Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

insidesearch.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 168 posts

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

#101

Post by waqf »

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...

Well, I feel uncomfortable using a product that is designed to fill such people's needs at the expense of mine.

Just like Yahoo's homepage full of entertainment news, Google's aggressive query correction sends me the message "You are not our target audience, because there isn't enough money in catering to you".

And when Google is sending that message to geeks, I can't help feeling there's some brand destruction going on.

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

#102

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

> 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.

Excellent insight. Linux kernel developers have had a similar experience with the use of the likely() and unlikely() hints on conditionals; it took a while to realize that unlikely() has to mean unlikely for any user, not just "unlikely for most users, and likely for the rest". So, for example, it doesn't make sense to write "if (unlikely(feature_disabled))", because anyone with the feature disabled will meet that condition every time.

I've definitely had the experience that Google's automatic correction does the wrong thing for me more often than not; I almost always end up clicking the link to go to the search results I actually asked for.

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

#103

Post by tomkarlo »

tamersalama wrote: post #94
moultano wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure that logic works. You're assuming that the Ads are matched to the query in the same way that results are matched to the query - that a more restrictive query necessarily translates into fewer ad matches.

There's another possibility which is that the ads are the query and the search query is in fact their match result. In that case, adding or removing quotes within the search query might not have any impact on the ads being shown.

Don't know which way it works, but it seems to me the latter would be better for showing ads without having any negative impact on search results.

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

#104

Post by mh- »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #16
brador wrote: post #10

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.

What about the equals sign?

=exactstring

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

#105

Post by mladenkovacevic »

101000101 wrote: post #92
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I definitely agree with you that it's probably faster to teach a single individual with a mild interest in becoming more techie than, for example, change an industry standard for search engines. But I'm talking about entire populations of humans and machines.

Changing an entire population of computer software/hardware is a far easier and faster process than changing the entire population of humans. We're much more stubborn creatures than we'd like to believe, plus we also have a longer lifespan thus making any dramatic cultural changes (techie or otherwise) a more or less generational thing. On the other hand, just look at how fast something like cell phones or the internet is changing on what now seems like a monthly basis.

People will always do the same things they've always enjoyed doing: eat at restaurants, socialize with friends, play games, listen to music... but in what way technology is involved with those activities will only be affected by how fast the technology can change to become more human-friendly, not the other way around.

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

#106

Post by SCdF »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #21
_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…

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 use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps.

I wonder how many of the 10% are intentional.

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

#107

Post by tomkarlo »

I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more "soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a huge help.

Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers.

It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or commands that allow the extra control we want.

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

#108

Post by itswindy »

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.)

Moultano, don't be so naive. There's someone above your pay-grade that watches these things, like this change hurt the earnings or increased them. Then winks and nods kick in.

Not to mention that innocent things like favoring brands can do wonders for Google's bottom line. So you can change the results all you want, as long as you favor brands. Henry Ford and car color

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

#109

Post by unfasten »

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.

If you'd like remove Preview then you can use the CSS from this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 to disable it.

conradfr: You may also be interested in the CSS snippet in the above post since it will make the Cache link show next to the URL.

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

#110

Post by throwaway64 »

oinksoft wrote: post #72
1amzave wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? If you have JavaScript disabled, or these particular event handlers somehow blocked, the href is never replaced. > Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar That's disabled by default in most browsers (see in FF about:config, dom.disable_window_status_change -> true). Look at the mousedown handler of links to see that the href attr…

The problem is blocking google.com javascript will also block recaptcha on any domains that use it (a lot do), which they ever so helpfully moved from recaptcha.org to google.com.
Post reply on HN