2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.
They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.
Google gave me more than 2 pages of results, while Bing gave me only 1 page.
After that, both Google and Bing provided countless pages full of results about Hoodoo, Voodoo, Zoodoo and the like.
The impossibility of making exact searches is what annoys me most in modern search engines.
I might make a typo sometimes, but I would prefer to correct myself when that happens, instead of the search engine always assuming that I am a moron that cannot type, thus offering every time "helpful" corrections.
I tried to repeat your experiment. I entered "xoodoo", surrounded by quotation marks into the Google search bar. I got 29 pages of results. From what I can tell by the previews, every result matches the string "xoodoo" and not any other similar string. Are you sure you are using the exact search functionality and not just typing the word into the search bar?
monkpit|10 days ago
They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service
shakna|10 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535
Antibabelic|10 days ago
adrian_b|10 days ago
Google gave me more than 2 pages of results, while Bing gave me only 1 page.
After that, both Google and Bing provided countless pages full of results about Hoodoo, Voodoo, Zoodoo and the like.
The impossibility of making exact searches is what annoys me most in modern search engines.
I might make a typo sometimes, but I would prefer to correct myself when that happens, instead of the search engine always assuming that I am a moron that cannot type, thus offering every time "helpful" corrections.
Antibabelic|9 days ago