Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.

This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.

Google Search fails whenever I'm doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can't just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn't help, because the problem isn't the rankings, it's that you don't know when you're done.

Then there's personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it's often because the first query had something in it that I didn't want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can't trust that the reason is part of the query I made.

Basically, you've improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics' blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what's wrong, but they are right. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.

Verbatim was a regression, given it requires you to use the UI instead of typing inline, and it seems to interact with other search options in hard to predict ways.

> A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase

I don't think a + could apply to a phrase. That was one problem with the + operator; it was not clear to users how it actually worked. In fact, though there were many searches whose results were helped by their use of + (many of whom made by users who are commenting here on HN), there were many searches whose results were largely made worse by their use of +, whether it was inadvertent or overzealously applied.

I had a couple of very unproductive days before working out how to force it to stop changing my search terms.

I could see how vb6/"visual basic" would cause some irrelevant results to come up. It's probably good sometimes, but also really bad sometimes. I've recorded it in our list of motivational examples that we use to try to come up with improvements to our algorithm. Thanks, and sorry for your wasted productivity.

ouch.

How do you know that? Just because I click on a result doesn't mean it was the correct one. I usually click on A LOT of results just to check if MAYBE there is something relevant (which is mostly not, especially with Google lately).

At other times, verbatim yields the best results. I guess I just wish there was a link next to the search results that let you repeat the search verbatim, so that we wouldn't have to go all the way to Advanced Search.

I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.

Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.

1) If I don't notice, then it's not the right result.

2) If I put a + in front of a search term, there's only one reason for that: I explicitly want results containing that word. If you return something not containing that word, then it's not the right result plus I'm going to be annoyed about it.

2) Do you mean putting a search term in "quotes"? The + operator was retired a while ago. And putting the term in quotes should do what you want, except maybe for high confidence spelling corrections or extremely long tail cases where there are just about no search result to show.

For most of them there is no "try again", they simply give up and blame Google (and maybe try the query in Bing/Yahoo).

Are you permitted to share the types of metrics that Google uses to determine whether an algorithm change is producing better results? Is bounce rate the primary metric that is used?

I can't discuss our internal metrics, sorry.