News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo Gains. Parent comment

Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by swang on Thursday January 08, 2015 @04:07AM (#8855574)
> Bing is currently more literal-minded than Google. Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for. It's become difficult on Google to search for a non-popular thing that happens to be close to a popular search target. Google does not treat quote marks as a mandatory exact match any more, just a hint.

One of the biggest things that irks me now about Google. Sometimes I want to search just for the word, "sofa" I don't need you to match it with "relevant" other words like "couch"

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by collyw on Thursday January 08, 2015 @06:08AM (#8855883)
Not quite the same, but I quite like the fact that Google is way better at spelling than I am.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by proexploit on Thursday January 08, 2015 @05:01AM (#8855726)
Why not? I consider sofa and couch to be synonyms. This lets me do two searches in one.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by blueskin_ on Thursday January 08, 2015 @05:08AM (#8855751)
Well, you used to be able to use "sofa" with google, which would exclude 'couch' etc. but then they killed that. Still works with other search engines.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by jpatokal on Thursday January 08, 2015 @06:45AM (#8855959)
sofa -couch still works. Also, verbatim mode: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by Dylan16807 on Thursday January 08, 2015 @11:06AM (#8856971)
Won't sofa -couch exclude pages that have both words?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by josteink on Thursday January 08, 2015 @06:39AM (#8855947)
> Why not? I consider sofa and couch to be synonyms. This lets me do two searches in one.

For you. For this one use-case. Which may or may not be good.

It's the effect of this scaled up, for all use-cases Google's cluster can identify, for all users which is bad. It's one of the reasons I use DDG instead of Google these days.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo ... by spacecowboy_lon on Thursday January 08, 2015 @06:01AM (#8855873)
sometimes you dont want that eg try to find solutions for open directory problems on OSX Server (as the docs for OSX server are F%$^ S%^t) you get lost a low quality results about how to make OSX work with Micrsofts AD!

if I wanted those results I would search with Acive directoy as part of the flipping query!

[ Parent | on HN ]