Google Just Got Better at Understanding Your Trickiest Searches (fastcompany.com) 80
For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for. And understanding that involves zeroing in on the meaningful keywords in a search query and ignoring the rest. Words like "a" and "the," for instance, can generally be safely ignored. From a report: The problem is that there are lots of searches where it's difficult for even a search engine as smart as Google to know how the words relate to each other and which ones matter. One example the company provides: If a user searches for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy," the "someone" is absolutely critical, since it's shorthand for "someone other than myself." A person would likely infer that that; a traditional search algorithm, not so much. But now Google is rolling out an update to its English-language search engine designed to give it a deeper understanding of such subtle queries, which will let it deliver more relevant results. For the above search, results are now topped with a "featured snippet" involving the specific issue of picking up another person's prescription. (Previously, the snippet involved prescriptions but failed to address the specific gist of the query.) I attended a press preview at Google headquarters earlier this week, where some of company's search executives showed examples of the new algorithm's improved results and explained the new technology that went into them. And they set the bar high for expectations; VP of search Pandu Nayak called them "the single biggest change we've had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning of the company."
O RLY? (Score:4, Funny)
Of course Google will claim that they understand my query just fine, they just don’t have the answer. No one does...
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Of course, that's why you have a spare pair of glasses stored in a known and easily locatable location.
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They're behind the couch.
Google knows everything (Score:2)
What makes you think it cannot find your car keys? It knows when you came home, where you've been within the house, where you lost them last time. And maybe even with your home security system saw you drop them.
Not today. But soon.
Google is trying to morph from a search engine to a source of all knowledge. What could possibly go wrong.
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The problem with google search is not your car keys, but the inherent conflict of interest in the business model. You want to see something that is relevant, they want you to see something that someone is paying them to show you.
The most obvious manifestation of this "problem" is the search of the Google Play store. After almost a decade, you still cannot search ONLY the apps you've added to "my library", because you have to see the options with ads and payments that you have not yet bought, so that they ge
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"Google, where are my damn car keys?"
Do not try and find the car keys, it's impossible. Instead try to realize the truth: there ARE no car keys. Then you'll see that it is not the keys that hide, but only yourself.
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Try it (Score:2)
Go to Google and do "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy". Then try Bing. Bing has better results. The first link is to: https://www.nhs.uk/common-heal... [www.nhs.uk]
So....yeah
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I imagine that result works better when you're in the UK. For me, the first Google result was a US government MedLine site on how getting prescriptions filled works. The first Bing result was the Walgreens corporate site.
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Google should simply reply, "Once more, in English".
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Indeed. Search engines, like any decent compiler, should not waste resources attempting to optimize for stupidity. There are trade-offs and it's far from clear that they're worth it.
Yeah, if you could just give me Perl RegExps... (Score:2)
On metadata/headers too, please.
I don't want to play a game of Family Feud where "We asked 100 retards ... in their natural language [youtu.be]", thank you very much.
Oh, and don't you dare remove punctuation, boolean operators, or assume I meant something else than precisely what I told you to look for, unless I request it!
Once again, porn leads the way (Score:3)
I mean, sometimes you just don't have the time or fingers to type anything more than "japan multi hentai squirrel" so you appreciate Google's ability to string that together into a cogent fetish request.
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For example, and entirely for research purposes, if I turn off safe search on google and bing, then go to the google main search and the bing main search and search on "Inflatable love fox," the first thing google pops up is a link to an alibaba page from their image search results that is pretty
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Kidding aside, have you ever tried to do a non-trivial image search? "One man and one woman with red car" is something that you'd expect there should be hundreds of pictures of on the internet, even by happenstance. Google returned me one image that matched what I was looking for, but after that, it's a somewhat random assemblage of men, women, and red cars. Bing Image Search does *slightly* better, but not significantly so.
Images are a kind of hard case, though, I get it.
Google is no good at this (Score:5, Insightful)
Google never sucks more than when it tries to "understand" my searches. No, I didn't mean to search for your asinine suggestion. I meant to search what I typed in. I have to use a lot of quotes to keep Google on target.
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There are plenty of high IQ people that are terrible at search. Become highly specialized in one thing and your brain doesn't have enough plasticity left to wrap itself around search.
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For me, Google's search has just gotten worse over the years. They've dumbed their search down to point you to the most common results instead of what you typed. Google needs a better way to differentiate technical work searches versus entertainment results.
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But surely if somebody's searching for "error" with a number after it, any results with some error number will be fine, right?
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Based on recent experiences, it will probably top the list with: "Buy error now on amazon!"
I kid you not, I have seen so many grossly illogical things it says it will sell me based on search terms entered into Google.
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EXACTLY, they removed the ability to require terms by using the + and now everything uses quotes, which isn't strictly enforced. Need an exact phrase? Wrap it in quotes! Need a specific term required in all the results? Wrap it in quotes!, Still, If I search for "heat sink" (In quotes because I'm searching for that exact PHRASE) I will end up with results that include shit like "...and the roast was putting off so much heat I had to throw it in the sink!..."
Don't get me started on the suggestions. No googl
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EXACTLY, they removed the ability to require terms by using the + and now everything uses quotes
And don't forget that this was just to fix searches around their own doomed Google+
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Sounds like you're not very good at searching. No I'm not being funny or dismissive. This is the result of a natural progression of Google from it's starts as a decent techie run search engine for the few nerdy enough to be on the internet to a general purpose search engine for the unwashed masses. And trust me those masses are incredibly unwashed.
I know someone who is polite to Google, as in their searches are "Please tell me who won the UEFA cup last night." These people exist. Ultimately this is the dire
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Actually, I find what I'm searching for probably at least 80% to 90% of the time. It's just I have to beat Google about the head and shoulders to get that done.
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It's just I have to beat Google about the head and shoulders to get that done.
That's precisely what I mean. We the techies try to be too clever. Rather than beating Google, it may just be easier to pretend to be a commoner. It just makes it easier to use Google these days.
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I'm not sure how this proves the author of the above comment is bad at searching. If they are entering a highly technical phrase that is well recognized by a particular industry and it gets automatically and uncontrollably substituted with terms that are more friendly to e-commerce / advertisers, then what is that person 'bad' at? Guessing what Google is going to do behind the scenes?
What if I did want the alternate form of gimp training? If there are two equally valid uses of a phrase, and it is reasona
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then what is that person 'bad' at?
Using Google clearly. I think you missed my point. Google is not a technical search tool. If you use it as one these days you'll find it fighting you. The OP seems to be bad at searching using Google, they may however be experts at writing unstructured database queries.
Will I melt
Strawman. No one said anything about melting, we're talking about someone who stated that Google sucks at understanding them.
Tip for old-school web searchers (Score:5, Interesting)
For people (like me) who have been using web search engine since early days (pre-Google, even), we learned early on to carefully curate our search terms, and to apply various operators to, for example, restrict results containing certain words, or force the presence of other words. Basically, we learned to create queries that narrowed the result space for dumb search engines which were nothing more than simple pattern matchers.
The first incarnation of Google web search was, like its predecessors, a simple pattern matcher, no more and no less. What made it dramatically better than its competition was Larry Page's clever idea[*] to exploit links as a way to measure the value of a page. Pages with more inbound links, it was correctly assumed, got those inbound links because they had good content. By ordering the results based on link structure, the engine didn't actually find results more effectively, but it put high-quality results at the top of the list.
But... the sort of search term curation we learned to do is unnatural to most people, who don't think in terms of pattern-matching database queries, and so search engines have evolved away from that approach and towards one that works better for most people. And works worse for those who do think in terms of pattern-matching database queries.
For years I found myself increasingly frustrated with my inability to craft queries that worked well, and at the steps Google kept taking to deprecate and remove the qualifiers that allowed me to express with precision the terms I wanted (and didn't want) in my results. I was angry when they removed the ability to specify that term A must appear near term B. Then one day I saw a list of queries that "ordinary" people type. The idiots were typing full sentences, including all the "filler" words we use in normal English, like "the", and "a", etc., words which would be stripped out and ignored by the search engine. And then it occurred to me that this sort of "normal English" query is what the search team is optimizing their system for.
So, I started typing normal English sentences as queries. I felt stupid doing it, because as a software engineer who understands how these things work, I knew it was dumb and pointless... but I quickly discovered that it actually works better than my old strategy. Most of the time, at least. I occasionally still use exclusions (prefix the word with "-") or forced literal inclusions (enclose the word or phrase with double quotes), but I only do that after an English sentence query has failed in a particular way that makes me think the tweak will help.
So: If you find yourself frustrated by useless results from carefully-chosen sequences of search terms, try not doing that. Instead, type in a sentence, asking the search engine exactly the way you'd ask a human librarian. Odds are you'll get better results. And the effectiveness of this approach will increase over time, because it's the approach the search engine engineers are trying to optimize.
When that fails, try https://support.google.com/web... [google.com]. But I find I'm far better off just starting with a normal English question.
Re:Tip for old-school web searchers (Score:5, Insightful)
Oops, I added a footnote mark, but then forgot the footnote. Here it is:
[*] It's worth pointing out that Larry Page didn't invent the concept underlying PageRank out of whole cloth. The concept had been explored for years, and the mathematical algorithms needed to implement it efficiently created, in a related context: Ranking of research papers by citation. It had long been observed that mere citation count was not a good indicator of paper quality/impact, but that the web of citation links could be mined to identify the truly important papers. Page's insight was that the web was structurally similar and that the same concept could be applied... and that the algorithms to do the ranking calculations could actually scale very well.
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OK, it works better for people who don't put any care into formulating their search. But riddle me this: which works better overall: a person carefully formulating a search query into a search engine that will execute exactly the search he crafted, or someone typing in a vague request with Google helping him?
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That's a false dichotomy. You're comparing a carefully-formulated search with a vague request. The correct comparison is between a carefully-formulated list of search terms and an English sentence asking the question with the same level of detail. And the answer is that to the degree that the search engine understands English sentences, the latter will do better because the structure of the sentence provides more information.
Think about it this way: Which would get you better results with a human expe
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And the answer is, there are no search engines that understand English sentences to any significant degree, so their theoretical superiority is rather irrelevant.
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And the answer is, there are no search engines that understand English sentences to any significant degree, so their theoretical superiority is rather irrelevant.
But it's not, because even if they don't actually understand yet, they do better on that sort of query because that's what they're optimized for.
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I don't know. I still try to search the "old" way, by using keywords I know are probably in the page I'm looking for, and I always seem to get much better results than my associates who type full sentences. If you search for the specific error code you're going to get a better result than my printer won't print.
That's a terrible example. Excluding relevant information that a human expert would absolutely need is not going to make a search engine work better.
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But searching for error 0x80070070 will be much more efficient if they show you only the results with 0x80070070 instead of deciding that maybe 0x80090900 is more relevant because more people searching for errors seem to like that number instead.
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Wait - Google has gotten rid of AROUND()? That explains a lot, but really sucks... however what really sucks is if they don’t bother to tell people who type it that they’ve removed it.
Re: Tip for old-school web searchers (Score:2)
FWIW I believe Bing still does support the "near" operator
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FWIW I believe Bing still does support the "near" operator
If it does, it doesn't work very well - I just tried it to find something I know exists here and got basically worthless results. But I suspect "near" does not work anymore.
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"dumb search engines which were nothing more than simple pattern matchers. "
This is what I want. Google's algorithm or AI or whatever will always suck because it can't know if people found what they were looking for. Can't there be just one search engine that doesn't copy Google's frustrating word salad results? Just one? Please???
It kinda does know if you found it (Score:3)
> Google's algorithm or AI or whatever will always suck because it can't know if people found what they were looking for.
I'm sometimes annoyed with Google's attempts to understand dumb queries and translate them. Not for that reason, though. Google DOES know a) which result you clicked (if you don't click the first two results, they probably weren't what you wanted). Also, it knows whether you tried again with slightly different search terms (because you didn't find what you were looking for the first
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For years I found myself increasingly frustrated with my inability to craft queries that worked well, and at the steps Google kept taking to deprecate and remove the qualifiers that allowed me to express with precision the terms I wanted (and didn't want) in my results.
Interestingly part of Google's natural language training involves identifying the difference between conjunctions, adverbs, and fillers to be ignored. So while there was a period where crafting queries using a logic statement didn't work pretty much most of those "depreciated" qualifiers actually still work just fine. OR, AND, wildcards, grouping keywords via brackets, inexact and exact searches, exclusions, mandated keywords, all of that works in 2019 in pretty much the same way as it did in 1999.
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I agree in principle that they are optimizing for whole-sentences for the sake of their audience, I'm hard pressed to say that it gives me better results compared to Google of 10 years ago. (Yes, I try both approaches.) The natural-language approach is often too vague or exclusionary to give good results on technical issues. (maybe 50% of the time I give up and try Yahoo/Bing. [gasp] any other suggestions welcome.)
Also, the web just sucks in general now too. There is very little content that is free a
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You experience is different to mine.
The only things seem to matter is are the keywords you use, and the order you have them in. If you don't have the right magic keywords to start with no amount of and's, or's or not's will help. If you do have t
Total. Fucking. Bullshit. (Score:3)
Words like "a" and "the," for instance, can generally be safely ignored.
There have been many times when I really wanted Google to not ignore articles such as "a" and "the", along with other 'insignificant' words. It's not at all unusual for me to want Google to not ignore even the case and punctuation of my search terms. In its early days Google was a good search engine - AFAICT much of the considerable suckage it's acquired since then has been a result of its efforts to divine what I "really" want. Well, fuck off with that shit Google! Your chances of being better than I am at knowing what I want with any consistency are approximately zero, and will likely remain so regardless of how good your algos get or how closely you approach true AI.
I'd be happy to actually pay to use a search engine that searches for what I explicitly specify, without either bending me over for advertisers or playing junior psychologist to figure out what I'm 'really' asking. I just TOLD you what I'm really asking for - now just go fetch it and stop second guessing me, dammit.
These are the systems driving your car (Score:3)
When the subject of automated cars comes up, particularly from google, I think of their search results. When the search terms contain, for example misspelling, and they return results with a "did you mean..." that's great. When they go ahead and return results what they thought you meant to type, that's a problem. I estimate 19 of 20 times google does this I click the link to actually search for what I typed in. Search the internet it's an inconvenience. When it's my car taking me to the wrong location, it
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I remember in the very early days of the google search engine, doing a search for "to be or not to be" (sans quotes) gave you no hits on the famous quote, as the engine ignored all the small words...
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I'd be happy to actually pay to use a search engine that searches for what I explicitly specify
How much would you pay me to know that google doesn't ignore any words if you put quotes around your search?
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I'd be happy to actually pay to use a search engine that searches for what I explicitly specify
How much would you pay me to know that google doesn't ignore any words if you put quotes around your search?
Actually, I use double quotes in Google searches most of the time, as well as the 'allintext' operator. Increasingly, Google ignores them at least some of the time. I also use the "-" operator and occasionally get results that contain the term following it. In a significant number of cases a search turns up pages that don't contain any of my search terms - and the terms are even absent from Google's cache of the page.
There are more considerations (Score:3)
Like the "fine line" between actual SEO and outright scams for results of a search.
If I am searching for the phone number of someone who just called me, I don't want any result other than who it was.
When I'm searching for recipes I don't want to add a huge list pf places I don't want results from.
And I never want to have to deal with Expert Sex Change appearing as a result.
*waves hand like a Jedi* (Score:1)
"This is not the search engine result you are looking for, move along."
Google is getting better, and... (Score:2)
...people are getting better at searching, too.
English (Score:2)
If a user searches for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy", it means the user should go back to school.
Follow the crowd (Score:2)
People familiar with Google would typically include "for someone else" to hopefully match prior searches and its incoming links that also used that phrase. One tries to forecast how a typical person has already phrased past searches or
Add -drivel (Score:2)
All they really need is a "-drivel" option that gets rid of all the useless drivel.
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Duckduckgo and not ignoring search terms (Score:3)
I usually get screwed when google ignores my search terms. I end up having to use a bunch of quotes, and I feel like the quote rules changed somewhere along the line to be less intuitive.
Luckily, I use duckduckgo the most and 99.99% of the time it gives me what I need. And image searches for random junk (plastic D&D miniatures has been the latest) is a lot easier and more accurate with Duckduckgo from what I have seen. Google images has gotten bloated... are they pushing more advertising or something with their weird links within image links that lead to shopping options... which I don't want unless I'm picking the shopping tab at the top???
No (Score:2)
It didn't.
What, they've fired their marketing dept? (Score:2)
10 years ago, google's response to queries was pretty good signal-to-noise. Since then, their marketing dept has taken over, and is giving orders. They will do *anything* to offer ads and sales pitches... and the signal-to-noise ratio is *way* down.
As an example, where I was working, last year I remember doing a search on a technical Linux issue. I put the phrase I was looking for in quotes. Google's response was "I can't find that phrase, but here are the results without quotes.
And the first or second hit
Too bad (Score:2)
Got better? (Score:2)
Google has been getting more and more terrible. They don't even bother with keywords anymore. More than half the time I need to add quotes around words or they get ignored. Sometimes that doesn't even work and I still get results without the words I asked for. The results will be related to what I'm looking for but merely related is pointless.
more relevant (Score:2)
replace results with ads, there you go fixed it for you.
Hello Operator. Gimme #9 (Score:1)
Its safe to say that Google likes shards of a penny more than providing relevant search results, so the door is already open for the next iteration of a global catalogue/directory without all of the superfluous perks.
Just give me a "no I DIDN'T mean that" button (Score:2)
Google, I'll give you better training data if you just give me a button that says, "no, I didn't mean what you're trying to correct my search to—fuck off, and give me what I asked for".
Nothing is worse than seeing that prompt in my searches. I asked for what I asked for.
Or they could... (Score:2)
Restore all the search operators and syntax they axed years ago.