I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm.
For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.
The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users.
The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished.
Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.
Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly.
> > In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.
Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches.
People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a mass market of people who see, and click, ads.
EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries.
And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading description of the times + is used correctly.
Less than one out of six hundred trips takes anyone to the hospital, but we wouldn't want a car that breaks down as soon as anyone is injured.
People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work.
Google gets ad clicks by building a brand, they want us to associate them with "competent to handle all my search needs." This is why Ford and Dodge make stock cars, not because they want to sell them on a mass market, but because they want to convince people the brand is capable of excelling beyond their needs.
UPDATE: I think you're right about Google's rationale, I just think execs are missing some counterarguments.
> users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches
Matt Cutts obviously isn't stupid, but that's a very stupid thing to say, or think, or act upon.
Many things are done rarely, that are extremely useful or important.
Hey, most search strings probably represent "less than half a percent" of all possible searches; so by that metric they could drop most of their index, and only answer the most frequent searches...
When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO.
Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.
"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are buried in there somewhere.
Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine.
Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.
It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?
The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the verbatim option :(
So true. I run into this when needing to debug some weird stack trace error but have recently run into google fuzzing my "" exact searches. Now I know I'm not the only one
>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it.
>Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop.
As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count.
I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]:
>From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):
>"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"
Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].
So, I was skeptical that only 19k webpages would contain the actual word mars (as per the +mars query), and curious why "verbatim" search wasn't included for comparison.
So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure that google has indexed more mars-mentioning pages than that!
Oh, not counting the "very similar" results:
> In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 188 already displayed.
Clicking this "include similar results" link gets me 45 results pages or about 450 results that mention mars found with a verbatim search.
I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway. Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle? It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more intuitive.
But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain the exact phrase "YouTube"?
I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.
As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but always failed.
The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.
The only blind study[1] I've heard of on the subject put Bing ahead of Google at almost 2-to-1 (yes, seriously).
>> Conducted by California-based Answers Research, the study queried an online sample of nearly 1,000 people at least 18 years old, all living in the US. None of the participants in the survey knew Microsoft was involved. Participants performed 10 searches of their own choosing, and were shown the results from both Bing and Google, side by side, with all the the branding removed. Additionally, notes Microsoft, “The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” For each search, participants chose which side showed better results, or could call it a tie. Of the participants surveyed, 57.4 percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often, and 12.4 percent didn’t prefer one over the other.
It was this study that inspired Microsoft's Bing it On campaign in 2012. Unfortunately, the ad campaign mostly consisted of Microsoft recreating the independent study, but cheating to make sure Bing would win even bigger[2].
For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness.
For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.
Also, the title of this article is so messed up...
I've been using DDG for over a year solid, and for the past couple on and off.
I still run the occasionally !sp or !g bang search (StartPage is a proxied Google, the other hits Google directly). And in almost all cases there's little if any discernable difference.
The main exceptions are:
1. Date-bounded searches. DDG doesn't support this.
2. Special collections. Books and Scholar in particular.
Until recently, I'd have included images, but DDG's added that. Maps can be searched through OSM.
My primary concerns are privacy and search bubbling, but quality is up there as well.
Did Google really name a feature after a P2P protocol? Coupled with the + symbol I initially thought this was about a file sharing protocol that G killed
Response from 'thisisnotatest' from Google search team [1]:
"I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google."
Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results.
Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
It's strange that you did not. WTF moment was the first thing I experienced when they did that and my search with + returned results that didn't contain the word. I was literally furious.
I may be wrong, but I seem to remember using +word since the AltaVista days. I still do it, even though it doesn't work. (grumble)
That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.
Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of the time.
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.
[+] [-] reitanqild|11 years ago|reply
The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)
[+] [-] pasbesoin|11 years ago|reply
Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.
[+] [-] DanBC|11 years ago|reply
> > In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your...
Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches.
People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a mass market of people who see, and click, ads.
EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries.
And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading description of the times + is used correctly.
[+] [-] brownbat|11 years ago|reply
People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work.
Google gets ad clicks by building a brand, they want us to associate them with "competent to handle all my search needs." This is why Ford and Dodge make stock cars, not because they want to sell them on a mass market, but because they want to convince people the brand is capable of excelling beyond their needs.
UPDATE: I think you're right about Google's rationale, I just think execs are missing some counterarguments.
[+] [-] bambax|11 years ago|reply
Matt Cutts obviously isn't stupid, but that's a very stupid thing to say, or think, or act upon.
Many things are done rarely, that are extremely useful or important.
Hey, most search strings probably represent "less than half a percent" of all possible searches; so by that metric they could drop most of their index, and only answer the most frequent searches...
[+] [-] barrkel|11 years ago|reply
Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business. Even when you really just care about the average Joe.
[+] [-] magicalist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine.
Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.
It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?
[+] [-] 0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kleinlieu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiksi|11 years ago|reply
>Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop.
As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count.
I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]:
>From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):
>"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c...
Edit:formatting
[+] [-] AshleysBrain|11 years ago|reply
"mars" - 228m results
+mars - 19k results
+"mars" - 197m results
Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].
[+] [-] ttctciyf|11 years ago|reply
So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure that google has indexed more mars-mentioning pages than that!
Oh, not counting the "very similar" results:
> In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 188 already displayed.
Clicking this "include similar results" link gets me 45 results pages or about 450 results that mention mars found with a verbatim search.
I feel like I've gone back to 1994!
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikegioia|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.
[+] [-] apricot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|11 years ago|reply
>> Conducted by California-based Answers Research, the study queried an online sample of nearly 1,000 people at least 18 years old, all living in the US. None of the participants in the survey knew Microsoft was involved. Participants performed 10 searches of their own choosing, and were shown the results from both Bing and Google, side by side, with all the the branding removed. Additionally, notes Microsoft, “The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” For each search, participants chose which side showed better results, or could call it a tie. Of the participants surveyed, 57.4 percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often, and 12.4 percent didn’t prefer one over the other.
It was this study that inspired Microsoft's Bing it On campaign in 2012. Unfortunately, the ad campaign mostly consisted of Microsoft recreating the independent study, but cheating to make sure Bing would win even bigger[2].
1) http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-s...
2) http://www.435digital.com/blog/2012/10/09/bing-it-down-a-not...
[+] [-] hrktb|11 years ago|reply
For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.
Also, the title of this article is so messed up...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|11 years ago|reply
I still run the occasionally !sp or !g bang search (StartPage is a proxied Google, the other hits Google directly). And in almost all cases there's little if any discernable difference.
The main exceptions are:
1. Date-bounded searches. DDG doesn't support this.
2. Special collections. Books and Scholar in particular.
Until recently, I'd have included images, but DDG's added that. Maps can be searched through OSM.
My primary concerns are privacy and search bubbling, but quality is up there as well.
[+] [-] chewxy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alok-g|11 years ago|reply
"I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958
[+] [-] joeevans|11 years ago|reply
Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
[+] [-] xor-ed-wolf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|11 years ago|reply
That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.
[+] [-] _greim_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annesa|11 years ago|reply
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