Comment on What search engines really have exact match?
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 1 year agoThat’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.
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 forblah” 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.
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).
Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
Vlyn@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Most users are idiots, so the behavior makes sense.
If some random teenager googles: “Am I preganante?” then the search result should guess “pregnant” instead and those kind of users will be happy.
It only gets annoying when you search for highly specific things, but I’ve found if you put it in quotation marks it usually works out.
My biggest issue isn’t the search, but the dozens of generated spam sites that nowadays crowd the first search result page :-/