Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”?

It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.

I don't believe that it's worth anything near what they are charging for it, except perhaps in the case of politics, which has always been an extremely efficient use of money. And even then, it's not worth a tiny fraction of the real cost it has to society.

Data analytics truly feels like a bubble.

Netflix has achieved the dream of movie studios going back more than a century now. They have the talent, the money, and more than two decades of data. Netflix knows what you watch, when you stop watching, how often you watch, which movie covers work best.

And yet, it's hard to look at Netflix as anything more than a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Netflix should be putting out nothing but hits. A dozen Breaking Bads or Game of Thrones.

Yet they are not. In fact, they do not even have a single show that is to the level of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or The Wire. HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix is making live action Cowboy Bebop and cancelling it before people even know it existed. I'm really curious what the data said about funding that particular project. On one hand, you have the cult following of the anime that will absolutely tear a live action version to shreds. On the other hand, you have to convince the uninitiated into viewing a remake of 23 year old anime.

Then there is the personalization. The fact that there is a meme about spending more time browsing the Netflix catalog than watching content tells you everything you need to know about how little people trust Netflix recommendations. Their new "top 10" feature is just depressing most of the time. It looks like a list of ten random DVDs in the bargain bin near the Walmart checkout line. Oh, and, their top 10 feature is currently the biggest recommendation feature on their site. And it's not even personalized! If that's not a complete admission of defeat I don't know what is.

I think Netflix has two big issues. The first is the way they drop seasons all at once prevents the natural cycle of pre-episode hype, post-episode interviews, speculation and leaks, fan anticipation, fan arguments (ship wars, etc), etc. Fan culture can't develop around this content as easily because there's never any breathing space for fans to collectively sit with the story so far. The shows that become a cultural force like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones need us to keep coming back to the conversation every week. They have us talking about what happened last week and will happen this week with our colleagues at work and around the dinner table. How can these Netflix IPs enter stable orbit in the cultural zeitgeist when they're once-a-year events? It devalues the work, positioning it more like a movie that you watch and then forget rather than a story you become invested in over a long period of time.

Full season drops also allow people to binge a whole season of content for a single month's subscription and then immediately churn (ask me how I know). I assume they have some data-driven reasons for doing this, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

Besides that, I think they should put more wood behind fewer arrows. They've developed a reputation for aggressively cancelling smaller shows with passionate followings which makes a lot of people not even want to bother until something has become an established mainstream success. I think of them now as the Google of content-creation, putting out a lot of solid (but not amazing) products and then cancelling them once people start to grow attached.

That's not how the entertainment business works. If I had to guess, Netflix's data-driven approach to content production is like card-counting in blackjack. It only gives them a slight edge on the house. A net positive outcome over hundreds or thousands of hands but offering no guarantee over the outcome of any single hand.

> HBO and AMC are running laps around Netflix

Netflix did win the most Emmys in 2021.[1] And they only started producing original content in 2013 or so. That's pretty good.

1. https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/netflix-emmys-the-crown-que...

They may also be optimizing for revenues as opposed to recommendation quality (homegrown content being cheaper than licensed)

But most people are lazy and won’t account switch for different contexts like that anyway, so there’s just no way they can keep the profile data as clean as it needs to be for a television.

This is exactly what their data analytics has told them to do.

Have a few popular, quality tv shows with star-studded casts as loss-leaders to bring in new viewers. Otherwise the model is to produce and recommend the shows that get them the most eyeballs per dollar; the bare-minimum to keep their subscribers there:

- Stand up specials are dirt-cheap, quite popular, and provide never-ending variety.

- Ditto with 'reality' shows, bake-offs, make-offs, expose documentaries, etc.

- Old sitcoms and b-movies that have a proven re-watch-rate.

Throw in a handful of first seasons to keep the FOMO up, and you've got a captive audience on the cheap. Maybe one or two will catch on and become the next loss-leaders.

They may not have the quality shows that are 'running laps around' HBO and AMC, but by any of the metrics Netflix cares about they are simply running laps around HBO, AMC and everyone else.

I don't follow this argument. Knowing what people like has very little to do with the quality of original creative content; surely you don't expect Goodreads to put out Shakespearean novels, or Spotify to be producing original hits on par with the Rolling Stones? Should ESPN have better pro sports scouting and coaching talent than the professional leagues?

Knowing what people like, however, _does_ have to do quite a bit with selling those people a product - which Netflix just reported 15% YoY growth to $7.7B yearly revenue, they're clearly very successful to this end. I think you actually have it backwards - if anything, Netflix represents a total fulfillment of the promises of data analytics and personalization. Despite mediocre original content, this is a $200B company with 200M subscribers growing revenues by double digits two decades after IPO.

If Netflix paid $450k+ salaries to screenwriters instead of engineers, you'd very likely get better movies on a worse streaming platform. And when Netflix has shelled out for Hollywood talent, like Mindhunter which has David Fincher and Charlize Theron, the results are quite good.

Regardless, to take the fact that Netflix pays for premium engineering and analytics talent, but does not pay for premium filmmaking talent, and then spin that fact into Netflix being "a total failure of the promises of data analytics and personalization" is a questionable criticism.

Ironically, it seems like AmazonPrime is far better at that.

As for then top ten being bottom barrel stuff, I think you overestimate how popular mad men was vs. something like king of queens.

I will say, Netflix seems to fail in many cases, and I don't understand how they think content discovery is supposed to work.

There may be others, but off the top of my head: Bojack Horseman.

The very high quality pieces of information can be things like "wants to buy a life insurance policy this week" or "just had a baby" or "just bought a plane ticket to XYZ," or "is in the frequent flyer program and spends more than $20,000 per year on travel."

However the majority of information about people, the overwhelming majority of whom have no significant disposable income, is worthless and not worth tracking for the most part. You reach those people through traditional mass marketing means.

And from what it seems to me, there is a giant bubble. The vast majority of companies doing "data science" jobs are things that a smart undergrad can do with a month or two of training. And this is because I believe C-suites have completely gulped down the data is oil mantra. There are entirely charlatan companies with unicorn, even decacorn valuations now being built on this mantra - for example, CRED in India.

Yet, as you said, and as I believe too, most of the data is worthless.

For example, I'm about to list my house on the market. The real estate agents who reached out to me last year and the year before that to try to induce me to sell the house had no chance of succeeding. Now is the time if they knew the secret that I'm about the list the house that they should all be competing for my business. The only relevant piece of information is that I'm about to sell the house. That is a valuable lead that many in my region would bid on. My background information is frankly not that relevant to the value of that lead, and isn't something that is readily surfaced by the kind of deep profiling that is supposed to be going on. It can be signaled by me signing up to some kind of list that sells my lead to a zillion people at once, but is never going to be surfaced accurately to the people who can earn the most profits from it by my Youtube habits or whatever.

Zillow sells the logged in user data in the market I'm buying in to the real estate agents listing the houses, but that again is not something being modeled by some kind of big data operation, but is merely the same kind of "little data" provided on things like dating websites or LinkedIn when people browse your profile. There's no modeling going on there that requires sophistication.

I've had a supposition for a while now that the targeted advertising industry should be closing the consumer cashflow loop by advertising effective self- and employment improvement, with the objective of increasing the disposable income people have so they can then make more brokering traditional sales

Personalized adverts and recommendations can be incredibly, horrendously dumb.

Here's what I see when I hit amazon's homepage at the moment : A "buy once again" column that features blackout curtains I bought 3 months ago (no, curtains don't need to be replaced every months, amazon.), USB cables I bought multiples of in the same time frame, a wireless charger (I already bought two before). An entire line dedicated to showing me backpacks (I bought one less than a year ago) An entire line dedicated to headphones (I recently bought wireless IEMs) An entire line dedicated to watches (same)

I don't get it. Supposedly the best and brightest work at firms like amazon and google to brainwash us to buy stuff, but classic, random, non-targeted advertisement is more likely to make me discover products I'd buy than targeted advertisement because the latter only shows me things after I don't need to buy them anymore!

Here's what I would expect actually intelligent targeted advertising to do : After buying a smartphone, recommend accessories (cases, screen protectors, USB-C dongles, chargers, whatever) Here's what targeted advertisement actually does : show me smartphones ads everywhere I go after I already selected and BOUGHT a smartphone. No, I don't need to buy another smartphone weeks after a recent replacement, amazon!

The same sort of phenomenon can happen after google locks on searches I did to buy something. I can't wait to see the internet advertisement industry crash and burn, it's overvalued nonsense.

Disagree there. About 75% of the things I buy on Amazon are repeating purchases that I nevertheless don't want to be automatically scheduled. It used to be a real pain in the neck to reorder something manually, so I'm glad they made that easier.

But yes, in general, Amazon is full of low-hanging fruit that's been neglected on the tree for a decade or more. Buying clothes from Amazon still manages to be a worse experience than going to the mall, for instance, which is really saying something.

Both YouTube and Amazon heavily personalize by recommending primarily the 3-4 things that I've interacted with in the very recent past.

Make it fancy and use a multi armed bandit and call it machine learning/AI/data science.

So the question is this: if they're not (and never were) using that data for what they say they were, what are they doing with it?

The most common pattern I see relating to personalized advertising as someone being advertised to is that I will often see an ad for something I just bought (or some competitor to it) repeated relentlessly for a couple of days after buying it and this is after not seeing any related ads during the days prior where I was actually doing some research into the product space.

Maybe I'm an outlier but they seem to miss the window of relevance on me often enough that I notice it as a commonly repeated pattern.

A return rate of say 1% may lead to more people looking to buy a drill who have just bought one in the last week than people looking to buy their first drill.

If that's true, they left something out of their calculation: What percentage of people will install an adblocker as a result of feeling like they're being hounded for a few weeks? This scenario was mentioned specifically by Tim Cook when he introduced the Safari anti-tracking features.

So that you can continue to show me ads for a washing machine for months after I purchased a washing machine.

Apparently now I'm into baseball, flowers, boating, celebrities, country music, credit cards, geology, event ticket sales, fishing, and windows OS. Among a couple hundred other things. It even gets some rather basic facts (marital status, company size, education) wrong. I seriously wonder how they generate this profile?

https://adssettings.google.com/

Poorly!

At the time I was a late 20s, college educated, South Asian male. I’m very cis and very straight. And yeah my musical tastes are pretty eclectic, but that was a weird profile to settle me on.

Better to just follow people's interests, instead of using their interests to incorrectly pigeonhole them and then drawing incorrect generalisations from that.

Something about my actual interests and activity apparently makes youtube think I'm into Fox news and all the crazy shit found there.

Now, who else has this same value judgement about me? This assessment that I neither declared for myself nor even ratified.

It's annoying but ultimately harmless that youtube shows me conservative wackjob stuff.

But is that same profile in someone else's database that marks me as someone to watch or something? Does it affect my insurance rates, my liklihood to get extra scrutiny when travelling, my ability to purchase or register a firearm, my access to jobs that might be extra sensitive or responsible, basically any of the things where someone either private or the state does any sort of background or credit check on you for any reason, and there are really many of those when you think a out it.

I'm guessing, today, it's probably not really affecting my life in any real way, but, there is no way it makes any sense to say that will still be true tomorrow.

I spent a lot of time learning about association rule mining in my AI courses, including the implementation details of competing ways to mine them. The technique seems extremely useful and fascinating (I jury rigged it for on the fly league of legends champ recommendations to maximize calculated win rate change given limited information), but I almost never see it used in the real world or even see it talked about anymore.

What happened to association rule mining?

Personalized page rank is not significantly better at summarization in my experience, even "queryable" summarization, but that also could be a pure implementation problem or a problem of hyperparamater selection...

Then, after that, what's the point in showing drill ads to me for two weeks?

Probably that's what they are going for if they're doing it on purpose.

Do you have a link for further reading on that? That's fascinating if true.

It's pretty straightforward to understand that when the vast majority of your sites income is generated from ad revenue, that data is being used to optimize for generating ad clicks, etc., rather than actually giving users the best/most relevant/useful/desireable information for their purposes.

It seems to be completely useless for anything else, and specifically harmful for product discovery, that is the one way ads add societal value.

Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-b...

I can't understand why every company want me offer “personalized” service. It never works, and if I can't manually set preferences, then it's not personalized (because “personalization” means exactly that).

You're missing what "personalization" has come to really mean. It means knowing enough about the user to give them an experience you can profit from and which they will accept. If there isn't something you can expect profit from, there's no reason to give them anything.

I'm sorry to tell you, but this is flat wrong. I commented[1] about this a few months back with a random phrase as an example. I see it often in my day to day also.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094

Looking at all 22 results (without opening the "omitted results" section or image results), the phrase became harder to find off the first page, but I tended to find it in the source code, or the DOM, or the cached version of the page, or by disabling JS (sometimes requiring a combination of those techniques). I found it in 21 out of the 22. The one page I couldn't find it in (the dolls one) looks like a frequently updating page, and it was highlighted in the snippet, so it looks like it was there at the time of crawling but not now; the cache isn't there for that page.

Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

In the [eggzackly this], you found matches of those words separated by punctuation -- which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.

I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.

I just tested "eggzackly this" and every result on the first page contains the string "eggzackly this", albeit usually with different punctuation ("Eggzackly. This [...]", "Eggzackly, this.", "Eggzackly! This [...]")

We don't have control over this and it's very frustrating.

What you're talking about is probably a case where there's a quoted word or phrase as well as other words that aren't quoted. In such a case, we're going to absolutely look for content that matches the quoted parts. That's a must. The other words, we'll look for them, but we'll also look for related words and sometimes, we might find content that doesn't match one of them.

Because those other words aren't quoted, we'll tell you if we find a match that seems helpful but doesn't contain those non-quoted words. That's what the message is about. But it should never be telling you we omitted a quoted word or phrase because we won't -- with one exception.

If there's literally nothing on the web we know of that matches a quoted word or phrase, then we're not going to show anything at all and say we couldn't match any documents.

Though, why does enabling "Verbatim" (in tools) on a search reduce the number of search results if all my terms are already quoted? Enabling Verbatim often does it make it feels like my queries are interpreted more literally, but if quotes are already being respected I don't understand how Verbatim would reduce the number of search results.

On the counts -- basically, it's all really rough estimates. We make a rough quick count, you go deeper into the page, we make a fresh estimate. It can change, and it doesn't always make sense and personally, I'd hope we just get rid of counts because of this, perhaps more confusing than helpful.

Thank you, Google, for continuing to respect quotes!

Interestingly I tried my pet peeve search, and it worked for the first time this year! It is for a specific recipe, and I search for 'ocau slow cooked balsamic beef'. I have had to manually find it in the archive of the overclockers.com.au forum for the past year, as Google seemingly forgot it existed no matter what search terms or operators I used.

The main difference is I am using Firefox on Manjaro and not my historically typical environment for searching. Normally I would either be using Chrome on Windows or Chrome on iOS if I am in the kitchen.

I will play around on some other devices and see what evidence I can find.

P.s. I'm being referred in for a role at Google currently, is the Search team only in a specific area like Silicon Valley or is it a global team? Most of the jobs in Australia seem to be commercial facing, not product facing.

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/users/ https://blog.google/products/search/overview-our-rater-guide... https://blog.google/products/search/raters-experiments-impro...

Today I stumbled upon one. Here's a broken example query: linux next hop "[::]"

Here's the archive of the incorrect query result: https://archive.md/9WGe7

The first result (the man pages) does not contain [::] anywhere in the page text, the source, or the cached result. Could you take a look at this one?

I’m guessing this happens when there are less results matching my phrase

Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."

And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.

Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.

"kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22kitchen+boss%22+%22g320%2...

Nothing useful at all. Nothing mentioning disassembly. Not even a YouTube link.

It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.

Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says:

    Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes):
    It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search

What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches.

IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that.

Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing).

Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking.

To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.

Showing results for non-quoted words isn't intended to be condescending nor an indication that we think someone made a mistake. Apologies that it comes across that way.

We think we're clearly saying there are no matches with the "No results found" message. If we stopped there, the page would have nothing else. And I get that for you -- and perhaps others -- that might be preferable, a further reinforcement that there's nothing out there.

For others, not so helpful. They potentially might give up with no real way of going forward, when just losing the quotes perhaps could get them useful information.

And I get the trade-off concerns. I've seen many comments here that things done to support less "pro" users are annoying. And yet, we do need to find a way to support everyone. I think that's why we've probably gone with the message about no matches with and showing the quotes.

Perhaps we should consider making that an option -- "Would you like to try this search again without quotes."

As for the message about not good matches, we always try to show the best stuff we have first. That's the point of our ranking. The warning is meant to indicate that even though we'll list the best we have, for that query, none of it is particularly helpful -- not that here are a bunch of results, and there's some good matches mixed in with poor ones. Ranking that way would make no sense.

But it might be also that we're so close to it -- that we always try to rank the most useful stuff first -- that we didn't consider the interpretation you had. So thank you again, it's really helpful to get that feedback.

Sorry the information doesn't appear to be out there. I hope if you disassemble it on your own, you'll post the info out to the open web. I'm pretty sure you'd end up ranking well for that and helping others who might have a similar need.

1. This is still horrific UX/UI 2. The culture internally at Google seems to have a "we know better than the users" attitude in all things. 3. Query rewriting is a horrific technique in general with almost zero value to life/society outside of fixing spelling errors. Whatever your A/B testing says about it's purported utility is polluted by Google's own dark patterns and political whims of the managers who run the internal search organizations.

It helps to actually know better than your users if you want to take the attitude in number 2. I don't believe that you or Google knows better than it's users, for many reasons previously enumerated in this thread and others.

One day Google search is going to be displaced and it's current utilization of query rewriting techniques will be one of the fundamental reasons for this.

You should take the absolutely massive amount of recent criticism and the fact that users repeatedly claim it's happening in the face of your claim it's not seriously rather than literally blaming the users writ large for a problem that is fundementally with the behavior of Google search.

Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that.

The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.

You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."

As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.

Or just quote the words in regular mode then use our before/after commands: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1115706765088182272

Have you tried this? It immediately turns verbatim off. For everyone! It's been like this forever. Years and years. Gaslighting won't help here!

In terms of quotes, again, this does NOT work like +, like verbatim. If it did, then that term would absolutely show up, just as it is, in search results. Yet, over the years I've seen:

- aliasing happen from within quotes (EG, bob -> robert)

- quotes entirely ignored (eg, those terms NOT showing up)

Yet searching with verbatim on, immediately causes those quoted words to appear!

You are absolutely gaslighting people on this! Right now, in this thread. And if it isn't intentional, if you aren't gaslighting, then how can you not even notice that verbatim turns off, the second you select a date range?

I want to say so much more here, but it's filled with such ... vitriol, that I think my terminal would melt.

Yes, I tried this for some of the presets before I replied. It worked. It still works.

My sincere apologies for not specifically testing custom date range option as well. I should have; you are correct. That won't work. I'll pass it on to see if there's a way it can. My apologies again.

If you need to do this another way, what I also said works. Do it in the search bar using the before/after command. Just quote all the words, and that's the same as verbatim.

Take a look here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29424094

It's like you're just spouting Google propaganda, without validating what you're saying. Just like with vertabim/date range, which has been a thing for close ot a decade, which Google has received endless reports about, this too does not do what you say.

Your responses are akin to those canned responses one gets when you post a bad review. "So sorry, please contact us here at this email address.", which of course is all about impression, and results in nothing ever happening.

This has been going on almost a decade, yet oh what, no, haha is your response.

So if you did this search in verbatim: [search for this]

It's the same as: ["search" "for" "this"]

in terms of the instructions we're getting on what to retrieve -- look for content that has all of those words and only those words. No spell check. No synonyms. Just those words.

The ranking of the results might differ, because we probably use slightly different ranking systems when using verbatim versus quoted words. But in either case, the retrieval requirement is the same. Results should have all the required words.

I don't really see what the link above is saying to somehow refute all this. That link is about a quoted search for ["eggzackly this"] and nothing to do with verbatim mode. And it says that it found those two words in that order with punctuation...

Which is what I explained elsewhere in this (now huge) thread. But to give it again:

Typically the reasons people believe quotes are not working when they are is because:

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

In the [eggzackly this] example, that's what was happening as the poster saw -- we found those words separated by punctuation, which we interpret as a space, so the phrase is matched.

Personally, I wish we'd fix the situation with punctuation. I get that's confusing. But that's not a new change; quotes have operated that way for ages.

Most important -- quotes SHOULD work as you and others are expecting. We WANT them to work that way. That's why we spend time looking at these reports saying they're not. I have spent lots of time doing just that. We find the matches. But if anyone believes they aren't working, and the reasons involved above aren't happening, let me know. We'll get on it. We want them to work as expected, and we want everyone to feel they're working that way.

It wasn't. It isn't. I never has been. Ever.

Verbatim was introduced to replicate that lost + functionality, after massive outrage at the inability to find search results. The fact that you, and other Googlers still think "" is the same as verbatim/+, when it doesn't even show the same search results, is highly, highly questionable.

To be beyond blunt, you're wrong. You are completely and totally wrong. +/verbatim and "" are not the same thing.

Please go away, and learn how your own product works, before commenting on it, ok?

At the time, + was used to require that something be present. Quotes were used to require words appear in a particular order. You could do a search where you quoted a phrase, but that didn't necessarily require it to be present (as I recall). If you absolutely wanted the quoted phrase to be there, you had to quote and put a + in front of the quoted phrase. So yes, they were different things.

When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.

With +, then with quotes and with verbatim, it's about what you retrieve. Verbatim says get these words or words and only those words. Quoting says get these words and only those words (and only those words in a particular order, if you indicate that). Just like + used to mean get these words and only these words.

The ranking of results might vary when you quote versus verbatim, but what you're asking to be retrieved is the same to us.

When + was eliminated, quotes took its place. Quoting a single word was the same as when you used to + a word -- find the exact word. Quoting a phrase still meant find the phrase, but that also meant it was required to find the phrase.

No, quoting did not take its place. At all. That's why verbatim was introduced, after outrage. Google claimed it did, but it still aliased. It still decided to provide results without quotes.

Again, this is why verbatim was born. From that "Google no longer gives precise results, ever" angst.

I can confirm, one of the reasons I haven't used Google in several years.

The query syntax:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

Quoting works perfectly for me dunno.

1) text appears in ALT text 2) text is not readily visible on a page (maybe in a menu bar or small text) 3) there's punctuation ("dog cat" will match "dog, cat" 4) page has changed after we've indexed it (so view the cached copy, if available)

But it seems people don't (my original comment is being heavily downvoted because of this). And although they can't submit even one example, the fact that they don't believe you is obviously a symptom of a bigger problem.

For some reason, Google is losing the trust of power users.

- no results with or without quotes:

    No results containing all your search terms were found.

    Your search did not match any documents.

    It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
    Tip: Try using words that might appear on the page you’re looking
    for. For example, "cake recipes" instead of "how to make a cake."

I have yet to find any instance where Google corrects the inside of quotes without any warning.

Baby talk (or CDS, child-directed speech) helps engage their attention and provides valuable feedback. Kids who experience less CDS develop language more slowly.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk

(I heard about this research a number of years ago. Although I must admit, now I wonder if it’s affected by the science reproducibility crisis!)

Could just be luck (well, genetics, probably) I guess. Maybe they'd have developed even faster if we'd used baby talk. One shitty thing about parenting is it's really hard to tell what helped, what hurt, and what didn't matter at all.

I would put a lot more of it to having (seemingly) engaged parents. Even a backwards strategy enacted by a loving parent who is consistently trying their best is likely to outperform the result that most can manage (owing to time/money/education/etc).

Genetics are a marginal element approaching none.

Compare a toddler living in a ghetto concrete jungle to one who takes daily strolls through Central Park or Suburbia. The enrichment of parents teaching about the trucks and the trees and the lady with a purple hat pays massive returns.

But, but... I didn't say anything about baby talk!!

The definition in that Wikipedia page is about something completely different: exaggerating intonation.

Fathers descend to "baby talk" when the child is learning and slowly bring them up to par instead of trying to just force perfect talk from the start. They do this instinctively.

There's some great comments on this from salman khan, I think. He recorded the first years of his kid's life at home and documented this phenomenon

The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites returned, and often think that the site's owners must be morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog search results. I think think about how moronic it is that Googs allows this.

I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.

I subscribe to the theory that this helps babies understand what they sound like, and therefore helps them learn how to produce the sounds they want.

Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.

I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you to personalise your search like that.

https://archive.md/wwMY3

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+...

I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search.

It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.

Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references.

They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water

Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches.

Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good, but they have to be shown the way.

Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people

This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they're giving up on Google entirely.

Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources.

When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it's not on the web. That's Google's failure.

As someone who's been a public librarian, I can tell you that is not how people work.

A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of:

- What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital)

- How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see.

- The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively.

- Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search

- What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'.

Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.

Many people already resort to real food, even with plenty of junk food around.

“Problem” is unfortunately, that it comes at a price, that many are simply not ready or able to pay.

Who should step in is a good question, and probably governments should make access to information a right and have high quality public service available (in this case a public web search engine). Public libraries used to fulfill this role for centuries.

Why would someone want to search Pinterest? Every time I've gotten a search result to Pinterest it's been some scraped image completely and frustratingly devoid of the context I was originally searching for. Pinterest is one of the worst offenders on the web.

They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.

I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose.

Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers.

The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.

Of course, influencer means something different now too.

Google is optimizing for that.