Worth mentioning that even if you put a term in double quotes, Google still tries to be too clever - you are not guaranteed to get results that contain your quotes search term :/
This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho.
But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
I think it’s primarily for people copying and pasting something like an error message, which may have user-specific data in quotes. That should be what “not many results for...” is for, but Google is always trying to optimize away those clicks. Maybe they could add a “programatic” search feature with documented syntax for power users.
I am always surprised that these systems are not more friendly to engineers, since they were built by them. You'd think for their own sakes they'd stick in a system like xkcd.com/806/
Use 'verbatim'. It's a drop down option, and it isn't as good as the old + or other operators (deprecated because of Google Plus). For example, with verbatim you can't only + one single thing in a search.
Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
And even if that exact term is present on popular websites, like Stack Overflow, Google still seems to have trouble finding those exact results regularly.
I was under the impression "verbatim" is to disable filter-bubble personalisation.
Normal queries are tailored to your personal filter bubble. You can't see what other people see from same search, and if you're doing SEO or just trying to find who tends to come top in results for something you have a lot of history looking at, you can't tell who comes top for other people.
It’s like being able to touch your nose in the dark, or even having been blind since birth.
Verbatim searches are for those easy tasks when you know literally, exactly, what you’re looking for.
Something tells me that a lot of folks on HN are being let down by Google in this area. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I want to identify these issues to help everyone. I wish the UI of search wasn’t so textually-bound.
Is there such a thing as an augmented reality search engine? You search like you do at the library, or when you lost your keys. But for data and virtual objects, they lose out - their evanescence creates a perception gap. There is no correspondence with physical objects, etc. We are getting better with haptics, however.
Rainbows End[0] is a future society I’d choose to live in, especially right about now.
