The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead • Hacker News Board

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#21

Post by vanderZwan » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:07 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

danmaz74 wrote: post #3

I'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 shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google…

DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#22

Post by userbinator » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:07 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

danmaz74 wrote: post #3

I'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 shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google…

Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want.

If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore.

I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#23

Post by e12e » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:09 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #15

DanBC wrote: post #11

Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > 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. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your.…

When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO. Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.

So, 1 out of every 200 searches contain a "+", possibly for refinement. In 1 out of every three of those searches, the "+" helps the user find what's wanted. No information on a) some users are better at using the "+" correctly than others, b) If removing the "+" means that now three out of three of those searches fail.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#24

Post by userbinator » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:11 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #11

Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > 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. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your.…

What do they even mean by "it was used incorrectly"? Did they somehow reach out to and ask the user if they found what they were looking for...?

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#25

Post by ninkendo » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:12 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

danmaz74 wrote: post #3

I'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 shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google…

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results.

But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones?

Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results on my own.

I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that number of results are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#26

Post by hrktb » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #8

Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?

For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness.

For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.

Also, the title of this article is so messed up...

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#27

Post by DanBC » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:15 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #24

DanBC wrote: post #11

Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > 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. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your.…

What do they even mean by "it was used incorrectly"? Did they somehow reach out to and ask the user if they found what they were looking for...?

They mean it was ran+domly inserted+in weird places. I think.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#28

Post by DanBC » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:18 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #23

barrkel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO. Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.

So, 1 out of every 200 searches contain a "+", possibly for refinement. In 1 out of every three of those searches, the "+" helps the user find what's wanted. No information on a) some users are better at using the "+" correctly than others, b) If removing the "+" means that now three out of three of those searches fail.

And no information if the correctly used pluses were inserted by humans, deliberately, and were useful.

Still, I am surprised that Google has made search so poor for so many people in some situations. Although I understand they've done some work on making programming code easier to search for?

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#29

Post by danmaz74 » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #11

Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly. > > 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. http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your.…

Just 1 in 600... and that's how many tens of million of queries? Or hundreds?

Anyway, losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business. Even when you really just care about the average Joe.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#30

Post by Kiro » Sun, Jun 22, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #6

I 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.

But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain the exact phrase "YouTube"?