71–79 of 79 posts
Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe (but have no evidence) that Google does this to redirect users towards searches which are more likely to serve ads. The more results a search yields --> the more likely it is someone is paying to target it. This likely applies more to general users and not HN users (turns out queries for error messages are hard-to-monetize).
> turns out queries for error messages are hard-to-monetize Really? You would think it would be the perfect opportunity for competitors to advertise. Here's the user frustrated with their existing vendor because their computer is emitting some kind of gibberish instead of doing what they paid for it to do, and here you are offering a different product that presumably makes the error go away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Under their search tools menu they have a "verbatim" option. There's probably a bookmarklet out there somewhere to make it a one click option.
My post wasn't really about technical support, it's about the merits of Google's decision to fuzz your search terms in the name of better results. I'm aware of verbatim search and the fact that I can quote words to make them required for the search results. I'm saying that it's a recent phenomenon for Google to intentionally ignore words in my query in order to include more results. I'm not really sure why anyone at…
Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results. Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Interesting. I get Wikipedia's Table Tennis entry first (I do use Wikipedia a lot). The first page includes 5 local/state related links, also has an "In-depth articles" section at the bottom with three items. The 2nd page is good as well, I personally can't complain, although I still rue the day they zapped the + operator.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fr…
> They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones
I would argue that since they have access to their data and they do not do anything without having data supporting the change, they would know better what people want. You and I may very well just not be in their main demographics.