Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes
by trebbble on Friday August 05, 2022 @01:34PM
(#32359263)
> 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.
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).
Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes
by Jiro on Friday August 05, 2022 @09:50AM
(#32356102)
I once tried to search for a scammer named "internal revenue services" (with an S at the end) and it just wouldn't let me, quotes or not.
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.
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.