Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by pasbesoin » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 9:44 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…

I seem to recall reading in prior discussion on this that +foo included stemming while "foo" does not? (And, therefor, some people were unhappy with "foo" not just due to the syntax change but also due to the difference in behavior.)

Some other people in this thread have suggested ¬ as a substitute (and no, it's not on a typical U.S. keyboard). Others point out that ¬ means negation in a typical context. Do you folks index backticks? If not, what about backtick? I guess that wouldn't be too *NIXy; however, most keyboards seem to have one, and if it's not currently indexed, might be a choice. (It's also "sort of quotish", in nature.)

P.S. Hmm... Backtick could cause unexpected results in the case of someone pasting a single quoted value from Word, or similar. Might not be the common, though, and I never did like Word's "smart quotes", anyway. ;-)

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

#82

Post by anjc » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 9:59 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

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…

Could it be that + is used by people who just don't know that Google treats it specially? Syntax of Google search is rather not common knowledge among general population. This might be a case especially when searching for books, songs, movies, magazines, etc. with '+' in title. Example queries (random ideas): - 18+ movies - children + fire proverb - 2+3D magazine - C++ - ++ operator Personally I often just copy-paste…

At a complete guess, i'd guess that their parser would check for usage of a plus that doesn't fit the boolean mould and doesn't count it as such. And i guess too, because like you say...autocomplete knows about it, it has exceptions for acceptable +'s that also aren't included in the malformed searches that the Google guy is talking about.

So i still can't really imagine how there are so many misused ones...

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

#83

Post by ElbertF » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:00 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…

I'm not seeing the change yet, will we be able to use "verbatim:hello world" to do an exact search? I don't see myself navigating through the sidebar each time I need to find something specific.

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

#84

Post by anjc » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:03 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #64

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be sure, Google search used to allow the period to force a connection between terms. "foo bar baz" == foo.bar.baz

No wonder my website, foo.bar.biz has been getting so much traffic :o

I'd rather . notation than "" any day. Doesn't seem to work now...

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

#85

Post by moultano » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:06 PM UTC

tamersalama wrote: post #62

InclinedPlane wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bit speculative: this is more related to Ad revenue. A wider spectrum of search results means more Ad variety and the ability to serve more advertisers per search query. I'm annoyed by Google's search quality by the day. I'm starting to use DuckDuckGo more (unless there are other alternatives).

I know it's tempting but please don't speculate like that, it raises my blood pressure. :)

Google keeps ranking changes completely siloed from the ad side of the company, and the decision makers about ranking changes don't see statistics about how it might effect ads. We don't even have a way of collecting that data. (At least as far as I've ever seen.)

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

#86

Post by moultano » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:11 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #60

daveungerer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch.

What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that, but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the feedback we've seen on HN.

We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.

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

#87

Post by TillE » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #86

JoshTriplett wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch. What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and t…

I'm getting worse and worse results for all sorts of queries over the past few years, not just technical ones. I can't think of specific examples from the main search right now (I finally snapped and switched to DDG a few weeks ago), but here's a particularly terrible one from the Android Market:

https://market.android.com/search?q=yore&so=1&c=apps

I appreciate that Google thinks I'm an illiterate chimp who doesn't know how to spell "your", but really truly, I was looking for a game with "yore" in the title. That's why I typed it. It's even an English word.

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

#88

Post by conradfr » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:33 PM UTC

kitsune_ wrote: post #43

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.

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".

I was thinking the same thing lately. I've wondering if I was crazy to notice that Google was ignoring my " ".

It is quite infuriating.

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

#89

Post by bromley » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:34 PM UTC

ElbertF wrote: post #83

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…

I'm not seeing the change yet, will we be able to use "verbatim:hello world" to do an exact search? I don't see myself navigating through the sidebar each time I need to find something specific.

Yes, please, verbatim: or similar would be great, especially for use on a mobile.

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

#90

Post by conradfr » Tue, Nov 15, 2011, 10:37 PM UTC

RexRollman wrote: post #66

I still love Google's search product but I am not real happy with the recent UI changes they have introduced. I particularly don't care for the preview arrow thing that now goes down the right side: I keep triggering the damn thing on accident.

Also the cache link has been sadly moved in that panel.