Lately, it has felt like Google has become more optimized for less intelligent/tech-savvy users (i.e. people who search using natural language e.g. “tell me the store policy for target please”). In these cases many of the words used are either irrelevant or counterproductive.

I’ve noticed Facebook’s search has started catering to the lowest common denominator as well. Searching for (made-up example) “Louis Potter” used to give all exact matches priority. Current results look something like 1) Louis Potter 2) Luis Porter 3) Louis Potters 4) Louis Potter (#2). I don’t like when search engines assume that I’m misspelling words/names, and it would be nice if they adapted for individual behavior in this regard.

The tyranny of the minimum viable user.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

facebook used to let you do direct knowledge graph searches

"restaurants liked by people who like Joe's Pancakes and Green Dragon Mexican Pizza"

"movies liked by people who are friends with people who like Back to the Future and Arrested Development"

"people who live nearby and like Green Dragon Mexican Pizza and Arrested Development"

"friends of friends of friends who like Arrested Development and Joe's Pancakes"

"Friends of Megan Albert friends who are women named "Erin" Chipotle employ"

I think you can see why they removed it.

this URL might lead to something like "restaurants liked by people who like Snow White" https://www.facebook.com/search/130104022710/likers/pages-li...

There are many cases where you don't know you misspelled the name.

Ah! This drives me insane and it's only started recently. I can enter as little as two words in format 'uncommonProperNoun commonNoun', and the entire first page will be results of 'missing uncommonProperNoun'. It's maddening. It's like searching for 'the moon' and getting results back containing 'the'. Does anyone know how/why this started? Is there a way to enforce a query?

I think enclosing the word you really want in "quotes" forces Google to not discard that term.

It does! And another trick that can be useful in these situations is gaps in quotes: "the * fox" will return (for me): "the main character, Simon Fox", "The Fabulous Fox", etc.

I thought you were supposed to do "+ImportantWord LessImportantWord". Neither seems entirely reliable.

Google has a habit of silently breaking things that used to work, and as it's silent you don't know what the workaround is, even if you are so lucky as to have one.

The +ImportantWord syntax was recycled for Google Plus searches at some point and replaced with "ImportantWord". And now to get a "Important Set of Words" query to work, you now have to enter some special "Verbatim" mode by going into Search Tools and clicking on a special checkbox.

The problem with enterprise search systems is that companies often buy a product expecting it to be as good as a public search engine out of the box, but it doesn't work that way.

Companies can have a great intranet search experience, but it requires time to properly configure the schema, train taxonomies, tune relevance, and understand the resources required to make it work quickly and reliably.

Document processing pipelines often require customization to meet the above requirements, and multi-lingual search may never be perfect within an organization due to differences in the way wordbreaking is done.

Some companies do put a lot of effort into doing this right and getting the best experience possible today, but most don't.

Google used to be a tool, now its a product.

Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it carries a lot of truth. Internet-based tech companies like Google have matured to the point where many innovators have left and MBAs have invaded, favoring short-term profit over user experience.

> As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got page after page of results. All of them were tagged "missing storename", so just randomly picked return policies from other stores.

I think it helps to put the critical search term in quotes. At least in DuckDuckGo, `"storename" return policy` would exclude results that are missing "storename".

DDG seems to have recently switched to the same atrocious imprecise search as Google is running for a few years already...

I don't want to fight with the search engine: "you meant this!" -- "nno, find me that" -- "you surely meant this so here it is!" ...

I hate DDG auto DYM (did-you-mean) so much.

So would you have rather got results with only 'storename' and not 'return policy', or no results at all, or what's the problem here?

If there was a result containing the whole search string it would (I believe) have been the first one.

If you don't have any results for the query, then return a page saying so. Otherwise you're annoying the user by making them scan through a page of irrelevant text to confirm that it really is all irrelevant. When this happens to me my reaction is "don't just ignore what I said to you", which is as infuriating when a computer does it as when a human does.

Google returns results specifically showing which terms were missing if this were the case for me. This is useful for finding articles with intersections of concepts (assuming I got the terminology/jargon right) and knowing when those probably don't exist, so I like the feature.

This being relatively large chain store, I'm quite certain there should be forum posts or reddit discussions about their return policy. I have no way of proving they exist, seeing as how Google is shit at finding stuff.

"So what's the problem here"? The problem is, the search engine threw away one third of my query terms, and then gave me all chaff. Apparently I should've thrown in some random punctuation to convince it to actually use all of them.

Can you just tell the name of the store? I want to see for example what happens if I select verbatim mode.

Example with Target, in DDG, verbatim: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22target%22+%22return+policy%22&t...

Seems to work.