I imagine this is a symptom of their parallelism. Sort of like the app engine datastore being eventually consistent, they operate optimistically. Presumably this reduces their costs and increases responsiveness. As for gmail, I noticed, when trying to archive a bunch of stuff, of search, select all, not operating on the theoretical full search set many years (at least 3 I'd guess) ago.
Google Memory Loss
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Re: Google Memory Loss
#42I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term. I haven't done this methodically, and I…
100% Agreed. Gmail doesn't seem to want to find stuff that is there.
I doubt it's malicious
Re: Google Memory Loss
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intersections are another thing that Google search doesn't do properly anymore. If I search for something like lkasdfjer samsung galaxy s8 it just gives me matches for samsung galaxy s8 and ignores the first word. When I do searches like this, I do it for a reason and don't want matches that lack some of the search terms.
I've found if I put the keyword in double-quotes then it makes the keyword required in the search
That helps. Even if you go to the advanced search, https://www.google.com/advanced_search, and use the box "all these words", you need to quote the words for it to take you seriously. I didn't give a good example, since there are no matches for that search (except reflections back to this discussion), but in other cases there are legitimate results that only appear after pages of invalid results.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#44Re: Google Memory Loss
#45I have also noticed that google search results, especially in the last few months, are incredibly weird and jumbled, as if they so desperately want to show me the $current_chosen_web_winners of news/ecommerce that they sneak in results from them no matter what the terms.
Re: Google Memory Loss
#46I'm confused, did i do something wrong or why can i find the referred article just fine on google, just by searching the keywords?
Re: Google Memory Loss
#47DuckDuckGo seems to have no problem returning the result, even with general terms: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tim+bray+rock+roll+animal
Re: Google Memory Loss
#48I'm confused, did i do something wrong or why can i find the referred article just fine on google, just by searching the keywords? https://imgur.com/a/szBcB
becuase the OP wrote an article that links to these things, and caused them to be re-indexed.
It's not purely a function of 'date published' it is also about frequency of access
Re: Google Memory Loss
#49Re: Google Memory Loss
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intersections are another thing that Google search doesn't do properly anymore. If I search for something like lkasdfjer samsung galaxy s8 it just gives me matches for samsung galaxy s8 and ignores the first word. When I do searches like this, I do it for a reason and don't want matches that lack some of the search terms.
I've found if I put the keyword in double-quotes then it makes the keyword required in the search
Not even this is sufficient any more. They now have a "verbatim" search, but I think even then some terms can be ignored -- terms which are not conventional "stopwords" like the.