Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on the page at all

Re:Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on th... by pedrosorio on Thursday March 21, 2019 @11:17PM (#19459358)

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

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Re:Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on th... by mcbits on Thursday March 21, 2019 @11:49PM (#19459482)

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.

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Re:Google may rank sites for queries that don't appear on th... by vesinisa on Friday March 22, 2019 @05:18AM (#19460748)

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.

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