[When Google first came on the scene, its defaulting to "AND" search] was a godsend for savvy users. Because every term appeared in results, you could continue to refine your queries by simply adding new words to the search bar until you found what you were looking for.Maybe Andy was just saying it was as if the default search had changed to "OR"?
As Google grew in popularity, this didn't scale. Non-technical users don't know what search terms to use or how to use search modifiers, and they shouldn't have to. Instead, Google needed to read minds to find what their mainstream audience was looking for, even if it meant ignoring what they actually wrote.
They started with the introduction of spelling suggestions, with "do you mean?" prompts introduced in 2003. By 2009, these were so successful that Google replaced the user's search with the corrected words by default, though they always explicitly explained the change.
In January 2009, however, Google began experimenting with silently ignoring search terms completely. For anyone deep-diving Google for the dark corners of the Internet, this change was hard to swallow. For the first time, searches were unreliable — an "or" search instead of an "and" search.
Google has suddenly and recently shifted away from a "cool company"/"do no evil" into something more and more like Apple and Microsoft (and Verizon etc). I would peg this around 3 months ago; did something change inside of Google around that time?Well, they got rid of their CEO and replaced him with Larry Page, one of the founders. A lot of people at the time thought things would get better, but yeah it's brought a lot of crap. They also 'refocused' on 'social' at some point, with G+ and all of that. I don't think they've gotten to Verizon levels of suck lately.
Does anybody actually use Google's products regularly apart from the search engine and Gmail? It seems like these two are completely dominating every market, with a nod here or there to one or two shared documents. But, of course, this is just me.Docs, Reader, Youtube, Even G+. Oh, and Android.
An aside...Am I wrong in thinking that, back in the mists of time, wasn't a verbatim search exactly what Google originally performed? In my recollection, it seems the substitutions are relatively recent developments.I think they've always done substitutions/synonyms and given you results when some of the terms didn't give good/relevant results. I think many people are noticing a decidedly worse change to the way it handles substitutions/synonyms that is independent of the plus operator debacle. Anecdotally, it seems like they've tweaked the algorithm to not favor inclusion of ALL the search terms as heavily. This is really frustrating, because in reality, what I actually want isn't forcing quotation-marks/plus-operators/Verbatim. I want it to handle synonyms as it did before, where it looked for synonyms only when it was contextually really obvious. An example would be the MacOS query Nelson made. Doing a search for MacOS along with an obscure product number a year ago would give good results without any quotes or whatever, if you use Verbatim Search it won't include "Mac OS" -- it will only look for "MacOS" without spaces. There's no way to have search behavior from a year ago because they've tweaked the algorithm for the worse, your choices are overeager dropping of search terms or rigid exclusivity. I'm not sure anyone can say that their search quality has increased recently. I suspect they're making this switch because their internal metrics are showing better results, but they're probably blinded by the multiple comparisons problem where they're testing both search metrics and interpreting what the metrics mean. I've heard from people inside Google how data driven they are, but they may be reaching the wrong conclusion when it comes to what the search behavior numbers means.
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posted by Renoroc at 2:23 PM on November 15, 2011