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Comment on What search engines really have exact match?

_cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

I remember this working really well on google. Recently (several months?) it didn’t as I would expect. Fictional example: when searching for “asdf123” google would show results just containing ‘asdf’. One particular thing I noticed was that google seems to omit underscores from verbatim strings. So for example when searching for “asdf_qwertz” it would show results that contained asdf and qwertz without the underscore.

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Vlyn@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
That’s just not true. Search for “SearchX222”, you get zero results. Even though both SearchX and SearchX2 exist.

Google has been decent as a search, the problem nowadays are bait sites with fake articles and thousands of keywords on them to trick the system. The results suck, but it’s not Google’s fault.

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- Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I don’t know about your or the other person’s particular examples but even when quoting stuff, Google search very frequently thinks it knows better than the user. I use quoting a lot and very often it gives me something I didn’t ask for with “I think you meant blah: showing results for blah” even though I specifically quoted my query to ask for something other than “blah”.
  
  It was a lot more reliable about giving me what I actually asked for a few years ago. The results are currently a lot worse when you’re searching for something specific.
  
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  - Vlyn@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If it’s a common typo it does that, but below it is a link “search instead for” with your original word.
    
    It never forces other results when you use the word in quotation marks (it might just tell you “Did you mean xy?” without showing results for that).
    
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    Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    If it’s a common typo it does that, but below it is a link “search instead for” with your original word.
    
    Pretty sure it’s not just common typos. However you’re right that it doesn’t provide a link to search with the original word. It’s just annoying that even I explicitly went through the trouble of quoting my query it still tries to second guess me and makes me follow another link to get to the results I originally requested.
    
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