I think they just assume that they know better what you want than you do.

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.

I work for Google Search. We never changed how we used quotes as a restriction tool. People seem to have had that impression because our snippets changed to not reflect where we were finding the terms. Hopefully our new snippet change will help stop that impression.

If you did not change how the quotes interact with the indexed text for a page, but you did change the mapping from pages to indexed text, then you have changed how you use quotes as a restriction tool.

I'm not sure what you mean by "mapping from pages to index text" but no, we didn't make any change in terms of retrieval. None. Use quotes, we look for pages that have the quoted material and only show those pages. The change we announced this week was about how we display snippets -- descriptions -- of those pages. Now the snippets will show examples of where we found the quoted terms, when sometimes the snippets didn't. But even if they didn't, the quoted terms were on the page.

So in the year 2000 and in the year 2022, for any web page, when that page is crawled the same text would end up in the index? No observable changes were made to the process of computing the text to put into the index from the page in those 22 years?

> 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.

Yes, we didn't make any changes in how quotes retrieve content with the announcement we made. We changed how we show snippets for quoted searches.

Quotes "not working" is because we search for things in quotes that definitely exist (and may even be possible to induce to appear on a search page, by other means) and get "no results, have some trash instead" in response.

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.

You are right. I think what I misremembered you guys changed was that WORDS became optional unless you wrapped each one of them inside double quotes which became super annoying.