I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results I'm looking for.
It's always worked reasonably well and saves me from trying to come up with a search.
At the same time I've noticed that coming up with a sequence of search terms has been working worse and worse in google over the last couple years. I frequently get results for whatever google thinks I was searching for, especially if my original search terms resulted in very few results or no results, I'll just get a result page anyway except it's almost never helpful.
Perhaps this is an attempt to make Google more Star-Trek/Watson-like, and it's great for those use-cases. But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.
> I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results I'm looking for.
This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.
Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.
Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.
Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.
So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.
Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.
I remember back in the old days search engines were explicitly saying that words like "and" "how" etc.. were ignored when returning the results for your search. These days these words are becoming the key to get you the results you are actually looking for.
I'm going to answer this from a technical point of view. I find search is best done by using precedence.
For example say my question is: "how to use rails with devise and omniauth", I break it down to the group in which I think nets the most results should be the first keyword and so on.
The top results are normally similar. With exception to the "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" search, which is rather different.
From my standpoint the "rails+devise+omniauth" yields the best results as the source of truth is closer to the github documentation "OmniAuth: Overview · plataformatec/devise Wiki · GitHub", over third party information "#235 Devise and OmniAuth (revised) - RailsCasts".
Using "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" gets rather off topic after the 3 or so results.
Another tactic I use is searching like a command line. For instance: "wiki list breaking bad", or "imdb iron man". This don't work with smaller properties, so "site:example.com" is another awesome tool.
Quotes do not require the plus sign as a placeholder for space, unless I'm missing something.
I often use quotes to search for specific Linux error messages with great success; any hit that isn't a direct match gets shafted.
> it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.
That's a really fantastic observation. I suspect that lots of these changes are meant for those kinds of people (who happen to make up the majority of the world) and not for tech folks at all.
But yeah, I notice that if I ask a question, quite often the results I get are on question asking sites like Stack Overflow -- it turns out I usually get very good results that way too ;)
I really miss the + operator in Google searches. Back when Google disabled it to make their Google+ easier to search for, someone posted some good examples of where " " fails to reproduce the + search behavior.
Completely different. It's a unitary literal operator, so if you put +shelf you would only get pages that had the word "shelf" and not shelved, shelving, bookcase, etc like you get normally.
I thought they got rid of the + operator a couple of years ago, recommending instead that you surround the formerly plussed word with quotes or use the Verbatim option under Search Tools.
However, I just tried a search for "anagram +python" and got 67 results vs 139,000 without the plus-sign. Does that mean they quietly restored the operator?
I haven't tried the "+" operator in a while but I know the "-" operator has continued to work.
I always use it to filter out commercial or store results when a query triggers some over-zealous SEO and throws up pages of junk. A quick "-buy" or "-store" usually cleans the results up.
I honestly suspect no power users or technical users are included in A/B testing, or if they are, they're a realistic minority whom does not have changes made for them....
Why was this voted down? It is the correct answer for searching for serial numbers, for example an Adobe Photoshop serial number: "1325-1576-6224-7891-3222-6645"
Double-quote is "sort of literal" (google will perform automatic stemming on single words in double quotes, but not on phrases) if you want really, really literal use "intext:" or "allintext:"
But it seems inevitable that as google targets what most people mean, they will target less what niche people mean (us). They could do both, with explicit operators etc, but would double their indices, and not worth it (for them). :( At least it creates opportunity for the google-usurper.
Yeah, people really need to know how to google effectively. You can also add "-" before a word to cut out results with that word. (example: "cats -dogs" will return searches with cats but take out ones that also include dogs.)
Then there's "file:" and a file extension name to find searches of that filetype. (example: "AP biology file:ppt" returns all ap biology related powerpoints.
Next there's "site:" and a website. (Example: "site:reddit.com fedoras" searches for fedoras on reddit, a very common thing. Useful if a site's search engine sucks.)
In my experience, as a rule, site search engines generally suck. And the exceptions to the rule often turn out to be farming the search out to Google one way or another.[1][2]
I often simply ignore site search boxes in favor of using the "site:" operator.
file: doesn't appear to be a documented command, while filetype is [1]
Searching for a few random queries with either "file:pdf" or "filetype:pdf" shows that both return pdfs, but the results that I get are different. Not sure what to make of that or which is better.
That's a massive fail for Google IMO. Why isn't it matching phrases for the search recommendation? Surely "to err is human" popularised by Pope [a million plus results] should be suggested before "to heir is human" (a minor computer game) [60k results].
"heir" is a much closer match for "hair" in terms of Levenshtein distance[1] (which indicates a typing error) and soundex[2] (misheard). But clearly "to err is human" should be offered as a possibility too.
I get a lot of "Showing results for X instead" when searching for model numbers or similar.
Usually you can click "search for {what I actually typed}" but it's still annoying. I liked it when +'s and double-quotes consistently did the same thing every time.
Maybe there is a setting that does this still? I've tried playing with a few settings but have had mixed results / consistency...
If that happens it's a bug, and I'd love to have some examples to pass along. I'll make sure they get to the right people. Looking through your search history: https://history.google.com/history/ might help you find them.
- still works, but they removed + a couple (few?) years ago. Instead, they recommend you put the single term in quotes, so a search for 'linux +powerpc' would now be 'linux "powerpc"'.
That, and they also have the Verbatim option under Search Tools, but using it seems to conflict with other Tools, such as date filtering, and also applies to the whole query, not just one or two terms.
Google is increasingly becoming an "Ask Jeeves" clone. I have very little control of my searches and Google just returns what it thinks I meant, rather than what I actually typed.
I would love an advanced search mode with some simple boolean logic, even if it took several seconds to return the result, for those times when you really need to sift through a lot of garbage to find the results you really want.
What is the point of Google returning results in 0.000000001 seconds if they aren't the results I wanted and I have very little means of refining the search. The moment a new search engine comes with this functionality and a decent indexed base, it's bye-bye Google for me.
If you have any example queries I'd love to debug them. You might find them here: https://history.google.com/history/ if you have search history turned on.
This is why I basically use DuckDuckGo for any search where I know exactly what terms I want to be super weighted, and Google for things like: "What is the weather in Amsterdam?"
It's worked out really well. That plus the !g operator in ddg means I get the best of both worlds, I'd suggest you try it for a day or so and see how it goes.
Same here. I was struggling over some results a couple times today where I entered keywords and it seemed more like Google was trying to answer a question. Wish I could turn the new thing off. I don't use Google that way.
But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.
It is a boatload of extra typing, but the "allintext:" operator is your friend for those kinds of searches. I wish there was a URL modifier that could force google to assume allintext: on the search - that way I could have two different google search engines in firefox, one for literal and one for more "semiotic" searches. Maybe there is and I just don't know it?
You only need to look at google's knowledge graph alongside google now to see that that's where they're going. Many Question Answering Systems are able to handle many kinds of questions with relative accuracy now. With all of the different kinds of data sources out there, I'm not really surprised.
That being said machine learning is far from perfect. Allowing for user correction is still an immense must.
Let's hope basic search operators like quotes don't go away anytime soon.
I have noticed the same and I am having more and more difficulty to find exactly what I want in the first result page. The disappearance of the minus and plus operators is probably the major reason for me not getting the results that I want.
I wish the 1998 Google page that made the front page on HN was real (with updated index of course).
It's always worked reasonably well and saves me from trying to come up with a search.
At the same time I've noticed that coming up with a sequence of search terms has been working worse and worse in google over the last couple years. I frequently get results for whatever google thinks I was searching for, especially if my original search terms resulted in very few results or no results, I'll just get a result page anyway except it's almost never helpful.
Perhaps this is an attempt to make Google more Star-Trek/Watson-like, and it's great for those use-cases. But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.