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Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

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

#91

Post by TillE »

recursive wrote: post #65
rickmb wrote: post #22

Does anybody else feel somewhat uncomfortable to live in a world where people who a) know how to spell and b) actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? I've always laughed at the idea of the internet and search engines making people dumber, but this seems like hard evidence. Most Google users are too stupid to have ever been able to use a library...

> actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"? Arguably synonyms and word stemming still are what they are looking for. You could easily argue that one either way.

Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just that, and only for certain words.

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

#92

Post by 101000101 »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #69
101000101 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be suggesting that Google's new demographic will never become more tech savvy or at least not "any time soon". That's an interesting view. I'm just a bit more optimistic.

I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.

And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results.

Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately.

The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".

We know where Google stands on this.

Let's see what happens.

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

#93

Post by RexRollman »

beernutz wrote: post #74
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.

Yes, THANK YOU! I find myself doing that as well. I don't understand why that is seen as an improvement. Also, I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded string HAS to appear in the result text". That seems different than quotes meaning "use this text exactly as i typed it".

I generally quote string searches but I do use pluses when I want to search for two separate strings in the same page, such as:

"Hacker News"+"Steve Jobs"

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

#94

Post by tamersalama »

moultano wrote: post #85
tamersalama wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I couldn't resist the speculation temptation :)

Correct me if I'm wrong; When I'm searching for (unquoted) "Canadian equivalent to SOPA Bill". I'm getting results about Soap, Telenovela, Spas, Dishwasher Soap, TV shows (and 1 related hit). The result, as you mentioned, could be ranked independent of Ads, but the Ad spectrum is wider (Soaps, Spas, Soap operas, TV shows, etc...) [I'm not getting any in this particular case].

If it's restrictive search (quoting each word - sigh!), the search result quality is slightly better (first 3 hits), but the potential of Ads is also low.

I know you put the user first - but wouldn't you speculate in my case?

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

#95

Post by thaumaturgy »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #58
tambourine_man wrote: post #56

Hi Matt, The problem is that, sometimes, even quoted queries don't guarantee that the word will be there. I hope verbatim solves that.

Yes, I believe it does. I believe verbatim requires an on-page page.

Thank you so much for this. I know I'm one of the less-than-a-percentage-point of users for whom the suggestions were making me cranky; this will make me a much happier Google user.

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

#96

Post by redthrowaway »

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…

Still waiting on being able to search for punctuation. Being able to search for "$. ruby" or "$_ perl" or "$: edit: Just realized "$_ perl" actually does work. It would be nice, however, if we could search for these kinds of terms generally and not just in specific case.

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

#97

Post by notatoad »

espeed wrote: post #18

In the past, we provided users with the “+” operator to help you search for specific terms. 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. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly. Actually, Google decided to repurpose the…

that may have had something to do with it, but i think you can probably trust the official sources that it really wasn't used much and was often used incorrectly. i've met more than a few old people who had been told at some point that they always needed to put plus signs between words instead of spaces, no matter what.

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

#98

Post by zargon »

1amzave wrote: post #50
_pghu wrote: post #5

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…

> wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out 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 manipul…

There are a variety of scripts that remove the link tracking. I use this one: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092

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

#99

Post by waqf »

eavc wrote: post #78
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!

Actually, spelling might be the only exception to that rule. If you genuinely misspell a word, it's nice to have it fix it for you in one motion.

Funny, for me spelling is least likely to be an exception to the rule. If I misspelled a word in my query then I meant it to be misspelled ... I was probably trying to track down a specific article in which I knew the word to be misspelled, or else I wanted to know how common the misspelling was. And my experience is that Google hates me a little more every year.

Meanwhile, the synonym replacement is actually helpful sometimes. I wish I could turn off one without the other: that's why "verbatim mode" isn't going to do it for me.

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

#100

Post by waqf »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #57
strictfp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can I enable literal mode permanently with a cookie? Otherwise, you better make sure that going into literal mode is fewer clicks than, say, going to DuckDuckGo.
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