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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

#162

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…

Still waiting on being able to search for punctuation. Being able to search for "$. ruby" or "$_ perl" or "$: edit: Just realized "$_ perl" actually does work. It would be nice, however, if we could search for these kinds of terms generally and not just in specific case.

That's great, Google does n-grams/symbol search finally. Tho 'f# "|>" ' is way less common than "$_ perl", doesn't work yet.

And i think the folks that did, e.g. hoogle took some time to get it right for 1 language

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

http://scalex.org/

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I launched a search engine that does exactly this just over a week ago, you can see it here: http://symbolhound.com/ I freaked out when I saw this headline and thought it meant google had finally decided to implement this feature a week after my launch.

That's freaking fantastic. Shame it didn't get much notice on proggit. I'll resubmit it at a busier time and share it on G+ and whatnot. You might want to submit it here yourself, so you can answer any questions people might have and let the community get to know you. Try submitting it with the "Show HN:" heading. Send me an email (in my profile) when you do submit it and I'll be sure to swing by and give it one of t…

Thanks! I do plan to post it on HN, I just want to wait until it's a bit better (right now stackoverflow dominates the results, so I need to adjust the ranking system and index more sites).

BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

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

#164

This sounds like it has potential, although I can't test it yet. You should try searching Google for information on COM programming. Try finding information on "COM Events", for example. Good luck. Macy's is on the the first page! Bing is not any better.

I get "Understanding COM Event Handling" at #1, but agree that it's not ideal. Some words like COM or IT have dual meanings where sometimes you want to treat them like stopwords and sometimes you don't.

Just tried it with verbatim but results are still no good =( I can see how it is doing exactly what it is told to do ("www.yelp.com/events"), but not what I would like. I like the idea of being able to do verbatim searches though! (and still miss the + button...)

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

#165

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 pro…

Counter example: I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried +"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation. There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actu…

I'd suggest that if there's 100 users entering the query [how to pronounce resig], there are a lot more of them that have dropped the "n" from resign than are looking for the pronunciation of resig. And even more queries overall where "resig" was supposed to be "resign". I admit it's unfortunate that sites have to guess based on the behavior of the group (rather than knowing, for example, that you usually don't misspell things) but I'm not sure any of us individually has enough query history to make those kinds of guesses.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked all over my German keyboard, with its crazy-assed bracket locations, and I don't see it anywhere.

My UK keyboard has it left of the '1' key above the qwerty keys

I have carat and a little circle. The bastards.

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

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's freaking fantastic. Shame it didn't get much notice on proggit. I'll resubmit it at a busier time and share it on G+ and whatnot. You might want to submit it here yourself, so you can answer any questions people might have and let the community get to know you. Try submitting it with the "Show HN:" heading. Send me an email (in my profile) when you do submit it and I'll be sure to swing by and give it one of t…

Thanks! I do plan to post it on HN, I just want to wait until it's a bit better (right now stackoverflow dominates the results, so I need to adjust the ranking system and index more sites). BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

>BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.

Sorry about that. I would have thought putting it in the email field would have made it visible. I've put it in the about field now.

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

#168

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: I 100% believe google keeps ranking changes siloed from the ad side, but Google 100% favors its own properties within its search results so you can't be surprised that someone thinks this way? Here are some examples for you that need major changes in my opinion.

www.google.com/#hl=en&q=san+francisco+restaurant+reviews www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hollywood+cauldron

-when i previously used google for retail reviews I would just bypass all of your results to get to yelp. sometimes trip advisor.

-look at those youtube video results for the 2nd query. So off the mark, but you guys keep them in there because it is good for google. it doesn't help your users and makes you look bad. I don't know what you guys are thinking.

I use Bing for 95% of my searches now. For tech searches I still think you guys are better, but for everything else I use Bing.

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