Because Google is... annoying, and silly, try verbatim search tools > verbatim, after you get search results.
Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
11–20 of 113 posts
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#12google hardly works for anything
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#13Interesting, in Sweden I only got this story when I made the same searches:
https://imgur.com/a/k1Avbtm
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#14I 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
expecting you - this is what you have
been searching for - this place,
David, is where dreams are born.”
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
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.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#15Curiously, 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
I may have figured it out. The site is committing hijinks with the text. They're manually wrapping text with ` `'s and then manually wrapping the source with spaces. Here's the HTML of the lines in question: The voice was deep and melodious when it spoke. “David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born.” It was at this moment Davi…
When every site was full of
s and s back in the day, Google had not been at all confused by it.
s and s back in the day, Google had not been at all confused by it.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#16Google 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.
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Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may have figured it out. The site is committing hijinks with the text. They're manually wrapping text with ` `'s and then manually wrapping the source with spaces. Here's the HTML of the lines in question: The voice was deep and melodious when it spoke. “David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born.” It was at this moment Davi…
When every site was full of s and s back in the day, Google had not been at all confused by it.
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...
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#18As 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.
Hasn't Google more more or less prioritized "authority" since Pagerank?
Of course, the exact heuristics to weight authority are in a continuous flux.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#19I 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.
Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#20Web 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.