51–60 of 79 posts
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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.
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.…
Less than one out of six hundred trips takes anyone to the hospital, but we wouldn't want a car that breaks down as soon as anyone is injured. People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work. Google gets ad clicks by building a brand, they want us to associate them with "competent to handle all my search needs." This is why Ford and Dodge make stock cars, not because they want to s…
That was part of the draw of switching to Google way back when. If you had a more challenging search to pull off, you used Google, and eventually it became a habit to just visit Google in the first place.
Now I'm starting to try DDG when Google frustrates me. I also don't need 'Google Power' for a lot of my searches.
It's probably a good thing they're implementing these changes. It makes it easier for an underdog to come in and disrupt their core business, introducing some healthy competition.
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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.
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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…
I wonder if it would help if they added some heuristic where, especially if it looks like a technical topic, it would try to find the word that was most domain-defining (in your example: "ruby") and never drop that one. I wonder how difficult that would be to solve. Even with a lot of false positives, the worst that you'd get is the results quality of not dropping any of the terms.
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The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't the…
> Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? Yup! Try searching for "ruby net::ldap search", without the quotes. For me, a CPAN page is the second result. (This is even logged out, in a chrome incognito window, so no cookies are sent to google.) That page doesn't have "ruby" or anything related to "ruby" on it, at all. But even if I was searching for something esoteric l…
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.
mars - 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].
So, I was skeptical that only 19k webpages would contain the actual word mars (as per the +mars query), and curious why "verbatim" search wasn't included for comparison. So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure that google has indexed m…
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 260 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
even though obviously there are more results that aren't "very similar" to the 260 that have been displayed.
The assumption has always been that people don't keep clicking through tens of pages of results...they refine their search terms.
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.…
Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine.
Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.
It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?