41–50 of 168 posts
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…
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 URL…
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
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 URL…
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'll pass the feedback on. Part of the issue with + is that it turned out a lot of people were mistyping queries with + when as far as we could tell, they weren't trying to match an exact word. Getting further off the beaten path with a more rare character might help though.
Showing results for this is a search Search instead for +this is a +search
As google does for other "typos".
Failing that, a replacement for + would be welcome. I can't imagine many people type, for example ^word or =word - allowing use of a symbol that indicates promotion of that word word in the search terms, they way + did.
The difficulty will be reeducating the (presumably quite large number of - even if proportionally a small percentage of googles user base) people who have been using + in searches for the last 10-15 years (I'm almost positive this concept existed in other search engines before google) that + isn't + any more, and please use this other symbol instead.
Wow 2/3rds of people use it wrong. That surprised me. On the other hand, the post tries to pretend that this had nothing to do with + username or + brand and Google+. No, it's the users, it's their fault, not our new product naming boo boo. We'll just silently break our flagship product and hope no-one notices. Blame the customer seems a bad strategy. Just wish they'd man up and admit it. Even if it's really not the…
If you really want to be depressed, read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...
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 URL…
What search engine do you use now, out of curiosity?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
I think the algorithm does too many "magic" things lately. I've noticed this when I had some search queries for "flask" (python micro web framework) and some programming related input and most of the returned results were about "flash".
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 URL…
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user. We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
I think a lot of us would welcome spelling suggestions while we're using our + operator.
Wow 2/3rds of people use it wrong. That surprised me. On the other hand, the post tries to pretend that this had nothing to do with + username or + brand and Google+. No, it's the users, it's their fault, not our new product naming boo boo. We'll just silently break our flagship product and hope no-one notices. Blame the customer seems a bad strategy. Just wish they'd man up and admit it. Even if it's really not the…
It's definitely the case that You might be surprised and discouraged to discover that most people don't know about things like the minus operator to exclude terms from search results. If you really want to be depressed, read this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...
I know that personally i often end up with bizarre looking searches, purely because i know what i'm searching for. e.g. it might include purposeful spelling mistakes, requiring the plus to avoid autocorrection...but this doesn't mean i'm using the + incorrectly.
I just can't imagine somebody, potentially, understanding boolean logic, describing a search with it, and using it incorrectly. I can't even imagine the most naive usage being incorrect, unless you're sure that you know what they wanted to do somehow.
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 URL…
Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? (e.g. with a user-script or something?) It's incredibly obnoxious. And sadly Google's not the only on that does it.
Frankly, it seems like a major design mistake from my perspective that Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar at all. It'd be nice to be able to remove that ability, if not "un-wrap" the links entirely.