. The post is from 2012 after all. And I take one sentence from there and search for it, with quotes:
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.
I don't see that particular page appearing to be indexed by us. If we don't have it indexed, we can't match it. Ideally, we'd index all the pages out on the web. But the web is really big.
You're still trying to gaslight HN users about this. Just ADMIT YOU and GOOGLE ARE WRONG.
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.
It's not that it gets specifically deleted. We just don't have infinite space. There's always new pages coming along. Like trillions of pages out there. So we might not get back to revisiting a page and it falls out of our index while other content is added.
How do you folks think about the fact that sites provide privileged access to Google’s crawler but routinely restrict access/paywall the same content to a normal user? Among chronic offenders are LinkedIn Pinterest, Instagram, various media sites, and etc. are you folks well aware that this is occurring, and are there any plans to discourage or punish that sort of behavior?
> For instance, in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site.
I've never thought of doing this. This would have been helpful in so many past searches.
I don't understand why they never added + back after Google+ finally died. When I was at Google I actually went as far as looking for the code to re-enable it in superroot. If I recall correctly I actually found some of the code but never had time to learn enough about superroot to make and test a CL.
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 feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes. Instead of reverting something and admitting it was a bad decision, they’ll at best completely relaunch a half-assed complete rehaul of it and pretend it’s a brand new feature.
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.
>I feel like tech giants just absolutely never admit mistakes.
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.
It's probably not in Google's best interest to allow that. I assume Verbatim search puts higher load on Google servers, while simultaneously making it harder to confine the user to a Google-affiliated site (eg: AdSense client, Blogger, Youtube...)
I work for Google Search. Quotes replaced the + operator but work exactly the same way. They do precisely search for content with the exact terms specified. They really do. They will not look for translations and so on. If there's no match at all for a quoted term, we will show other matches but also make that clear with a special message. And maybe we shouldn't do that to make it even clearer there are no matches. But we don't ignore quoted terms when there's a match -- if you ever have an example where you think this has happened, I'd love to know if you're comfortable sharing, so we can investigate.
I search things in English daily. The results are translated word by word into similar sounding words in Japanese written in Katakana with zero English on the page.
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 are quoting terms, we're not going to match what's quoted and not go beyond that. If you have an example of where using quoted terms, you find this happening, please share if you're comfortable. I'll forward to the team, and we'll investigate.
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.
The shame of this is, sometimes it's nice to be able to indicate to google which words in your complex query should be treated as a phrase, without forcing 100% literal matching. So the ideal for a power user would be to have both quotes for phrase grouping and +/- for exact search and exclusion. (Both of which could be used on either single terms or phrases.)
Working numeric ranges would be nice too. And wildcards. Heck, full logical AND/OR search with parentheses.
> If there's no match at all for a quoted term, we will show other matches but also make that clear with a special message.
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.
This is one of the most clear examples of one of the worst user interfaces ever.
If you can show a match it does show the results if it does not, it shows you show a bunch of useless, to me, pages anyway.
There is little surprise there are so many people here saying quotes don't work at all.
I think part of it's that they just don't index a whole bunch of the Web anymore. You can search things in quotes that must exist, and get "LOL no such results here's some irrelevant shit". That's what people mean when they say quotes don't work as expected—you use them and more often than not get "LOL nothing, here's unrelated trash" even when there for-sure should be results.
> I work for Google Search. Quotes replaced the + operator
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.
Quotes existed originally as a way to match phrases, more than one word. + was meant for matching a single word. Quotes replaced the way to match a single word, while still remaining the way to phrase search.
Yes, that's exactly what it will do. But keep in mind that if you do [lyrics walk down the "aisle" at the "store"] by default we'll probably rank pages that have many of the words adjacent to each other because we can tell those are probably more relevant. That's why you might get the same or similar results to [lyrics "walk down the aisle at the store"] -- and it's why the post suggests not even using quotes at all at first, because we might get things fine without them.
I work for Google Search. We have looked at this, and while never say never, reverting is hard from what I understand because it means we'd have to ignore the + symbol which turns out to be useful to recognize when it comes to international phone number searches.
That seems like quite the edge case. I don't think I've ever searched for an international phone number. Is that worth making the search experience rather poorer for everyone?
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?
Are you by chance in North America? I suspect this is a much more common edge case in Europe where you have a bunch of countries within close proximity to each other.
I live in the UK and travel regularly in Europe. I've very rarely Googled a phone number. The only times I can think of is when I've had an unknown number call me and I want to try to figure out who it was. (Of course, doing it the reverse way, Googling an org's name to find their phone number, is common).
I'm suddenly curious as to why anyone would search for phone numbers regularly.
The + symbol also gets used in credible search terms like Disney+, Apple TV+, math equations, C++, code snippets (x += 1), indicators of age (e.g 2000+ year old pyramid) etc.
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.
Or if it doesn't, than make it so. And tell people that if they want to search for a word that begins with a symbol, put it in quotes. That doesn't seem difficult.
Note here - they aren't changing what results are returned when you search with quotes, they are just highlighting what you searched with quotes in bold in the snippet displays in the search results page.
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!
google literally starts captcha blocking me if i do too many quote or intext searches. there is obviously a business case for fucking over power users. "you will look at the results The Algorithm surfaces and you will like it".
Those users probably don't give their clicks to ads, obvious or otherwise. Their focus on useful results means they cannot be easily monetized, and therefore need to be dissuaded from using G as much as possible.
Have to have an extension to make that show up on new tabs, so cant get right to it on mobile? Why did google kill the option to set a home page for new tabs? Obviously some kind of user hostile monetization reason I guess.
It seems DDG handles quotes somewhat similarly to how Bing does (I just tried "input: dispatch" and got the same list of useless results from both. Google's are no better though.)
But Bing is much better for "life sucks and so do you". Strikes me that DDG just isn't "there" yet, which is the impression I've had almost every time I've used it.
I can't believe I was so naive as to think this was going to be Google apologizing for how it screws up most search operators by only obeying them if Google agrees with you. Most of the time it happily includes all sorts of SEO horseshit like synonyms, related words, and even companies who happen to be competitors of what I wanted exact results for. Words in quotations aren't supposed to be suggestions.
Just to be persnickety: If you do a search for "dog" (with the quotes), do you expect to find hits with only "dogs"? What about "doghouse" or "Dogbert"? "Dogged" (the past tense or past/passive participle of the verb 'dog')? If you search for "goose", do you expect to also see "geese"? (And for good measure, what should be done about languages where most nouns have case marking suffixes, like Russian, or languages with lots and lots of suffixes, like Turkish or Finnish.)
I'll agree about synonyms, if you use quotes you shouldn't see those.
That's how it works. That's how it has worked for years, except you don't need the + symbol -- that tells us nothing.
["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.
No, I don't expect to see those things, because those things aren't what I searched for. My problem is that i get results for those things anyway. It's especially infuriating when, to use your example, I'm looking for something that happens to be called "dog" but has nothing to do with canines and Google won't stop giving me puppies.
Words in quotes aren't suggestions. They tell us (I work for Google Search) to find only what's in the quotes. That's how they've worked for years. We haven't been "only obeying them" if we agree. I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. We obey them as outlined in that post. The problem is that people sometimes can't find the quoted material on the page -- that we definitely did see and definitely did restrict to -- so we made it clearer in snippets to help them understand what we saw, where we saw it and hopefully guide them to the right locations in the doc.
I think what scares me about Kagi is the privacy aspect. One thing to look up "hot steamy decompiler software in my area" in an incognito tab (even if it's not particularly that private) and another to do that logged in to a service linked to your credit card linked to you through all the KYC.
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.
But ISP dangers are at least mitigated by HTTPS/proxies/VPNs/public Wi-Fi/Tor. Does Kagi have any comparable protections? It would actually be extremely cool if it did.
I love where they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products? Is this just from their family members at holiday dinners?
The PR people writing the article are rephrasing the words of the division lead who has aggregated the feedback from a bunch of project managers who are relaying what the data analysts in each team are interpreting from a host of metrics their engineers implemented.
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.
To be fair, many Googlers are on Hackernews. There's been a lot of posts on HN recently complaining about how quotes was broken. Would not surprise me if a few Googler used the chatter to pull reports and quantify the impact leading to this fix.
I suspect you’re right. But knowing Google I have my doubts most Googlers have any real influence over this, unless they are in VERY specific positions in the company.
Maybe a decade ago, there were feedback pages. I recall when Google Maps changed its format. (I forget now what the change was, maybe scattering controls all over instead of having a sort of legend where all the controls sat.) There was a place where you could provide feedback, sort of like a Usenet page. Anyway, after the change there were thousands of posts, and after a few days tens of thousands of posts--every last one of them negative. (Well, there were one or two positives, but they were /s.) After a week someone from Google showed up and said they were listening. They eventually changed some very minor part of the format to look sort of more or less a little like it used to, while not budging on most of the changes they had made. At that point, people started posting alternative map sites.
I was involved in writing that post and, in particular, that sentence about feedback. I don't work for PR. I work for our search quality team, as a liaison between the team and the public to ... bring feedback we hear in a variety of places to help consider improvements. Hacker News was one of the places earlier this year where there was a lot of feedback about wanting to see how to make quote search work better. In responding to (see my profile) and exploring that feedback, it wasn't that quote searching was broken but that people couldn't readily understand we really did bring back documents with the quoted terms. So that's the feedback that went back to our team, and we looked at how to improve things which lead to the change we announced.
You would be surprised how many people who work at Google who hate Google products and say so in the internal groups. People have been complaining about this for years internally.
Yeah ironic considering this blog post (or any post at blog.google AFAICT) doesn't allow for comments. It is more like pressrelease.google or marketing.google than blog.google.
To add, I've had Google Docs, YouTube, Store (store.google.com), and Google Search all proactively ask me to rate the experience via a short survey element in the bottom right of the page.
> they said they've "heard feedback". Where? Where can you possibly give feedback to Google about their products?
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.
OK, now re-implement the "-[searchterm]" filtering that used to remove all results with that searchterm, up until about a year or so ago.
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?!
If you don't want a city name being matched, then you need it inside of quotes and the - outside of those. From the examples you've given, it sounds like you might have it reversed. IE, there aren't correct
["-berlin"]
["-new york city"]
These are the correct way to indicate you do not want (the - symbol) a word or phrase (the quote symbols:
This is fascinating. Not because of the content of this article, but because it's the first glimpse behind the Google Search curtain that I've ever seen in an official Google post. You rarely see details about search explained. Or maybe I'm just ignorant.
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.
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.
I'd be super interested in a higher quality delayed search. Just each day you could go and look at your search queries from the day before and it would list any better results it found with more time.
Then again maybe i'm underestimating how often I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and just grab the first result.
Hi, would you know if there are any good explanations on whether Google searches (or in general the search strategy) say, creates a general search result for any given query, which is then tweaked with customizations specific to individuals / locations / languages? I.e. they've "saved" the basic search output in advance so that core doesn't have to be run each time, and only adjust around the edges specific to a user?
Or is that not how it's done, and each search, for a given person, follows the same process?
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.
Or maybe because it's impossible to guarantee that you'll find what you're looking for and you may not even be looking for anything specific, making "search" a more honest and literal term? I'm not saying Google results haven't been getting worse, but blaming that on Google entirely instead of rampant SEO (which is mostly used by people who want to make money, not people who want to provide useful information) and the lack of hand curated directories to steal relevant results from are likely just as detrimental to good search results as Google's ad prioritization. While Google certainly hasn't been helping, the web has been falling apart (in terms of usability at least) for at least a decade. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetency.
I had a customer once that wanted a 'find' feature instead of a 'search' feature. Which was not a bad idea, it makes sense, you want to find something not just search for it. However, they also insisted the 'find' button would fall and bounce a few times after you click it. You win some, you lose some ;)
Actually, often you must first "search" (aka go to some search page to enter search terms) and only then you can click the button "find" - unless the search controls are already on the page you're on.
Google defines what good search results are. Any company trying to compete with them is just tilting at windmills. They'll always be a step behind, forever. "Hey, why does Google show me x and DDG doesn't?", "Why is it so hard to find x on DDG, it's on the first page of Google." Etc. It will never be the reverse for 99% of users.
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.
Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. I was part of the Kagi beta test and I think the results were on average better than Google, and not just for lack of ads. I'm not a Google hater either, but their systems are just not as far in front as they used to be.
What's the fundamental rule to get users to switch products or services? Answer: 10x.
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?"
For me, not feeling spied on was the big part and the search results were also much more consistent and less frustrating. The final parts were the ads, and that I simply try to avoid Google products.
10x sounds like a lot but for me personally Kagi is probably like 30x when you take all the factors into consideration.
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?
Disagree. I use DDG because I'm frustrated with Google search results. And granted, sometimes Google is better, so I just add "!g" to my query and let DDG redirect me to Google.
for me I’d be very happy to just use google through a proxy service. google now hides images and maps behind a cookie consent page, so if you’ve got their cookies blocked, you can’t access then
That used to be the case. It's why they rose to dominance (that and the "no extra crap on the page"). Nowadays, Google's search results are pretty meuh. However, the domain has become much more adversarial with many companies devoted to manipulating search results for a fee. Not sure, perhaps "meuh" is the best we can hope for nowadays.
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.
google results seem meh when you compare them to google results. go and try and use duckduckgo or brave search for anything more than basic one or two keyword searches, and you’ll be back to google like a shot
That's just not true. I switched from google at least two years ago (first to cliqz now DDG), and haven't looked back ever since. And I run pretty technical queries. When I try google again, it's not better, and many times it's worse.
I've been setting DDG as my default search engine on all browsers for at least 4 or 5 years.
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.
When was the last time you tried. It is somewhat topic dependent but I've been using brave for a couple of month and have not missed any (except for significantly less content farm results). I sometimes revert back to Google, but at the same time I also used other engines for better results when on Google.
I tried a couple of weeks ago. my conclusions were solidly in favour of google, despite reluctance on privacy concerns
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
Have to disagree. I've tried DDG and was never impressed enough to switch from Google, but I have found Yandex to increasingly give better curated results, especially for stuff originating in Europe. Bing has also gotten much better, but I don't find it adds anything to Yandex+Google.
I started using DDG a number of years ago out of principle, even though its search results were clearly worse than Google's (but still mostly acceptable). Quite often I fell back to Google to get better results.
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.
Good morning! Always fun to come back and see a pretty straightforward comment getting downvoted to oblivion. :-)
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.
after a few weeks of trying all the different (free) options, I found that anything longer than 3 keywords and Google is the only option. duckduckgo doesn’t even have [consistently working] quote search
If we are speculating why Google is now caring to pay attention to user reports, I strongly feel such things usually precede a wave of user monetization.
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 started using as a test drive (as I have been a happy DDG user before that).
I really like the fact that there is no ad, I can easily rank the pages or even block them (be gone w3schools) and ultimately I don't ever have to go to google anymore. The result are quite solid, even for local non-english searches which DDG struggles a bit.
Brave Search is quite good. They basically trained their model to give the same results as Google, but they give prioritized sections to real discussions. Plus they have a cool goggles experiment.
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.
Personally I find myself using bing more. Nothing against google search, but a lot of times I just cannot find what I need in google so I go over to bing to see if I have better luck. Sometimes I do. Although, google search is still better, for now.
I work on Google search, and have been posting in threads about it for quite some time here taking feedback, asking for examples to debug, and passing them on when I get them.
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.
Honestly I think using quotes for that is probably better, even though + was a bit less typing. You wouldn't believe how many people search for [tar -xvf] and are confused as to why none of their search results contain the string xvf. It's hard to come up with operators that are easy to type and will never collide with their normal meaning in language, and I think quotation marks work much better for that than + did.
I explained elsewhere that it's very unlikely to come back because we actually do try to match + in queries now for thing like international phone numbers, and also as someone else noted, there's any number of names that make use of it (Disney+ for example).
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.
Ok - I totally understand the intent, but NOOOOOOOO!!!! (or more clearly: I have no problem with them trying this, but it doesn't solve my use case)
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.
Please remove Pinterest, or at least lower their relevancy. So often when searching for images the are higher up then the source page the Pinterest image is from and don’t link back to it.
Why isn't there a reasonably priced Google Search API?
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.
While we have you here, can you guys take a look at why the Google Cache feature is very hard to find nowadays? It's almost as if most big sites don't have an option to see the cached version, and even when they do, finding the "Cached" button on desktop seems impossible, this started happening ever since the "More :" menu got redesigned (to show "about this result"), the cached button just isn't there sometimes. (Ex: Amazon).
Even better is when they do show the 'cache' button but don't actually have anything cached, so if the site is down their 'cache' is broken. They think users are too stupid to notice.
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.
"don't" being turned into "don t" is due to the way search indexes work. It's a computer science problem, not Google specific.
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.
It's only "myseterious" because google will have everyone believe so. They certainly have some of (if not the) best tuned algorithms for indexing and querying on the planet, but there's no angel dust or dark magic at work. (And frankly given how unreliable search in gmail is I'm amazed they keep their head above water)
Ultimately one thing people misunderstand is what it means philosophically to search.
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.
When I'm using quotes it's usually because the first, unquoted search ended up not being fruitful. In a world of algorithmic nonsense, quotes turn google back into what it should be best at: being an index.
> "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."
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.
[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.
> One could argue saying searching for content with the query 'like this' should yield the previous statement. Others would disagree.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's top HN because HN commonly sees complaints about quotes in Google Search not performing correctly; i'd link to some of these complaints, but the algolia search is needlessly fuzzy and doesn't seem to include all comments on HN.
Something like that is about as key to using the web as anything. I've used quotes on searches to get an exact phrase since, what, 1995? The fact that has been broken for a long time and now fixed is absolutely worth top story of the day to me.
I think developers and technologists use this feature often to locate people experiencing the same technical issues. Don't know what an error means? Google it. With quotes.
Funnily enough I just searched for "input: dispatch" and couldn't see a single match that included the key colon character so I really hope they fix that.
Do # and ++ count as punctuation? But yes, that's my point, they should at least favour results that match on non-alphanumeric characters if used with double quotes (ideally I should even be able to search for double quote characters!).
Conference proceedings. When I was at a computational linguistics conference back in ~2004, I was appalled when another attendee checking out from the hotel left his printed conference proceedings there, saying the electronic form (CD then, web pages now) was good enough and a lot easier to carry around. I thought about that as I carried the printed proceedings (large conference, so large proceedings) back on the flight home.
He was right, I was wrong. And I haven't seen printed conference proceedings for some years now.
710 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadApparently 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.)
R.I.P.
If that were the case then search engines would differ only on how big their database is, but unless you care about the long tail you wouldn't be able to notice much of a difference.
I don't work in ranking, but considering how the web has changed since the early 2000s I'd guess that page rank's quality has gone down as spammy websites and walled gardens appeared.
And as the web scales, it's an increasingly expensive problem. (Servers, storage, bandwidth, etc.)
I'd wager that it's easier to launch the next SpaceX than to launch the next Google.
It is the same spam sites I see again and again. A manual blacklist from one puny FTE would probably clean up the wast majority.
Google now has moved to model based ranking. In the current (search-hostile) web environment, PageRank or whatever simplistic algorithm doesn't work anymore.
I recently started paying for Kagi[1] and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I haven’t felt the need to use a different search engine since switching. (No affiliation; just a happy customer)
[1]: https://kagi.com/
I do occasionally switch back to DDG for non-technical searches, but even that has been rarer and rarer as time goes on.
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).
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 ...
Google made quotes basically not do anything forever ago. But there were a few good years when it did what people wanted
I've never thought of doing this. This would have been helpful in so many past searches.
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).
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.
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?
Unfortunately we are not enough, and ads bring more money to Google on average than what we are willing to pay.
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!
I have no clue what your DDG is doing but it’s not behaving right.
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.
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.
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.
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"]
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.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWf2ZlNsCGDS89VBF_awNvA
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Dont
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRvaR4fqrYY
Google has managed fine with this since the beginning.
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...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/settings
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.
Am I missing something?
How did this become the #1 story on HN?
He was right, I was wrong. And I haven't seen printed conference proceedings for some years now.