If they break a key feature to MAKE a verbatim search happen with literally two keys pressed, and are apparently not even indexing what they used to anymore, they're dropping the ball. Most people know the quotation trick now and are probably assuming it still works
I tried using verbatim searches to make Google decent for me again, but Google defines "verbatim" rather differently than I do.
1 - By interpreting your search, it leads to better "search quality" by having one model say "i think this is what they want" and another execute the search. P90 accuracy is increased at the cost of P99 accuracy.
2 - If you search for a literal string you know exists, you expect to find it. By interpreting, fewer search inputs with literal strings make it to the search function.
3 - Since Google is interpreting more searches, this gives ad-placement a route in to favorably interpret "they want to buy something" even when this isn't the case. This makes Google money.
4 - People that used to use literal searches either stop, learn how, or switch search engines.
5 - After a couple years, business metrics show that literal searches represent 0.1% of queries and make less money, is it really worth investing in? When it was a P99 issue it fell off the radar and now the P999 is lost.
So a series or rational decisions by rational actors leads to a decline of a used feature because of business incentives and chasing P90s at the cost of P99s.
Fantastic
I couldn't get my fiancé's mother to stop re-installing bonzi buddy or whatever that toolbar was called because she 'loves the purple monkey, he's so cute!'
I actually use that, but it has its faults. You get more spam results and iffy sites (e.g. Wikipedia clones). It's also missing some of Google's convenient features (like doing unit conversions and arithmetic).
IIRC, Verbatim mode is closer to the raw results of Google's underlying search engine, before some of the massaging they do. Some of that massaging is bad, but some of it's all right.
Second, I just looked up when this feature was introduced (assuming it was fairly new), and it was in... November 2011. It's been there for the past twelve years. See:
https://www.wired.com/2011/11/google-verbatim-search-back/
https://searchengineland.com/responding-to-complaints-google...
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2011/11/18/google-introduc...
Thanks for letting us know! It's been right under our noses the whole time -- and it's not like the Tools menu is even particularly hidden, at least on desktop.
Every time I tried it, it didn't work.
It certainly changed a lot on those years, but the reason nobody acknowledges it is probably because it's a coin-toss if Google wants "verbatim" to mean verbatim today.
Quotes actually stopped working (they became a hint, instead of filtering the results) a long time ago, and many people insisted for years that the verbatim search worked. Probably because those tried it on the days when Google decided to use a standard dictionary. Nowadays even those people gave-up.
I just tried a whole bunch of queries on seemingly generic-sounding sentences from old pages on niche blogs and it found every single one.
So I'd love to understand when it doesn't work and if there's some pattern -- like if certain punctuation trips it up, or if it's simply pages not indexed in the first place.
But then, I've seen it work too. And stop working again.
This is just about verifying the behavior, that it's not finding a verbatim result that it should. And it has nothing to do with personalization -- it's easy to run these logged out.
Also, "A verbatim search was very similar to putting every word in quotes" is not an example of it not working. The question isn't whether they're similar -- your claim was that it "didn't work", which I take to mean it was returning incorrect results.
I think I also mentioned it a couple of times when the same complaint came up.
The problem I think is that "verbatim" is not a word that one thinks of, so nobody searches for that. Plus it's hidden in a generic "Tools" menu. Sometime you get a link to search for the exact phrase at the bottom of results, but that too is subtle.