Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#1

Post by Matt_Cutts » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 6:37 PM UTC

Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms
insidesearch.blogspot.com

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#2

Post by Matt_Cutts » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 6:41 PM UTC

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word.

The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so thanks for the suggestion.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#3

Post by DanBC » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 6:51 PM UTC

This is excellent news. I know when Google does stuff that they base it on evidence, and they do it for the best of most users, and that my edge cases are not what most users would have.

I was getting caught in some frustrating searches, so I'm really pleased about this.

There's some amazing figures in the article:

> However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.

Wow.

Finally: If Google offered user controllable stemming that'd be awesome. When I started using Google there was no stemming. Now there's either Google suggested stemming or user-controlled no stemming.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#4

Post by Metapony » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

More like adds and then buries. I'd rather have the plus sign operator back, google.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#5

Post by _pghu » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

And, of course, the "search for what I actually fucking typed" mode is completely undiscoverable, hidden behind another click, and which can't be defaulted into.

This is a good bandaid, but is still a bandaid. I have still switched away from Google to a search engine that will actually search for what I told it to, not one that thinks it can guess my meaning. (Not to mention one that doesn't wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out.)

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#6

Post by mrich » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:02 PM UTC

Thanks for also considering the power users/edge cases.

Even better would be to have a prefix for the search, e.g. /l(iteral) so that you could do the whole search by keyboard only (but perhaps there is a key binding for the menu option? Would be great)

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#7

Post by redler » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:02 PM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #2

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so…

Matt, do you know if there are any plans to once again allow the mixing of exact match with the regular fuzzier search functionality? It's great to have exact matching back, but I often found it a useful strategy to build the search loosely, then refine with +specifics. Perhaps something like this, in exact match mode:

  ~run ~sprint ~hurdle nike

could be the equivalent of the old:

  run sprint hurdle +nike

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#8

Post by zobzu » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:04 PM UTC

Woohoo! that's actually something that was annoying me greatly. Type stuff and Google just search for whatever it thinks is best. Bleh!

Anyway, that's awesome.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#9

Post by ctdonath » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:04 PM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #2

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so…

Thank you. Irritation has been growing that I can't search for what I want without fielding all kinds of "well what about this variant..." results, without even + prefix and "" squishing into some unwanted twist. Would be nice to make (at least as an option) Verbatim mode the default, with a link provided per search to show variants.

Re: Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

#10

Post by brador » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 7:06 PM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #2

I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to do an exact match for a word. The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for exactly the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News, so…

This isn't really the solution we were looking for Matt.

Can we replace the + operator with something else? How about¬? We don't use that very often to the point I don't even know what it's called, but it's there on the keyboard in one keypress.