The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
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The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
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Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#2>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it.
>Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop.
As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count.
I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]:
>From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):
>"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c...
Edit:formatting
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#3I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#4mars - 197m results
"mars" - 228m results
+mars - 19k results
+"mars" - 197m results
Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#5The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the verbatim option :(
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#6I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway. Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle? It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more intuitive.
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#7I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users.
The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#8Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#9I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user.
I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time).
I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead
#10Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?
I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.