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0 pointsJohnFen4y ago0 comments

Why is it that exact searches used to actually work reliably, then? What's changed?

0 comments

This has changed:

  term -term

In the past that Google search returned no results for any search. Today the set of results are altered before they are presented to the user. Sometimes the set of reslts is empty and at other times it contains results.

For example:

  steve -steve    returns 0 results
  test -test      returns 4,780,000,000 in my search
                  starting with google/youtube videos

saalweachter4y ago

That's easy; there are synonyms added for test but not for steve.

If you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms.

It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.

IncRnd4y ago

Correct, though it is new in the sense of this conversation, which compares to how a search used to be.

The point wasn't as to what the synonyms were for a specific search term but that they have been added as implicit terms, which makes google search no longer exact.

fargle4y ago

[test -test -tests -tested -testing] returns no results for me - teased out the synonyms!

saalweachter4y ago

I mean, I'm confident that the core of how it works -- "an exact match between the tokenized document and the tokenized query" -- hasn't changed in a very long time, but I can't really promise there wasn't another aspect I'm ignorant of that is responsible for the behavior you remember that changed somehow.

"Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

IncRnd4y ago

This has changed:

  term -term

For example:

  steve -steve    returns 0 results
  test -test      returns 4,780,000,000 in my search
                  starting with google/youtube videos

saalweachter4y ago

That's easy; there are synonyms added for test but not for steve.

If you search for ["test" -test] you'll get no results; quoting "test" removes the synonyms.

It's probably not new behavior per se, but synonyms have gotten a lot broader over the years, so it was a lot easier to punch [term -term] ten years ago and hit a term which had no synonyms.

IncRnd4y ago

Correct, though it is new in the sense of this conversation, which compares to how a search used to be.

The point wasn't as to what the synonyms were for a specific search term but that they have been added as implicit terms, which makes google search no longer exact.

fargle4y ago

[test -test -tests -tested -testing] returns no results for me - teased out the synonyms!

saalweachter4y ago

"Exact tokenized matching" can look like "exact string matching" a lot of the time. Until you hit some of the edge cases it's like kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse