
The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead - fraqed
http://searchengineland.com/google-direct-connect-dead-194598
======
danmaz74
I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the +
search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users
can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1
for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after
the change.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they
significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm.

For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly
technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days
when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and".
Still it's very, very difficult to tell google that you actually for really
really realsies want to search for all the terms you typed in.

~~~
ninkendo
Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm
asking for in order to give me more results.

But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They
_do_ understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead
of just having more useless ones?

Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap <some error
message>" and it decided to put, front and center, results from CPAN. Just
about as irrelevant as a search result can get. The little grey highlights
below the results had "ruby" listed with a strikethrough, to imply that if I
had only searched without that word, I could have gotten these helpful results
on my own.

I can only hope that this behavior was not a conscious decision by anyone at
Google. I hope it's because they added some machine learning or something to
their algorithms and this was just some emergent behavior they hadn't
accounted for. Because if somebody working for a search engine company decides
that irrelevant search results are a good thing, or that _number of results_
are by any means a useful metric, I'm scared for the future of Google.

~~~
nevi-me
They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the
bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have
excluded.

~~~
Wilya
I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could
improve the quality of my search results.

Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more
results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.

~~~
ninkendo
Exactly. Searches with less results are nearly always better than searches
with more... I don't know why Google would think it's helpful to include more,
but clearly _less_ relevant results. (By definition, too. If a result is
lacking one of your search terms, it's less relevant to what you searched for,
strictly speaking.)

This is _especially_ true when what I'm searching for yields almost no
results. That's how I typically know that what I'm searching for was probably
bogus to begin with. But when the first page is full of a bunch of fuzzed-out
results that are only tangentially related to what I searched for, I now have
to skim through a page full of results to realize that Google just gave up and
decided to omit several of my terms.

------
DanBC
Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and
even then it was mostly used incorrectly.

> _> In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for
> specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less
> than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used
> incorrectly._

[http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-
your...](http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-
verbatim.html)

Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out
of 600 searches.

People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a
mass market of people who see, and click, ads.

EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus
operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying
experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries.

And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading
description of the times + is used correctly.

~~~
userbinator
What do they even mean by "it was used incorrectly"? Did they somehow reach
out to and ask the user if they found what they were looking for...?

~~~
DanBC
They mean it was ran+domly inserted+in weird places. I think.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
It probably means that people were searching for _Ben + Jerry 's_ or the like.

~~~
xor-ed-wolf
Did't it only worked if there was no space character before + character and
the word?

------
jacquesm
"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very
few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are
buried in there somewhere.

Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of
quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring
back the old usage, which worked just fine.

Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-
interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.

It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single
company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google
would have dropped their '+' operator for that?

------
0x0
The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be
combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the
verbatim option :(

~~~
Kleinlieu
So true. I run into this when needing to debug some weird stack trace error
but have recently run into google fuzzing my "" exact searches. Now I know I'm
not the only one

------
Tiksi
_> For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million
matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might
not have the word but are deemed related to it._

 _> Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the
same number, even though that number should drop._

As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate
for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search
with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only
see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate
count.

I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time
looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]:

 _> From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):_

 _> "We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--
estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but
in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate
results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"_

 _[0][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-
google-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-count-
and-estimate-the-number-of-a-search-results*)

Edit:formatting

------
AshleysBrain
mars - 197m results

"mars" \- 228m results

+mars - 19k results

+"mars" \- 197m results

Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like +
still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].

~~~
ttctciyf
So, I was skeptical that only 19k webpages would contain the actual word mars
(as per the +mars query), and curious why "verbatim" search wasn't included
for comparison.

So I tried verbatim search for mars, to find the estimated results count
disappears. However, skipping along the pages got me the counterintuitive
result that verbatim search for mars finds only 188 results - I'm pretty sure
that google has indexed more mars-mentioning pages than that!

Oh, not counting the "very similar" results:

> In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries
> very similar to the 188 already displayed.

Clicking this "include similar results" link gets me 45 results pages or about
450 results that mention mars found with a verbatim search.

I feel like I've gone back to 1994!

~~~
magicalist
Google has never given you all 18 million or whatever results that it says it
has for a term. If you look at just mars (no quotes), it says (for me, not
signed in) there are 211,000,000 results, but the results only go to page 26
with the same kind of message:

 _" In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some
entries very similar to the 260 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat
the search with the omitted results included."_

even though obviously there are more results that aren't "very similar" to the
260 that have been displayed.

The assumption has always been that people don't keep clicking through tens of
pages of results...they refine their search terms.

~~~
ttctciyf
I suspect you're right in that it's never given you _all_ the results. I'm
pretty sure that it's given me many more than 300 or so results in the past,
though, whereas that figure seems to be google's idea of the max any user
could possibly want now before they refine their term.

I think _mars_ is probably not the ideal term for testing this sort of thing -
just too many hits. I tried _mars "philip k dick"_ and found the same thing -
30 or so pages and then it refused to give me more results. Increasing the
obscurity level somewhat, _devil 's vindata_ vanilla search vs. verbatim
search did indeed show a reduced set of results for verbatim (the vanilla
search results including hits on _devil 's vendetta_)

Overall though, if you're looking for more fringe results for common search
terms, millionshort.com might be worth a try, where you can remove hits from
the top 10^n sites for your term _it says_.

------
mcintyre1994
I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway.
Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle?
It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see
the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more
intuitive.

~~~
Kiro
But it would be at the start in many cases. How would it know if you want to
go to the Google+ site of YouTube or just search all the pages that contain
the exact phrase "YouTube"?

------
chris_wot
Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack
up?

~~~
marcosdumay
As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but
always failed.

The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day.
If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the
other sites got better.

~~~
Vik1ng
Tried it too. Wasn't that happy. I was also never a fan of different search
options in my browser bar so the !bang feature wasn't really my thing either.

Now I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap, because I think at least that stands a
chance against google maps and might even help some other search engines.
DuckDuckGo is using it and maybe Bing will at one point, at least that would
explain why they provide aerial images.

------
chewxy
Did Google really name a feature after a P2P protocol? Coupled with the +
symbol I initially thought this was about a file sharing protocol that G
killed

------
alok-g
Response from 'thisisnotatest' from Google search team [1]:

"I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any
good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in
search quality at Google."

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958)

------
joeevans
Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I
guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in
there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results.

Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by
being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.

~~~
xor-ed-wolf
It's strange that you did not. WTF moment was the first thing I experienced
when they did that and my search with + returned results that didn't contain
the word. I was literally furious.

------
mixmastamyk
I may be wrong, but I seem to remember using +word since the AltaVista days. I
still do it, even though it doesn't work. (grumble)

That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for
me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was
already queued.

------
_greim_
Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than
noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did
infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of
the time.

