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Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

insidesearch.blogspot.com

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

#51

Post by daveungerer »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #42
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #21

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.

Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.

Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!

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

#52

Post by Natsu »

nknight wrote: post #31
Xuzz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on US keyboards, I don't think.

Depends on your OS. ¬ is a quick alt+l on any Mac. However, it's the symbol for logical negation[1], and thus probably not a great substitute for +. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%AC

On Windows, you have to do Alt+0172 to get a ¬ unless there's some shortcut I don't know offhand.

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

#53

Post by Matt_Cutts »

anjc wrote: post #49
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Could you explain how exactly the + operator is used incorrectly? 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 searc…

I'm at a conference and can't easily get on our internal VPN from here, but I'll try to remember to circle back around when I can get on our VPN.

But in general, you see a lot of stuff that looks like semi-random punctuation just sprinkled at the beginning of the query or throughout the query, things that look like people are using plus instead of space as if they're copying from an address bar, etc.

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

#54

Post by strictfp »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #47
kitsune_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

We're always trying to find the right balance. The nice thing about this change is that it gives people an escape hatch if we get it wrong. In theory, I could imagine we could look at the corresponding data to improve the balance in the future too.

Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting corrections does not interrupt my flow and are generally helpful. Auto-corrections are in great part highly disruptive for me. Please don't deviate from this very sound principle, at least not for us power users.

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

#55

Post by anjc »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #53
anjc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how exactly the + operator is used incorrectly? 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 searc…

I'm at a conference and can't easily get on our internal VPN from here, but I'll try to remember to circle back around when I can get on our VPN. But in general, you see a lot of stuff that looks like semi-random punctuation just sprinkled at the beginning of the query or throughout the query, things that look like people are using plus instead of space as if they're copying from an address bar, etc.

Ah ok that makes sense, thanks. I'm just mainly surprised at how little usage there was of the operator to begin with. I use it (used to use it) probably 20+ times a day, and would've assumed that it's common enough, at least in certain circles (academia etc).

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

#57

Post by Matt_Cutts »

strictfp wrote: post #54
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're always trying to find the right balance. The nice thing about this change is that it gives people an escape hatch if we get it wrong. In theory, I could imagine we could look at the corresponding data to improve the balance in the future too.

Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting correc…

I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong.

My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.

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

#59

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

Out of curiosity, how does google judge search result quality? It seems as though search is trending toward the idea that more results are better, when usually the opposite is true.

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

#60

Post by JoshTriplett »

daveungerer wrote: post #51
JoshTriplett wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.

Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!

If the computer successfully guesses exactly the thing you wanted and does that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a "did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do it then?".

However, if the computer guesses wrong, that will cause significantly more frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong. Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user with their original search.

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