I do suspect the main thing people complain about currently with Google is the abundance of ads and the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
Greater scale = greater cost of keeping data hot in their search data-warehouses (esp. in light of contention over memory/caches.) Keeping around both a source-text string and its tsvector representation (or whatever Google's version of that is) is a "thing that doesn't scale" that they could provide at 1B queries/day, but probably not at 10B queries/day.
> the algorithm that has encouraged stupid amounts of articles of a certain length. Recipe for baked potatoes is now 2000 words long.
That's not the algorithm's fault per se; that's instead the fact that recipes can't be copyrighted, and so these sites can freely steal + repost one-another's recipes, and so you'll find the same recipe word-for-word on many sites, thus making an exact match in the recipe part not contribute highly to ranking any particular site. The 2000-word blog post, on the other hand, is actual Intellectual Property unique to the site posting it. So it only appears in the one place; and so when your query matches it, it ranks quite highly indeed.
Yes, it is. There are good recipe sites out there with authoritative, reliable content and fast loading times. Google says it prioritizes those things, I can identify sites that have them, and yet the algorithm doesn't favour them. That's the algorithm's fault no matter what memes about copyright law cause a proliferation of shitty websites.
Compare and contrast: phone-number directory listings. Who should Google cite as the authoritative source for lists of name-to-phone number associations? Nobody. All the lists are copying from each-other, curating and correcting the data taken from one-another, gathering their own original data for additions, and everything in between. Every portal overlaps every other portal, but mostly has the same stuff.
Compare and contrast, in the physical world: printings of public-domain literature. If Google indexed bookstores, which printing by which publisher would you want them to rank first on a search for e.g. Pride and Prejudice?
$10 a month for a personal search is a bit much. $10 a month for work related search is cheap. Give me results specific to my industry without having a super long query.
Control. They've moved from helping you find what you asked for, to trying to influence you to changingnwhat you ask for to the thing that paid them the most.
Similarly they're they're forcing creators to alter content to match their metrics or fall into obscurity.
Quotes have ~always been an exact match on the tokenized query text, not a substring match on the corpus text. No synonyms, reordering, gaps, etc, but the matches -- and failures -- are sometimes not obvious at first blush.
If you search for "don't stop me now", for instance, that "don't" tokenizes to "don t", so it will match the tokenized strings "don't", "don t", "don-t", "don, t", etc ... but not "dont", because that's outside tokenization.
On the other hand, snippets mostly are substring matches of the query text, so if you see a result to a literal query that doesn't have a snippet, you know it's probably one of the weird matches.
If you use quotes around a phrase, it will reorder terms and make substitutions with synonyms in addition to straight up ignoring the quoted phrase no katter how many times you add +. If you then fiddle with settings (randomly not available depending on star alignment and device) to change it to 'verbatim' it will still reorder and split up tokens in the phrase.
