My anecdote was that during the winter Olympics I was looking for a college friend who's name was several characters off of one of the competing athlete's. It didn't matter how much additional information I put in the search. Even quoted, if it included anything that looked like that popular athlete, then that was all that was returned.
When I finally found an old user name she used, then the searches worked. Her correct name and the other information I was searching with were in the page. So it was indexed, the information was simply ignored, because it wasn't news.
Interesting that DDG did not find the page even with the username. I do not know why, but it appeared it was not indexed there.
This is exactly what people mean when they say quotes "don't work". Elsewhere are google people in this comment section saying they do, and they may be telling the truth after Google applies some relevance pre-filter to the results. Anything that doesn't pass that, though, basically doesn't exist, which can look like quoting not working at all (and effectively is quoting not working as expected).
I tried it now and it's better, but not perfect. Most pages contain the term (as a misspelling) but a few didn't seem to (one had the word "services" in many places on it, however) and there was still a big Google Maps result and a Wikipedia result at the top for the actual IRS.
I have noticed a general decline in search quality over the last couple of years, but nothing specific to quotes.
I realise I'm not saying anything particularly useful with this comment, but I just thought I'd add another datapoint.
Edit: Thinking more, my biggest issue is when the quoted text occurs in the "recommended similar posts" section of a page (particularly common with reddit). That section gets re-rendered on each view, so it probably won't be there once I click the result.
Proof: https://archive.ph/AAa6k and https://archive.ph/9WGe7
More and more frequently I was getting this for the actual search terms, in quotes or not, to the point where I would Control+F any words just to find none of them existed on the page. It's the reason I switched to dumber search engines.
I've assumed the "fast path" is to search for "phrases with similar meaning", rather than actual words. But that really destroys technical searches.
To any google engineers reading:
Please add `really-verbatim` mode, indicated by backtick quotes, which also requires strict matching of punctuation.
I wonder if that will ever be worth the hardware cost. Back when I did some coursework on information retrieval, it seemed that you get superlinear savings via reducing the cardinality of tokens. So you'd do stemming, remove all punctuation, words that are too frequent ("do", "be", "and", "or", ...)... Basically remove all grammar. You do the same to your search query and the index. This intuitively reduces your compute by at least an order of magnitude, especially for languages with rich grammar (e.g. stemming nouns in Polish reduces the cardinality of tokens by a factor of 7 and verbs by a factor of 162).
[::]
That you probably don't want the thing you're searching for, but some alternate spelling, even if it's something completely different.
I imagine this probably ends up being the case for the majority of their users, but for advanced users and people searching for specific technical strings, they've cheapened their service.
> we didn't make any change *in terms of retrieval*
Users don't care which part of the system was changed to cause the results to be worse.
It looks like maybe your reply is only about what changes recently shipped and are mentioned in the blog post. A lot of the discussion in this comment section is about changes much older than these changes.
It may be true that quotes are working the way we expect, but the data set to which they apply is very obviously restricted before they get a crack at it.
Probably the vast majority of the population have no idea that quotes do anything in searches. Maybe they need some checkbox in the tools bar that makes quotes actually work if you know how they work.
they do this for other things that annoy the F out of me. for example, searching for a phone number. it's a specific set of numbers that is unique. if there's no results for that number (or very few), it gives me results for numbers that are similar like same area code, same prefix, different number. nope. that's not useful. in this situation, I'd much rather see that no results are found rather than making me think there's a result but forcing me to look closely that it is what I wanted
"The magic of Google is gone"
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
"Hast du besondere s9y eventplugins installiert?"
This leads to https://www.google.de/search?q=%22Hast+du+besondere+s9y+even..., which so far has only one search result, to http://sw-guide.de/2006-11/serendipity-plugins-seitenleisten.... Which by the way does not contain the target sentence, but that might be because the search moved over into non-verbatim mode.
If I search without the quotes I get more results, but I think not the target thread.
Admittedly, this is not "" not working by showing pages that do not contain the target keyword. But it is "" failing by the search not properly searching its own index.
What's going on there? Why is the index of a rather stale 20 year old forum not complete? The site is indexed in general.
Thread after thread of hundreds of people telling you your wrong and then you going "actually the community is wrong". Month after month, year after year, you pull this crap.
Admit it, Google search is worse now than it was before, and partly because they are abjectly failing at handling quotes.
what the ... ? Why do you delete stuff from your index? Even if it's down there's a good chance it'll be archived ...
I recently started paying for Kagi[1] and I’ve been very pleased with the results. I haven’t felt the need to use a different search engine since switching. (No affiliation; just a happy customer)
[1]: https://kagi.com/
I do occasionally switch back to DDG for non-technical searches, but even that has been rarer and rarer as time goes on.
R.I.P.
If that were the case then search engines would differ only on how big their database is, but unless you care about the long tail you wouldn't be able to notice much of a difference.
I don't work in ranking, but considering how the web has changed since the early 2000s I'd guess that page rank's quality has gone down as spammy websites and walled gardens appeared.
It is the same spam sites I see again and again. A manual blacklist from one puny FTE would probably clean up the wast majority.
Google now has moved to model based ranking. In the current (search-hostile) web environment, PageRank or whatever simplistic algorithm doesn't work anymore.
And as the web scales, it's an increasingly expensive problem. (Servers, storage, bandwidth, etc.)
I'd wager that it's easier to launch the next SpaceX than to launch the next Google.