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

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

#101

Post by jaclaz »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #45
monkeybutton wrote: post #23

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

Yep, same thing happening to me... three keywords to define what i need, and it randomly chooses to ignore one of them, and show me irrelevant results. The only worse search is probably on aliexpress, where you search for "red led", get a bunch of red LEDs, then you sort by the number of orders, and the top results are for other random "red" stuff (it seems as if it searches every keyword separately, but I haven't ve…

I can confirm, it must be the worst possible one (but to be honest it is not like Amazon's one is much better).

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

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

#103

Post by tim333 »

michaelt wrote: post #60

I have an Intel Realsense camera, which sometimes reports the error "Failed to recconect" (there being a typo in the drivers) [1] - that's a pretty unique error, so in combination with the product name that should be a very easy keyword search, right? Especially if I throw in some quotation marks, to make it clear I want a literal match? Yet when I search for realsense "failed to recconect" Google, in its infinite wi…

realsense "recconect"

works. I guess it does words but is buggy with phrases?

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

#104

Post by michaelcampbell »

tonfreed wrote: post #71
michaelcampbell wrote: post #31

DDG does much better with quotes for required/exact matches.

I've found the opposite. DDG will often just ignore my quotes entirely

DDG is "better", not perfect.

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

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

#105

Post by erichocean »

Since Google has source code going back to their founding, it would be nice if they literally offered older versions of their search, just with updated crawl data.

Then you could use "Google 2008" and get decent results. (Google still only needs to crawl the web once for all versions.)

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

#106

Post by dazc »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #91
capableweb wrote: post #14

I agree with your general point that the search quality has gone down, quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results. Looking into your suggested example: That turned out to be interesting and unexpected. So, the exact string you put here was "David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born", which is what you get when you copy…

To a company as comfortable as Google, the fact that users want to find relevant information, as opposed to watch ads all days or buy products, is an inconvenience. There is incentive to keep users on-site as long as possible; "our engagement metrics are rising". There is incentive to shovel users, kicking and screaming, to product pages or advertisements. Google, Youtube, Amazon and other giants have little incentiv…

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

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

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

#108

Post by robbedpeter »

sshine wrote: post #100
Lamad123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's depressing is that this problem keeps getting worse and worse! It used to be a problem you'd encounter very occasionally, but I now experience this crap every few days, sometimes even for things that seem very obvious.

I see a silver lining: When Google no longer has economic incentive to deliver quality search results, new search engines can finally take a market share. For a year I've been using DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and they're both great, but sometimes there's something they just don't give me, and I've felt the need to Google it. Now that Google's results are deteriorating, I find myself doing that less. I've been able to…

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

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

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

#109

Post by zzo38computer »

iamleppert wrote: post #67

I really want a search engine that works more like a database. I want to see why it returned the results it did, like an EXPLAIN syntax does for SQL queries. I want fine grain control of the actual query, and ability to sort the results by different facets. I think there’s 100% a market for a new search engine that is geared toward the power user, the researcher. Google hasn’t innovated their actual search engine in…

Yes. Search engines, web browser, etc should be made improved for such a purpose.

I also would want to have the feature like EXPLAIN and to use the other features of SQL such as ORDER BY, etc. (Even on Hacker News too, to be able to change sort order, I would prefer to list the comments in order by the date/time.)

Often, I would want to use SQL to search things that are not available as SQL, or even as CSV (which could be imported into a SQL database; SQLite command shell has this capability built-in).

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

#110

Post by clove »

kazinator wrote: post #62
braddeicide wrote: post #37

Google results are low quality unless you enable verbatim. Tools, all results, verbatim. It blows my mind this isn't the default. I can only assume they've adopted the opinion of search engines before them that they could benefit from showing lower quality results to keep the users on their site longer.

Is this something accessible through the Settings, bottom right? I cannot find it.

DDG's !gvb bang is faster.
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