Re:Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirat...
by dpkirchner on Monday September 04, 2023 @01:27AM
(#37377395)
I don't have an example query ready for you. I'll often see the problem when I include error messages, media titles, or model numbers in my searches, none of which have synonyms. Google will arbitrarily ignore at least one term, often silently.
I don't take issue with spellcheck or even synonym suggestions, FWIW. It's that the results which include/are relevant to specifically requested terms appear below results that don't/aren't, sometimes way below. It hasn't always been this way but I can't pinpoint when results started getting worse.
Re:Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirat...
by crazygringo on Monday September 04, 2023 @11:22AM
(#37381349)
But that's easy to fix by putting in quotes. And Google will often highlight next to a search result "doesn't include <search term>", which you can click and Google will add the quotes for you.
If you put all terms in quotes, Google generally won't ignore anything. It will tell you it couldn't find any results though, quite frequently.
Re:Google Preemptively Banned Hundreds of Millions of 'Pirat...
by dpkirchner on Monday September 04, 2023 @09:24PM
(#37386848)
Sure, there are workarounds for the problem, some of which work reliably. In the grand scheme they're not even onerous, just annoying.
Oh they absolutely do, and thank goodness. What turns out to be the most useful page often contains a synonym instead, which an exact query would have missed.
But I've never seen Google return results that don't have anything to do with my search terms at all. Is that a problem you've had? Do you have an example query?
The only bad searches I get are when a word/term has multiple meanings and the more popular one crowds out what I'm actually looking for... but then I just add terms to narrow it down and it fixes it.