We're improving search results when you use quotes

Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by dannysullivan on Friday August 05, 2022 @06:25AM (#32354088)

Quotes searches bring back pages we can see have the quoted terms. That's how it is intended to work, and that's how does work. I've looked into many of these cases, we find the quoted terms there. In this example, we don't see any pages with that quoted phrase. If there is a page with it out on the web, like the forum post you mentioned, it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it. Do you recall the URL? It would help me look into that more.

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Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by onli on Friday August 05, 2022 @07:24AM (#32354558)

I have a different example of Google not finding a page with "" that ought to be found. Assume I want to find https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685, which is on a ~20 year old phpBB forum that is certainly indexed. The post is from 2012 after all. And I take one sentence from there and search for it, with quotes:

"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.

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Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by dannysullivan on Friday August 05, 2022 @08:33AM (#32355164)

I don't see that particular page appearing to be indexed by us. If we don't have it indexed, we can't match it. Ideally, we'd index all the pages out on the web. But the web is really big.

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Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by Der_Einzige on Friday August 05, 2022 @11:24AM (#32357480)

You're still trying to gaslight HN users about this. Just ADMIT YOU and GOOGLE ARE WRONG.

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.

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Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by solarkraft on Saturday August 06, 2022 @07:28AM (#32367108)

it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it

what the ... ? Why do you delete stuff from your index? Even if it's down there's a good chance it'll be archived ...

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Re:We're improving search results when you use quotes by dannysullivan on Monday August 08, 2022 @06:52AM (#32384092)

It's not that it gets specifically deleted. We just don't have infinite space. There's always new pages coming along. Like trillions of pages out there. So we might not get back to revisiting a page and it falls out of our index while other content is added.

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