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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

#111

Post by 101000101 »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #105
101000101 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Understood.

But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?

It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome.

And the reason they have removed this operator?

Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.

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

#112

Post by mladenkovacevic »

101000101 wrote: post #111
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Understood. But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow? It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome. And t…

Oh I wasn't really commenting on Google's decision and whether it was right or wrong. Like you said before: "Time will tell". I was just offering an alternate view to your expressed optimism that Google's demographic (aka everybody) is becoming more tech savvy.

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

#113

Post by Gormo »

brador wrote: post #10
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…

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.

That character is most often used as a logical negation operator, so it may be confusing to use it as a force-inclusion operator for search.

It's also almost never found on standard US keyboards, which is why the tilde is often used as a logical negation operator in it's place.

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

#114

Post by goblin89 »

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…

Nice, now search personalization can be turned off!

> With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before

Personally, I appreciate this more than allowing to search for exact matches. Hopefully ‘filter bubble’ just became less… bubbley. =)

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

#115

Post by JonnieCache »

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.

This is a good idea, it will allow us to use the string interpolation address bar search functionality we all love in our favourite browsers.

In general, nice one google for once again keeping an ear to the ground.

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

#116

Post by nzmsv »

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.

There's a magic "nfpr=1" flag in the query string that seems to revert back to the old "did you mean" behaviour. Sometimes it randomly fails though. I don't know if this feature is going away with this update.

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

#117

Post by barrkel »

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.

Fully agree with this. Approximately 90% of the time Google thinks I misspelled something, it's wrong.

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

#118

Post by tambourine_man »

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.

Hey Matt, thanks for listening.

Since code search is gone, I'd really love a “grep” for the Web. Full page search, including headers,js,css,html comments, etc.

If you could pass that along, I believe it would make a lot of us geeks happy.

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

#119

Post by moultano »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #59
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.

Here's an official post on the subject: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-...

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

#120

Post by simonbrown »

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 href attribute is still changed. While javascript can't change the status bar explicitly any more, they can set the link's href to the fake URL and change the link's target in the click event.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/zTRQh/

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