Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on the page at all(unlikekinds.com)
unlikekinds.com
Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on the page at all
https://unlikekinds.com/article/google-ranking-keyword-not-in-content
167 comments
Agreed, the results with the "missing" flag are the worst. I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.
I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.
I increasingly suspect that Google is entering the lengthy death-by-design-by-committee phase that will ultimately unseat them as the top player in their space.
> But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.
Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
Then you've never worked on a search engine. There's a real bias in the comments here because the way technical people search for technical topics is dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine. Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
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Normies ruined search engines.
No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles.
There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense.
I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.
No, really. Especially if Google is using search queries and clicks to update ML models - non technical people "pollute" the algorithms with poorly formed queries and overwhelming numbers of clicks on non technical articles.
There's probably enough of a niche now for a genuine technical search engine. Which treats keywords like Google used to, maybe with some regex thrown in and what not. None of this full question nonsense.
I personally believe that allowing people to search with full queries has had a negative effect on society - very little critical thought goes into which parts of your question are actually important, and searching is no longer a learnable skill; just ask a literal question and let Google do all the thinking for you.
It is an interesting viewpoint. One of the advantages of Twitter is that people can weight, or Twitter itself can weight who is posting and sharing that information. For instance, if Fred Wilson writes something about startups or VC, I generally find it interesting, if he writes about public markets, I largely ignore it. Originally, page rank probably solved quality of the source well enough, but as more interesting content is appearing in podcasts or niche, subscription blogs, does the approach need to be drastically different? What I mean is rather than Google's algorithm likely boosting the popularly clicked and shared post, "10 Things I learned as a VC Intern", should Google's ML algorithm weight that click based on the expertise of the search user or subject matter density, etc.? Like should Linus Torvalds clicking on a link be given far more importance on a technical/software related query than myself?
So, ClickRank? Makes sense to me.
Or at least, rather than factoring in the expertise of the clicker, factor in the similarity of the clicker to the new searcher, so as to predict the new searcher's behaviour.
Or at least, rather than factoring in the expertise of the clicker, factor in the similarity of the clicker to the new searcher, so as to predict the new searcher's behaviour.
Having never worked on a search engine myself I will avoid guessing as to why Google's results are the way they are. As a search engine user I noticed Google's results seem to be less useful than they were before. After a particularly poor series of results I tried DuckDuckGo and found the results better. It seems similar to when I switched to Google from MetaCrawler. Whatever the reasons I just want to find what I'm looking for.
It's not sudden.
We can see the start when HN complained when Google removed + and said use "" instead.
We can see the start when HN complained when Google removed + and said use "" instead.
And then went on to ignore both that as well as the verbatim option and serve up stupid results despite our carefully crafted query strings.
I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago and I can repeat it: if they pay my tickets and a fair price I'll be happy to hold my course "how to continue being best by not nerfing your market leading product".
Personally I gave up last year and I'm now on DDG. Not perfect but less annoying.
I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago and I can repeat it: if they pay my tickets and a fair price I'll be happy to hold my course "how to continue being best by not nerfing your market leading product".
Personally I gave up last year and I'm now on DDG. Not perfect but less annoying.
I've gone over almost completely to DDG as well, for at least the last few years, but have noticed that DDG has been ignoring required terms more often lately. But they're still better than Alphagoog.
DDG has a feedback mechanism (the almost invisible "Send Feedback" thing in the lower right corner), but I'm unsure if anyone there actually sees the feedback and cares enough to do anything about it -- as I said, the problem is getting worse over time.
And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm going to continue complaining about having to use quote pairs instead of + for required terms. That still _really_ grinds my gears.
DDG has a feedback mechanism (the almost invisible "Send Feedback" thing in the lower right corner), but I'm unsure if anyone there actually sees the feedback and cares enough to do anything about it -- as I said, the problem is getting worse over time.
And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm going to continue complaining about having to use quote pairs instead of + for required terms. That still _really_ grinds my gears.
Sadly, I've been seeing similar behavior from DDG lately. In some cases it's been even worse than Google. I really wish there was a search engine optimized for technical work.
>> I can abide synonymous substitutions, for instance if I search for "interesting articles" and the results include "fascinating", "intriguing", etc. But it is boneheaded to serve up results that completely ignore one of or more search terms.
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc).
His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results.
Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search. Requiring exact match for every term in a query would vastly reduce usability.
He wasn't talking about that, and actually said he was fine with synonyms (and I would assume stemming, etc).
His problem was Google flat-out ignoring some of his search terms, thus giving irrelevant results. I don't have examples handy, but I'm under the impression that Google often ignores some of the more relevant terms in my queries to give me more popular results.
Which is ironic since most pre-Google search engines defaulted to OR'ing terms together, and one of Google's innovations was to switch to defaulting to AND. Now they seem to be revisiting the mistake of their competitors and wandering back to something like default-OR.
now I have to control F a term to visually ignore results without my term.
what is really amazing is how bad youtube search is. I can search for the exact name of a video, and it wont show up in the results. many times I have to use google search to search youtube
what is really amazing is how bad youtube search is. I can search for the exact name of a video, and it wont show up in the results. many times I have to use google search to search youtube
> dramatically different from the way the general audience uses a search engine
How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!"
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search.
Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software
How many people have you actually talked to? Over the last few months I've had more than a few non-tech friends/family/etc complain to me about Google's broken search results, often asking if I knew of a way to fix it. The "missing: <query_term>" behavior is particularly enraging: I've seen multiple people yell at Google's search results variations of "F* you, Google! Stop telling me how you're ignoring half of my search!"
> Most people use natural-language sentence fragments in search.
Most people have a wide variety of behaviors that cannot (and shouldn't) be reduced into s single group. That said, a lot of people have learned to use Google in ways that work for them, even if it sometimes seems inefficient or unusual to those of use used to using query languages. Assuming you know what they "meant to ask" is often wrong and usually considered offensive. Priding tools people can choose to use is great; attempting to DWIM[1] - interpreting what the user intended instead of what they said - has been a terrible idea that ruins tools even since it was first attempted >50 years ago at Xerox PARC[2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15628014
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM#Software
Yeah, Google has steadily become more and more infuriating to use to answer questions that aren't already answered on Stack Overflow. If they're going to use NLP, how about they use NLP to prioritize things that aren't exactly like the 10 or 15 results pages which give a 10 year old solution to my problem or which are written for an esoteric package and not the one I'm mentioning in my search results?
They're probably running web queries through the same or similar NLP engine as the Google Home and Android voice query to stress test it with additional input. That roughly coincides with the time frame that results have gotten worse.
> No major search engine has worked that way since the 90s, I don't know why this is suddenly becoming a narrative on this site now.
I understand the idea, but you are wrong or at least not completely right (I can't speak for all markets).
I know someone who learned to spell as a kid using Google, because if he didn't spell the words correctly he wouldn't get to see pictures of the moon or whatever he wanted to see.
Also after they learned to guess what people meant, Google used to be able to respect +, "" and also the verbatim option hidden beneath a button.
For a while they would also ask politely: did you mean x?
Since then it has become worse and worse: silently rewriting, fuzzing without asking etc.
I understand the idea, but you are wrong or at least not completely right (I can't speak for all markets).
I know someone who learned to spell as a kid using Google, because if he didn't spell the words correctly he wouldn't get to see pictures of the moon or whatever he wanted to see.
Also after they learned to guess what people meant, Google used to be able to respect +, "" and also the verbatim option hidden beneath a button.
For a while they would also ask politely: did you mean x?
Since then it has become worse and worse: silently rewriting, fuzzing without asking etc.
Yes, I caught on to that change with Google a long while back (when they started removing useful search modifiers).
The problem is that Google can't even get the right search results with natural-language sentences or sentence fragments.
The problem is that Google can't even get the right search results with natural-language sentences or sentence fragments.
So is there another search engine for techies?
Just today I had to ask Google Scholar for a lot of things since Google itself was completely useless. So it's not like it can't be done. Maybe that's the way going forward, one general search for grandma and specialized search engines for everyone else.
Just today I had to ask Google Scholar for a lot of things since Google itself was completely useless. So it's not like it can't be done. Maybe that's the way going forward, one general search for grandma and specialized search engines for everyone else.
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Having a list of stopwords is different from discarding half the query.
Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back.
Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.
Yes, most search engines have ignored commonly-used words since at least the late 90s. But Google only started doing its idiotic "Missing: [key word from your search]" fairly recently. And it's a step back.
Although I personally don't think this is the case, it's something that's going to provide ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who'll swear they're just doing it to drive clicks to pages with Google ads.
Even for non-technical searches, Google is becoming increasingly worthless.
I think a lot of it is about giving too much weight to (its flawed) geolocation.
Last night I searched for "Vintage computer store $location" while I was in $location. All I got back was Best Buy locations, eBay listings, irrelevant Yelp lists, and local newspaper articles about computers in general.
Today I'm in a different place, but performed the identical search, including the $location where I was last night, and guess what -- helpful results!
Google is trying too hard to be Yelp, and not hard enough to be a search engine.
I think a lot of it is about giving too much weight to (its flawed) geolocation.
Last night I searched for "Vintage computer store $location" while I was in $location. All I got back was Best Buy locations, eBay listings, irrelevant Yelp lists, and local newspaper articles about computers in general.
Today I'm in a different place, but performed the identical search, including the $location where I was last night, and guess what -- helpful results!
Google is trying too hard to be Yelp, and not hard enough to be a search engine.
A very, very large percentage of searches are for local locations, which is why you see these cards and 'answers' as your result. Most of the time it's what people want.
> Most of the time it's what people want.
It really sucks being a frequent traveller, and frequent VPN user and having to REALLY go out of my way just to get some useful default behavior.
VPNing through Iceland and now all the Google Flights prices are priced in Icelandic Kroner and not even a clear dropdown to change this preference. Try the URL hack to change the currency code in the get parameters and MAYBE get what I want.
There are so many ways to detect this and assume this preference, and they opt for the most debilitating one. Many services are following this trend, all because of blindly following some A/B test iteration.
Add the human sense back into it.
And god forbid the VPN server you used was used by someone else doing something odd, welcome to CAPTCHA HELL! Where we make all the assumptions about what you want until search is no longer useful for you, but don't let you access search at all by assuming you the current user are the problem based on IP address alone!
It really sucks being a frequent traveller, and frequent VPN user and having to REALLY go out of my way just to get some useful default behavior.
VPNing through Iceland and now all the Google Flights prices are priced in Icelandic Kroner and not even a clear dropdown to change this preference. Try the URL hack to change the currency code in the get parameters and MAYBE get what I want.
There are so many ways to detect this and assume this preference, and they opt for the most debilitating one. Many services are following this trend, all because of blindly following some A/B test iteration.
Add the human sense back into it.
And god forbid the VPN server you used was used by someone else doing something odd, welcome to CAPTCHA HELL! Where we make all the assumptions about what you want until search is no longer useful for you, but don't let you access search at all by assuming you the current user are the problem based on IP address alone!
Sorry, but you’re an edge case. I wouldn’t expect everything to work perfectly when you’re VPN’ing thru different countries.
Only an edge case because:
There are more and more reasons to VPN through different countries.
There are more and more teams using A/B tests and completely removing the human element from their UX design process.
A human would say "hey it makes sense to have a currency picker here, thats super easy since we already have this on the backend"
The A/B test says "hey nobody taps the currency picker so therefore it must be REDUCING your engagement" When its really completely unrelated.
There are more and more reasons to VPN through different countries.
There are more and more teams using A/B tests and completely removing the human element from their UX design process.
A human would say "hey it makes sense to have a currency picker here, thats super easy since we already have this on the backend"
The A/B test says "hey nobody taps the currency picker so therefore it must be REDUCING your engagement" When its really completely unrelated.
This was actually solved for languages long ago through NavigatorLanguage but now we've regressed to stupid IP based country lookups.
I wonder if NavigatorCurrency.currency should be a thing!
I wonder if NavigatorCurrency.currency should be a thing!
I barely think of Google as a search engine for the web anymore. Modern Google is more like an "ask a commonly asked question and get an answer" engine.
My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.
My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.
It's great if you want a major brand, shopping site, or easily answered question that wikipedia and sport sites can answer. Which has been the direction they've been going in for years with updates to prioritise brands, recency and frequency of update etc. Add in the search bubble from your history, and "Google knows best" including also words and considering even quoted terms optional. Not much search engine left.
Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more.
Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.
Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more.
Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.
What's interesting re: getting better results is how much my own behavior has changed in response to how Google behaves now.
In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for.
I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.
In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for.
I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.
Today I searched for a phrase including the word “Swedish”. First result was an article that contained the word “German”, which Google had helpfully bolded in the excerpt, as Swedish and German are basically the same thing I guess?
I guess you're lucky they didn't return a page about Robert Bork where the surname was repeated two times.
sounds like they're allowing substitutions based on their word2vec stuff. and doing it a little too liberally
I installed a browser extension that adds a blocklist to google's search results. So every time I visit a '10 wierd hacks to...' type of page I block the entire domain from ever showing up in my results again. It take a while to filter them all out, but it drastically increased my search experience. Anyways I use duck duck go nowadays so now my plugin is irrelevant...
Which extension are you using? Personal Blocklist broke for me a while back, and now my days are filled with scrolling past
w3schools.com to get to developer.mozilla.org
A duck duck go search of something like
<what I'm looking up> javascript mdn
give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.
<what I'm looking up> javascript mdn
give me developer.mozilla.org at the top every time. It's somehow better than site:developer.mozilla.org for some weird reason.
Just put !mdn in your DDG search and it will take you right to MDN. Same with !g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc.
In Firefox, right-click the search box at developer.mozilla.org and select "Add a Keyword for this search". Put a keyword, something like m.
Then you don't even need a search engine. Just type
Then you don't even need a search engine. Just type
m your search term here
Wow! That's wicked cool- thanks for the tip!
EDIT: I'll add for others that this keyword is stored as a bookmark, so you can find it in your bookmarks and edit/delete/etc.
EDIT: I'll add for others that this keyword is stored as a bookmark, so you can find it in your bookmarks and edit/delete/etc.
!mdn uses mdn's search and returns their results, but I actually prefer ddg's. And using only mdn has the side-benefit of including relevant SO results (and others) lower on the front page sometimes.
Anecdotally, so many of us do exactly that scroll.
It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools.
Tyranny of the majority I guess.
It must be millions of us, but apparently not enough for Google to decide MDN > w3schools.
Tyranny of the majority I guess.
Same here. There's still times where a !g actually improves the results but usually duckduckgo's results are fine.
Google used to have that function. But it was very useful, so of course they removed it.
I wish there were a way to exchange that block lists between the users of this extension.
This may be a controversial opinion, but it also seems that Google's (intentional or unintentional) biases are severely hobbling results. Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked. I get a sense that naive individuals at Google are applying their world views when training algorithms to weight results based on content.
This didn't used to be the case. It used to be, if I searched for it, I could find it, no matter how popular or controversial it was. I used to live in China and it reminds me of how Baidu works.
This didn't used to be the case. It used to be, if I searched for it, I could find it, no matter how popular or controversial it was. I used to live in China and it reminds me of how Baidu works.
This is an interesting one because we’re also seeing an increase in propaganda and misinformation being propagated online by some pretty resourceful players. Doing absolutely no curation can also have some pretty significant consequences.
The mainstream narrative has always been propaganda. This is not new. The powers that be are not happy that propaganda other than their own is slipping through.
> Unpopular political opinions and non-mainstream narratives are increasingly de-ranked.
Citation? Examples?
Citation? Examples?
I'd really like to see this tested somehow, because I have friends along the political spectrum that complain of the same thing. I'm not sure how google is somehow hindering results for left, right and middle.
I think they mean that when they search 'donald trump news' they have a set of results in their mind they expect to see, and Google gives them back something different.
That's a really hard issue to solve...
That's a really hard issue to solve...
Can you remember any of your queries? I'm happy to pass them along to debug. If you have your search history turned on you can find them here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19
One example that continuously irks me that recently started happening is if I search for "python list index" (without the quotes) the official reference material is ranked 7th. I don't need a tutorial or a second hand source, I need the information I'm looking for which is in the official python documentation. Not on programiz, or tutorialspoint (twice), or w3schools, or geeks4geeks.
Thanks!
This is a UX issue, not a technical one. Google doesn't want people abandoning the site if they see zero results for their searches. So if a particularly obscure search doesn't bring up anything, Google will show you some results it thinks is close.
I find the message "missing: [term]" more helpful than not. Anytime I see that, I don't click the link. That sends a small signal to Google (compounding with the scale of search queries) that their #1 link isn't what the user was looking for.
I find the message "missing: [term]" more helpful than not. Anytime I see that, I don't click the link. That sends a small signal to Google (compounding with the scale of search queries) that their #1 link isn't what the user was looking for.
That would make sense if the bad search results were limited to searches that have few results. But Google's results are suboptimal for all searches.
My biggest problem with Google search these days is their recent push towards localized results.
I speak two languages, english and german. I set my search preferences accordingly and expect the results within those languages to be ranked by their actual quality. However it seems Google favors results in my local (german) language, which often don't appear to be the best results if both languages were weighted equally.
Particularly when searching for "{popular game/album/film} review" I perceive the returned results as subpar, simply because my local media landscape doesn't seem as thorough, high-quality and in-depth to me.
I speak two languages, english and german. I set my search preferences accordingly and expect the results within those languages to be ranked by their actual quality. However it seems Google favors results in my local (german) language, which often don't appear to be the best results if both languages were weighted equally.
Particularly when searching for "{popular game/album/film} review" I perceive the returned results as subpar, simply because my local media landscape doesn't seem as thorough, high-quality and in-depth to me.
google.com will give you German ranking from Germany. You can still workaround that with google.com/ncr. The results are night and day for programming related questions.
I've heard a while ago that they want to deprecate ncr though.
Personally I use Google only for local searches and DuckDuckGo for almost everything else. Works well for me.
Personally I use Google only for local searches and DuckDuckGo for almost everything else. Works well for me.
Search isn't a Google product anymore, it's a learning tool like reCaptcha. Sure, the ads at the top of your search results are a product, but the real value of search is that they can capture everything you do to learn more about you. So every time you refine your search and try again, they learn a little bit more about what you're interested in, or what you're doing, and maybe what you're working on for your job, and advertisers will throw money at them to get the "better" information for targeting. Search is just the latest casualty of the war for your attention online.
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Googlebombs have "been a thing" for 20 years...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
"Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
"Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
In September 2000 the first Google bomb with a verifiable creator was created by Hugedisk Men's Magazine, a now-defunct online humor magazine, when it linked the text "dumb motherfucker" to a site selling George W. Bush-related merchandise."
I just put quotes in half my queries these days.
A hilarious example of this last week; searching 'email CTR' brought up pages with email/center... Google of all companies should care about CTR!
A hilarious example of this last week; searching 'email CTR' brought up pages with email/center... Google of all companies should care about CTR!
Maybe you didn't mean literally but for me it doesn't show me anything about Peter Thiel.
Yeah the listicle type results have really started to increase in search relevance for me. ESPECIALLY when I search on mobile. I think mobile Google Search is a truly awful experience with an extremely cluttered results page that I can never properly navigate.
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Google is becoming a service that no longer performs searches and instead attempts to project reality back at me based on a keyword cue. This is how the AI takes over society.
The quality has definitely gone down. It seems a lot of sites that play the SEO game heavily have floated to the top and far fewer smaller sites with quality content show up.
I've been using Qwant as a search engine, so far its much more palatable than others I've tried (like DuckDuckGo).
I'm working on a project that involves the bsp too. If you found any great resources I'd really appreciate a link.
Is google becoming useless or the majority of the content people are putting on the web is useless?
I work on (non Google) search engines. This kind of thing has been happening for decades. Whether it’s synonyms, entity extraction, or embeddings to capture conceptual relationships, I’m surprised this is surprising... but then again I’m a search nerd :)
On Google, at least a few years ago and back, when you put a query "X" you were guaranteed to see X in the HTML contents of the page. Or at least I can't remember getting a result that didn't satisfy that condition. Now it's common to not find X there.
Yes you’re right on exact matches.
For basic keyword searches. It’s not uncommon for search users to want inexact equivalencies, synonyms or conceptually close search results. (Search for cold, get back rhinovirus). Every user and use case has different definitions/tolerances of “this term appeared on the page”
It’s a complicated topic, without simple solutions. I wrote about it here.
https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2018/12/07/synonyms-b...
For basic keyword searches. It’s not uncommon for search users to want inexact equivalencies, synonyms or conceptually close search results. (Search for cold, get back rhinovirus). Every user and use case has different definitions/tolerances of “this term appeared on the page”
It’s a complicated topic, without simple solutions. I wrote about it here.
https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2018/12/07/synonyms-b...
If users want equivalencies then they shouldn't use quotes, which are for exact match. Let's not play semantics here. Search syntax is clear - put things in quotes, get 'exact match' in return. Equivalent words are not exact match. Get smart with me, decrease usability for me. This is what is happening.
We can argue whether there is place for more operators, or whether it's better on average for an average user to still be "outsmarted" by the engine, but it's clear what's going on - these aren't exact match results and the results often have zero relevance with what user is looking for precisely because the user knows the specific word WILL appear on the page they need and a page without that word WON'T be what they need. I don't know how much clearer we can be :) It used to work (or seemed to). Now it doesn't. It frustrates some people. That's it.
We can argue whether there is place for more operators, or whether it's better on average for an average user to still be "outsmarted" by the engine, but it's clear what's going on - these aren't exact match results and the results often have zero relevance with what user is looking for precisely because the user knows the specific word WILL appear on the page they need and a page without that word WON'T be what they need. I don't know how much clearer we can be :) It used to work (or seemed to). Now it doesn't. It frustrates some people. That's it.
Yes you’re right. I missed the “” in your comment and failed at reading comprehension
But there's more to it anyway.
I've interpreted searches. Database searches, not web pages, but my problems should apply to web search too: For example, a user who types "märz 2019" with quotes might mean that string, in German, or might on the other hand mean that particular month and use the quotes to eliminate february 2019, march 2018, etc. And people enter the exact string they remember in the hope of avoiding a sea of mismatches, but then they either mistype or don't remember quite the right wording.
I've interpreted searches. Database searches, not web pages, but my problems should apply to web search too: For example, a user who types "märz 2019" with quotes might mean that string, in German, or might on the other hand mean that particular month and use the quotes to eliminate february 2019, march 2018, etc. And people enter the exact string they remember in the hope of avoiding a sea of mismatches, but then they either mistype or don't remember quite the right wording.
This has nothing with the quality of the search results. This belongs in the "did you mean" box at the top.
It's extremely common to become very frustrated and angry when you cannot get an exact match for the search terms you've entered after explicitly indicating to the search engine that you want an exact match and nothing else.
Don't mess with my search terms! Bring exact matches back! Only show pages that match the search terms!
Don't mess with my search terms! Bring exact matches back! Only show pages that match the search terms!
Verbatim mode as default?
The amount of automatically created synonyms is getting out of hand, it decided the name of where I work is a synonym for another company in the same business that's 15 miles away
The amount of automatically created synonyms is getting out of hand, it decided the name of where I work is a synonym for another company in the same business that's 15 miles away
I never figured out what verbatim does. It certainly doesn't seem to force exact matches.
Verbatim mode does not resolve the issue.
From the customers point of view, those two things are pretty similar.
Verbatim mode has been broken more than once, too :-/
Is it possible that the times you're frustrated that verbatim search isn't working are the same times there are no decent results to your query anywhere on the internet?
It seems to me the main failing of Google is they have no good way to say "We understood your question, but the answer isn't on the internet".
Instead they just return a set of not very relevant results.
It seems to me the main failing of Google is they have no good way to say "We understood your question, but the answer isn't on the internet".
Instead they just return a set of not very relevant results.
The texts other sites use to link to given site have affected the search results on Google for many many years.
This has been abused many times by using derogatory link texts when linking to politicians web pages.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
This has been abused many times by using derogatory link texts when linking to politicians web pages.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
I would so love access to Google database, but with Boolean search and some simple Regex / Grep type functionality. We can but dream.
The closest to this is to use BigQuery over HTTPArchive, it's not the Google index but a pretty solid base though and requires no setup at all.
https://github.com/HTTPArchive/legacy.httparchive.org/blob/m...
You can search for anything in the source-code of pages, using any regex or grep you can imagine.
https://github.com/HTTPArchive/legacy.httparchive.org/blob/m...
You can search for anything in the source-code of pages, using any regex or grep you can imagine.
Get a job at Google and then you can directly query the underlying data with as complex a query as you like (and don't have to use indexes etc).
Obviously running your custom filter logic across every byte of data that has ever existed on the internet is compute heavy... But Google has lots of that!
Obviously running your custom filter logic across every byte of data that has ever existed on the internet is compute heavy... But Google has lots of that!
> Now it's common to not find X there.
Do you have an example? Exact match has been working fine for me.
Do you have an example? Exact match has been working fine for me.
Just guessing, but maybe there just aren't enough results featuring that exact match? Would you prefer to just see less results in such a case?
Yes, because then I know I need to broaden my query slightly. Feed me a bunch of junk I didn't ask for and my first instinct is to restrict my query more.
Absolutely. I want to see what I searched for, not what some algorithm thinks might be related. A lack of results is often useful information when searching for an error, for instance. It tells me whether I've run into a common situation or something that's likely related to my specific configuration or use case.
Can you provide an example of this? People always say this, but never provide the query.
This is an example from yesterday:
"azure" devops agent "checkout" "freeze"
I'm obviously searching for something very specific here, and Google helpfully decided to show me results omitting "freeze" and "checkout" so I had to quote them.
I also notice that it looks like Google thinks that check-up is the same thing as checkout, which in context are not synonyms, though this would require Google to infer "git checkout" but I didn't include git because that would introduce another universe of unhelpful results.
https://dzone.com/articles/getting-started-with-jenkins-the-... was included which doesn't include "azure" at all, though this is obviously Google being cheeky.
Of course I could also call this somewhat sinister, as Google is basically saying I should ditch a direct competitor to their services and instead use a self-hosted service. Or maybe I'm projecting since I would like to ditch Azure DevOps and use Jenkins, but in any case there's an example.
Feel free to play with it: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS820US820&biw=1...
Of course, in this case it was a networking problem so I do have to admit that usually when Google starts ignoring what I typed it's because the answer to the question is something else entirely. Though sometimes I know exactly what I'm asking for and Google doesn't get it.
"azure" devops agent "checkout" "freeze"
I'm obviously searching for something very specific here, and Google helpfully decided to show me results omitting "freeze" and "checkout" so I had to quote them.
I also notice that it looks like Google thinks that check-up is the same thing as checkout, which in context are not synonyms, though this would require Google to infer "git checkout" but I didn't include git because that would introduce another universe of unhelpful results.
https://dzone.com/articles/getting-started-with-jenkins-the-... was included which doesn't include "azure" at all, though this is obviously Google being cheeky.
Of course I could also call this somewhat sinister, as Google is basically saying I should ditch a direct competitor to their services and instead use a self-hosted service. Or maybe I'm projecting since I would like to ditch Azure DevOps and use Jenkins, but in any case there's an example.
Feel free to play with it: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS820US820&biw=1...
Of course, in this case it was a networking problem so I do have to admit that usually when Google starts ignoring what I typed it's because the answer to the question is something else entirely. Though sometimes I know exactly what I'm asking for and Google doesn't get it.
Wow THANK YOU! I have been asking for an example of this for literally years.
I think possibly what is happening here is that the index believes "azure" is on the page.
Consider the second result here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22azure%22+%22Allows+adding...
(the one that starts java.dzone.com but leads to the same article).
It appears to have captured at index time a phrase "Microservices and Serverless on Azure" that is no longer in the artcile (possibly a link to another article).
Perhaps a Googler can explain exactly what is happening.
I think possibly what is happening here is that the index believes "azure" is on the page.
Consider the second result here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22azure%22+%22Allows+adding...
(the one that starts java.dzone.com but leads to the same article).
It appears to have captured at index time a phrase "Microservices and Serverless on Azure" that is no longer in the artcile (possibly a link to another article).
Perhaps a Googler can explain exactly what is happening.
Can you provide an example of this? People always say this, but never provide the query.
Because anyone who's used Google in the last 10 years knows that Google tailors its results to what it thinks you want to see.
So a search query that fails for one HN reader may work for another, or at least work differently.
A repeated frustration in my life has been explaining to bosses that the search results that appear on their personal phone are not the same as what will appear on a client's computer.
Because anyone who's used Google in the last 10 years knows that Google tailors its results to what it thinks you want to see.
So a search query that fails for one HN reader may work for another, or at least work differently.
A repeated frustration in my life has been explaining to bosses that the search results that appear on their personal phone are not the same as what will appear on a client's computer.
It's pointless to provide examples, because Google will quickly "recall" anything that is being searched by multiple different people.
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to use Google Search for searching in Internet. You are only allowed to look up viral memes and query neural networks, trained by other people's searches. Searching for rare and unique things will quickly get you banned. An interesting side-effect: using modern Google to check if name is vacant is meaningless. I used to google for names to see, if something else used them, but Google's search repeatedly returned me 0 results, even when there were multiple pages with that particular name in title, many of them years old. Searching for the same thing couple of weeks later have suddenly returned hundreds of hits.
I wonder, how much it costs to actually query Google's database instead of some distant neural network approximation. Apparently, Google's own employees can't afford it anymore — some of them are using DuckDuckGo instead (they even added it to Chrome, lol)
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to use Google Search for searching in Internet. You are only allowed to look up viral memes and query neural networks, trained by other people's searches. Searching for rare and unique things will quickly get you banned. An interesting side-effect: using modern Google to check if name is vacant is meaningless. I used to google for names to see, if something else used them, but Google's search repeatedly returned me 0 results, even when there were multiple pages with that particular name in title, many of them years old. Searching for the same thing couple of weeks later have suddenly returned hundreds of hits.
I wonder, how much it costs to actually query Google's database instead of some distant neural network approximation. Apparently, Google's own employees can't afford it anymore — some of them are using DuckDuckGo instead (they even added it to Chrome, lol)
I... What? This is so disconnected from any experience I've ever had searching anything I don't even know how to approach it. What on Earth do viral memes have to do with anything? What does "banned" even mean in this context? There's no such thing as a ban from Google search.
And if I were to hazard a guess I think you dramatically overestimate the role of neural networks in search in general.
And if I were to hazard a guess I think you dramatically overestimate the role of neural networks in search in general.
"banned" in this context probably means that idiotic popup about "unusual traffic detected from your machine" and if i would "pretty please run some anti-virus scanning software please".
This happens often when creating complex search terms with 'inurl' and 'intext' operators. This happens to me at least once a month.
This happens often when creating complex search terms with 'inurl' and 'intext' operators. This happens to me at least once a month.
Just curious, do you live in a western country? Do you have a Google account? I use funny queries like that often but I've seen that message maybe only once or twice before. There must be some additional factors involved.
Western country while logged in on my google account. I've given it some thought myself, I have that account logged in from a variety of systems: linux boxes and windows boxes some behind a vpn, some not.
I suppose it sometimes looks like my account is used for botting, but then again: why wouldn't I be allowed to connect my bot to their results, given that google uses bots to index the content in the first place?
Despite the fact that I could probably adjust to better fit their 'nothing weird going on here' preconceptions, I think I'd rather complain and hope that over time it's google that will change.
I suppose it sometimes looks like my account is used for botting, but then again: why wouldn't I be allowed to connect my bot to their results, given that google uses bots to index the content in the first place?
Despite the fact that I could probably adjust to better fit their 'nothing weird going on here' preconceptions, I think I'd rather complain and hope that over time it's google that will change.
Clearing cookies and use of a shared VPN server are the main culprits for this error.
If neighbouring IP's to yours abuse Google services, you'll see way more of these errors.
If neighbouring IP's to yours abuse Google services, you'll see way more of these errors.
This is so disconnected from any experience I've ever had searching anything I don't even know how to approach it.
Then consider yourself lucky. The post was a little rambling, but it wasn't wrong.
Then consider yourself lucky. The post was a little rambling, but it wasn't wrong.
If you want exact then put it in quotes. Sometimes you may not know the exact language to use or proper language to ask and in those cases their current functionality is extremely useful.
The problem is, quotes don't work anymore. Even the verbatim mode doesn't restrict searches to exact matches. No matter what I've tried, Google still messes with my search results.
In fact, some of the recent google queries returned results that have nothing to do with the query! I had to go to - sorry - bing to find what I was looking for.
Not really true: Google bombing is almost as old as Google itself.
The article clearly explains the phone number is related to Uber, and the top post is people worried about Uber phone number scams. So why are they surprised the 3rd results is also about uber phone number scams?
I'd hazard a random guess that 90% of the time someone looks up a phone number for an unlisted number, they want to know if it's a scammer/spammer. So why the author seems to think this is the "wrong" result to show seems pretty strange to me.
I'd hazard a random guess that 90% of the time someone looks up a phone number for an unlisted number, they want to know if it's a scammer/spammer. So why the author seems to think this is the "wrong" result to show seems pretty strange to me.
Not wrong, just strange :)
And the algorithm in general appears to frustrate many people, if the comments here are anything to go by.
And the algorithm in general appears to frustrate many people, if the comments here are anything to go by.
Any books, blogs or courses you recommend to learn about search?
Well yes a ton :) And these are the ones off the top of my head... others feel free to list ones I'm missing
Books:
Lucene in Action http://manning.com/books/lucene-in-action Solr in Action https://www.manning.com/books/solr-in-action Relevant Search http://manning.com/books/relevant-search (disclaimer, my book) Elasticsearch Definitive Guide (free/online) https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/... Introduction to Info. Retrieval https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.... Deep Learning for Search http://manning.com/books/deep-learning-for-search
Training:
Lucidworks Training https://lucidworks.com/resources/solr-training-and-consultin... Elastic's training https://training.elastic.co/ OpenSource Connection's training (disclaimer, my company's training) http://o19s.com/events/training
Conferences:
Haystack http://haystackconf.com (disclaimer I'm a co-organizer) Activate http://activate.conf SIGIR http://sigir.org ECIR http://ecir2019.org/ Search Solutions https://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2018/ss2018tutorials.ph... Berlin Buzzwords https://berlinbuzzwords.de/ MICES E-Commerce Search - http://mices.co
Blogs:
OpenSource Connections blog - http://o19s.com/blog (disclaimer - my companys blog) Lucidworks Blog - https://lucidworks.com/blog/ Sematext Blog - https://sematext.com/blog/ Elastic's blog http://elastic.co/blog
Books:
Lucene in Action http://manning.com/books/lucene-in-action Solr in Action https://www.manning.com/books/solr-in-action Relevant Search http://manning.com/books/relevant-search (disclaimer, my book) Elasticsearch Definitive Guide (free/online) https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/... Introduction to Info. Retrieval https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.... Deep Learning for Search http://manning.com/books/deep-learning-for-search
Training:
Lucidworks Training https://lucidworks.com/resources/solr-training-and-consultin... Elastic's training https://training.elastic.co/ OpenSource Connection's training (disclaimer, my company's training) http://o19s.com/events/training
Conferences:
Haystack http://haystackconf.com (disclaimer I'm a co-organizer) Activate http://activate.conf SIGIR http://sigir.org ECIR http://ecir2019.org/ Search Solutions https://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2018/ss2018tutorials.ph... Berlin Buzzwords https://berlinbuzzwords.de/ MICES E-Commerce Search - http://mices.co
Blogs:
OpenSource Connections blog - http://o19s.com/blog (disclaimer - my companys blog) Lucidworks Blog - https://lucidworks.com/blog/ Sematext Blog - https://sematext.com/blog/ Elastic's blog http://elastic.co/blog
This has been happening for many years now. In fact, Google introduced "verbatim" search back in 2011 for those who wished for search results that more strictly contained the exact search terms:
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
Verbatim search is still available today. Searches from the URL bar can be made to use verbatim search by default via this search string:
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=%s
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2126346/google-introd...
Verbatim search is still available today. Searches from the URL bar can be made to use verbatim search by default via this search string:
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=%s
Verbatim mode is very insufficient. We need actual logical operators to go with it.
I just tried this on one of my old favorite games, "Stars!". I used to be able to search for that. But google ditches the !. Even quoted. Even verbatim.
"Stars! game" (with or without quotes) helps a little. The right wikipedia page is linked. Mostly it's drowned out in a sea of stuff about the Dallas Stars, NBA all stars, etc.
"Stars! game windows" is getting closer and has more results, but it's still cluttered up with results for various windows games, companies (StarDock), etc. that have nothing to do with what I want.
The real trick here is to search for Stars AutoHost, since that was one of the hub websites of the game. Doesn't need to be verbatim, quoted, anything. Suddenly, the actual page titles actually have "Stars!" - complete with exclamation mark - in them.
This isn't an edge case for me. C++, C#, ".NET", tons of tech thinks punctuation is cool and (ab)uses it. To say nothing of all the various operators these languages have. Bleh.
"Stars! game" (with or without quotes) helps a little. The right wikipedia page is linked. Mostly it's drowned out in a sea of stuff about the Dallas Stars, NBA all stars, etc.
"Stars! game windows" is getting closer and has more results, but it's still cluttered up with results for various windows games, companies (StarDock), etc. that have nothing to do with what I want.
The real trick here is to search for Stars AutoHost, since that was one of the hub websites of the game. Doesn't need to be verbatim, quoted, anything. Suddenly, the actual page titles actually have "Stars!" - complete with exclamation mark - in them.
This isn't an edge case for me. C++, C#, ".NET", tons of tech thinks punctuation is cool and (ab)uses it. To say nothing of all the various operators these languages have. Bleh.
This headline is silly. Google has ranked sites for text that doesn't appear on the page basically for as long as Google has existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
I wonder if this is related to the fact the quality of Google's search results has seriously declined for me over the years. I keep getting the feeling that Google is trying to second-guess what I'm looking for, and not only getting it wrong, but getting it more and more wrong as time goes by.
The annoying thing is when you get pages of results for (popular keyword) which is maybe tangentially related to (alternate interpretation of keyword you used).
It's frustrating because it just translates into making Google harder to use, and multiple searches for the same thing are now common. I often see, on a four word search, the top five or so results all having "Missing: word3 word4". I often search for "<thing> <thing I would like to known about it>", and Google goes "Here's some general information about <thing> instead". It's not _useful_.
But does this happen because Google is ranking those results above ones that matched both words, or because nothing on the web matches both words? I'm often unsure what's going on when I experience this.
I think there's historical reference as well. If a site X publishes your exact terms but hasn't posted in a while, site Y that posts regularly appears to me like it'll be above it, even if it contains only a vague interpretation of your search term.
Generally speaking, I can find the information I am looking for, usually by forcing Google to include those words.
There used to be a time where if you typed three words and got zero results, it was "no page on the ENTIRE INTERNET contains those three words." Now it's "these are what the algorithm thinks you want".
It has always been the case that the search terms do not necessarily appear on the resultant pages, this is actually the cornerstone of their algorithm. They use the text in the links and nearby text to apply to the site it is linking to. This was from day 1. It was why you would get good results for categorical searches like "search engine", "shopping site", "best auction site", etc. It didn't say those terms on the sites that showed up high in the list, but that's how everyone described them.
The more Google uses this type of presumptive search behavior rather than what I'm actually searching for, the more I find myself using Duckduckgo and Bing for finding specific things with specific search queries.
If I am searching for "xyz abc" I am searching for those specific terms for a reason, so please don't present me with results for the entirely unrelated "123", and no I am not talking about showing synonyms.
If I am searching for "xyz abc" I am searching for those specific terms for a reason, so please don't present me with results for the entirely unrelated "123", and no I am not talking about showing synonyms.
Recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19380212
Posted about it at length here: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us...
Posted about it at length here: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us...
This is a link to a thread (created by the parent commenter) with 15 comments on a post about DuckDuckGo.
Link is from 2016 obviously.
Link is from 2016 obviously.
I always wrote elaborate search queries with most important terms first, no filler words, etc.
Lately I'm using more natural language searches, because they return better results. Probably they're optimizing the engine to return the best results for the most people, and most people want to know "how do I turn on the furnace" not "[model number] furnace manual"
Lately I'm using more natural language searches, because they return better results. Probably they're optimizing the engine to return the best results for the most people, and most people want to know "how do I turn on the furnace" not "[model number] furnace manual"
I don't mind google replacing keywords with similar word2vec or doc2vec embeddings (or some other statistical fuzzing) that they found typically increased relevancy/click-through on users. Not sure why anybody really does other than the fact it makes the reasoning behind why certain results show up more opaque.
Hasn't google has ranked pages for text that appears in links to them but not on them for a long time?
I don't know about links, but the phenomenon of getting results for a query like: A "B" with no B on the page has been particularly disturbing for some time. At least months, maybe longer, I can't say. I have no idea why they made a change this drastic (it is drastic when someone makes a deliberate effort to say "I need "B" in the page, it's not a whim or a random query" and the search engine shows results which violate the query _syntax_).
Yes this is true. Google will rank web pages, based on the inbound links pointing to the page, even if Google hasn't crawled the page itself.
This happens regularly when a web page is blocked from crawling via Robots.txt file. Google still indexes and ranks the page, but Google has no idea what is on the page.
Want to keep a web page out of rankings? Allow Google to crawl it (by not restricting via robots.txt), but use a NoIndex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to indicate that the page should not appear in search results.
This happens regularly when a web page is blocked from crawling via Robots.txt file. Google still indexes and ranks the page, but Google has no idea what is on the page.
Want to keep a web page out of rankings? Allow Google to crawl it (by not restricting via robots.txt), but use a NoIndex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to indicate that the page should not appear in search results.
Not only will google index all those pages you are blocking them from but will also penalise you when they have indexed x number of them.
Fix the problem with X-robots-tag, request removal from index (*while such option is available) and then wait for months for the penalty to be lifted.
Fix the problem with X-robots-tag, request removal from index (*while such option is available) and then wait for months for the penalty to be lifted.
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
> Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
> Google bombs date back as far as 1999, when a search for "more evil than Satan himself" resulted in the Microsoft homepage as the top result.
I think so. It definitely seems like a nice shortcut to link together adjacent concepts and queries. If a page talking about a particular topic (but in a different way or with different phrasing) than the original page it could help build out a kind of list of related topics.
Yes, this was the whole point of Google, and how they beat Yahoo, etc.
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Sir, 4843218317 appeared on your article so many time.. 48.. 2 times..32 3 times..18 once ..83 once...31 once...17 4 times...(maybe,its only for number search :) )...i'm a hacker from Bangladesh.{ha ha :) }
I’ve seen this when googling the numberplate of an old Ferrari. Google knew what model it was and returned results as if I’d searched Ferrari 512 TR or whatever. I was pretty impressed / freaked out at the time.
Here is how this works: https://www.link-assistant.com/news/keyword-refinements.html
Basically, Google tries to anticipate query refinements, improving the search as a skilled user would do. Most users are not skilled though, so this leads to an overall better search experience for them, but makes the experience for skilled users worse, due to false positives.
Basically, Google tries to anticipate query refinements, improving the search as a skilled user would do. Most users are not skilled though, so this leads to an overall better search experience for them, but makes the experience for skilled users worse, due to false positives.
> On perhaps Google is linking pages based on how searchers move around the web. For example, a searcher might first search for the phone numbers and not find what they’re looking for, so they search for something like the article title, and end up on the article. Google might see a high enough proportion of users behaving this way, and decide to save them the trouble of performing the second search.
Or - way simpler - maybe a link to the page at the text "4843218317" on it.
Or - way simpler - maybe a link to the page at the text "4843218317" on it.
maybe I'm just weird but I always look at the green text below the blue links and expect to see my search terms (or their derived equivalents) with a bit of context. I can't understand why google would even list links where it shows me some context but without _any_ of my search terms in it. I probably wont click on them anyway(unless the title or url are containing search terms)
More often than not, if a term is missing from a page, chances are it is on the anchor text of a link that points to the page.
It doesn't seem completely random... the first two results which include the number are about Uber SMS messages, and the blog post is about Uber SMS messages.
So Google has clearly determined that this number is somehow associated with sketchy Uber SMS messages, out of a very sparse signal...
That seems pretty cool actually. Like, really cool.
So Google has clearly determined that this number is somehow associated with sketchy Uber SMS messages, out of a very sparse signal...
That seems pretty cool actually. Like, really cool.
Term frequency–inverse document frequency is a technique that can retrieve documents related to a term, but which literally lack it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf
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Isn't this the core concept of PageRank?
If there are 10 million websites out there linking to a single article when referencing X, even if such article doesn't include X verbatim, that article will rank high in queries for X.
If there are 10 million websites out there linking to a single article when referencing X, even if such article doesn't include X verbatim, that article will rank high in queries for X.
I like google
Googling 101: surround the search phrase with literal double quotes ("") to request an exact match.
Includes the unwanted page: https://www.google.com/search?q=2109085405
Does not include the unwanted page: https://www.google.com/search?q="2109085405"
Includes the unwanted page: https://www.google.com/search?q=2109085405
Does not include the unwanted page: https://www.google.com/search?q="2109085405"
Except this doesn't exact match anymore. It's just a strongly suggested phrase.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Except+this+doesn%27t+exa...
I rest my case :)
I rest my case :)
:) You're wrong because I've seen strings between quotes being ignored as well :)
Do you have an example of this not working?
"thraed ripper"
Maybe not the most compelling example, but I think it's usually with really blatant misspellings that Google will second guess my quoted terms, which can be annoying if I'm actually looking for the misspelled term.
Maybe not the most compelling example, but I think it's usually with really blatant misspellings that Google will second guess my quoted terms, which can be annoying if I'm actually looking for the misspelled term.
Not very compelling because:
- The exact search for that string returns nothing
- You can still force it to do that quite easily by clicking "Search instead" right at the top
If you search for a term with no occurrences which is very likely to be a misspelling of an existing popular result, what maximizes total usefulness for users?
- No results (10% of the cases you are actually searching for something that does not exist)
- Here are the results for the term you're likely searching for (90% of the time) + btw click this link right here to get (no) results for the nonsensical search term
- The exact search for that string returns nothing
- You can still force it to do that quite easily by clicking "Search instead" right at the top
If you search for a term with no occurrences which is very likely to be a misspelling of an existing popular result, what maximizes total usefulness for users?
- No results (10% of the cases you are actually searching for something that does not exist)
- Here are the results for the term you're likely searching for (90% of the time) + btw click this link right here to get (no) results for the nonsensical search term
I found a more compelling example: "ophthalmic" "bitx"
What surprised me most is that there actually exist pages containing both of those terms! But it's also including results with just one or the other, and at least one page with neither term in it. I'm also getting no "Search instead" or "Did you mean" links.
What surprised me most is that there actually exist pages containing both of those terms! But it's also including results with just one or the other, and at least one page with neither term in it. I'm also getting no "Search instead" or "Did you mean" links.
Which of those pages on the result page does not contain either of the phrases? For me, the first result contains both phrases (the other only in page title). The second is from the same site and lacks the "bitx" term, but it likely at some point linked to the first page, hence it's inclusion.
The problem with the "barchart.com" results is that it's some sort of a portal of frequently updating headlines, so it's not reasonable to expect the search index to always keep up to date with it.
The problem with the "barchart.com" results is that it's some sort of a portal of frequently updating headlines, so it's not reasonable to expect the search index to always keep up to date with it.
Or if you do a search for name surname it may return results for "name" with "missing: surname". That is, how on earth if I search about (for example) Peter Petrelli a result about Peter Thiel would be the same thing? That's a full 50% of my search query that Google is discarding...