Wouldn’t it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for “this is my phrase” rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?
There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website’s search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:
- The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
- They’re just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.
Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?
Cheers!
EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I’m mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don’t seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.
Because business majors decided a search engines primary job was actually to serve you ads rather than to help you search for things
Yeah, even fucking linkedin can’t make the difference between C, C++ and C#
It’s largely the first one, at least according to The Man Who Killed Google Search.
See also the Hackernews discussion and this follow-up article by the same author (with links to an article with Google’s response, summaries of other discussions on the topic, etc.)
I could FEEL when amazon removed the not and quote functions… now it’s nigh-unusable.
I hate trying to search for specific things on amazon because negative operators don’t work. I’m frequently trying to find products that don’t contain specific words. Like when I wanted a foam mattress cover that wasn’t cooling. I need all the heat I can get when sleeping. But trying to find one that wasn’t marketed as cooling? No such luck. I tried using search engines that honor negatives but no such luck. Amazon has thwarted every attempt to find what I want.
I’m convinced there’s an AI in Google search now that reinterprets what you put. It never seems to give me what I search, only what it thinks I mean.
I said so-fucking-long to Google long ago and switched to DuckDuckGo. If I ever get really nowhere and think maybe googs might have a result for me, then on the Duck you just use a !g before your terms and it facilitates the search thru Google but without their ads.
Their focus shifted long ago from being the best to just figuring out new ways to get more out of users, no matter how deceitful and manipulative they need to be.
Guys, please. The solution to Google reinterpreting your search queries has been around for years, and it is called VERBATIM SEARCH. (Search options: All results -> Verbatim). Voila, welcome back to 1997.
