- fixing search (it has become more and more broken since 2009, possibly before. Today it wotks more or less like their competitors worked before, random mix of results containing some of my keywords.)
- fixing ads (Instagram should have way less data on me and yet manages to present me with ads that I sometimes click instead of ads that are so insulting I go right ahead and enable the ad blocker I had forgotten.)
- saving Reader
- etc
tbh, it's one of those "Are you sure you're not an idiot?" replies.
They not only disregard quotes but also their own verbatim setting.
- Establish the behaviour as documented.
- In representing and demonstrating this to others.
It's not that I doubt your word, but that I'd like to see a developed and credible case made. Because frankly that behaviour drives me to utter frustration and distraction. It's also a large part of the reason I no longer use, nor trust, Google Web Search as my principle online search tool.
That said, I might have something on an old blog somewhere. I'll see if I can find it before work starts...
Edit: found it here http://techinorg.blogspot.com/2013/03/what-is-going-on-with-... . It is from 2013 and had probably been going on for a while already at that point.
Edit2: For those who are still relying on Google, here's a nice hack I discovered that I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else:
Sometimes you might feel that your search experience is even worse than usual. In those cases, try reporting anything in tje search results and then retry tje same search 30 minutes later.
Chances are it will now magically work.
It took quite a while for me to realize this and I think in the beginning I might not have realized how fast it worked.
It seemed totally unrealistic however that a fkx would have been created and a new version deployed in such a short time so my best explanation is they are A/B-testing some really dumb changes and then pulling out whoever complains from the test group.
Thinking about it this might also be a crazy explanation for why search is so bad today compared to ten years ago:
There's no feedback whatsoever so most sane users probably give up talking to the wall after one or two attempts. This leaves them with the impression that everyone is happy, so they just continue on the path back to becoming the search engines they replaced.
I'm getting both mixed experiences and references myself looking into this. Which is if anything more frustrating than knowing unambiguously that quoting doesn't work.
I've run across numerous A/B tests across various Google properties. Or to use the technical term: "user gaslighting".
EDIT: I don't know why this being downvoted. This is a genuine question to understand if the problem is the size of the index or the fuzzing matching that search engines do.