Re:Google search results have more human help than you think...
by Jtsummers on Monday November 18, 2019 @03:47PM
(#21567994)
There was a time, several years ago now, where that was happening pretty regularly to me. It's gotten better, but since 2009 or so Google search quality has been on the decline for me. It only works well when I use things like site:blah.blah or quoted searches, or something I happened to search for and click on before (but couldn't find in history or had found on another computer). Finding novel things is a pain.
From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.
Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".