
Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms - Matt_Cutts
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html
======
Matt_Cutts
I know that a lot of people were sad that we switched from +word to "word" to
do an exact match for a word.

The good news is that we're rolling out a "literal mode" that will search for
_exactly_ the words you typed. It does a verbatim match with your words, so it
turns off things like spelling corrections, stemming, synonyms, optionalized
terms, and so on. I think we saw multiple proposals for this on Hacker News,
so thanks for the suggestion.

~~~
brador
This isn't really the solution we were looking for Matt.

Can we replace the + operator with something else? How about¬? We don't use
that very often to the point I don't even know what it's called, but it's
there on the keyboard in one keypress.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I'll pass the feedback on. Part of the issue with + is that it turned out a
lot of people were mistyping queries with + when as far as we could tell, they
weren't trying to match an exact word. Getting further off the beaten path
with a more rare character might help though.

~~~
sc00ter
Surely simpler soultion would have been to respond to a search for "+this is a
+search" with:

Showing results for this is a search Search instead for +this is a +search

As google does for other "typos".

Failing that, a replacement for + would be welcome. I can't imagine many
people type, for example ^word or =word - allowing use of a symbol that
indicates promotion of that word word in the search terms, they way + did.

The difficulty will be reeducating the (presumably quite large number of -
even if proportionally a small percentage of googles user base) people who
have been using + in searches for the last 10-15 years (I'm almost positive
this concept existed in other search engines before google) that + isn't + any
more, and please use this other symbol instead.

------
gergles
And, of course, the "search for what I actually fucking typed" mode is
completely undiscoverable, hidden behind another click, and which can't be
defaulted into.

This is a good bandaid, but is still a bandaid. I have still switched away
from Google to a search engine that will actually search for what I told it
to, not one that thinks it can guess my meaning. (Not to mention one that
doesn't wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses
JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out.)

~~~
Matt_Cutts
For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge
help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to
"search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam
and malware for the average user.

We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term
with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I
misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the
alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because
more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what
Google thought I meant.

~~~
daveungerer
Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown
that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one
thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should
default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!

~~~
JoshTriplett
If the computer successfully guesses _exactly_ the thing you wanted and does
that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a
"did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do
it then?".

However, if the computer guesses _wrong_ , that will cause significantly more
frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that
the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong.
Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then
compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user
with their original search.

~~~
moultano
That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in
exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query
have to have a much _much_ higher win to loss ratio in order to launch.

What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the
time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the
_users_ and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really
unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that,
but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the
feedback we've seen on HN.

We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical
queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My
email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I
tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the
> time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the
> users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really
> unhappy as a result.

Excellent insight. Linux kernel developers have had a similar experience with
the use of the likely() and unlikely() hints on conditionals; it took a while
to realize that unlikely() has to mean unlikely for _any_ user, not just
"unlikely for most users, and likely for the rest". So, for example, it
doesn't make sense to write "if (unlikely(feature_disabled))", because anyone
with the feature disabled will meet that condition every time.

I've definitely had the experience that Google's automatic correction does the
wrong thing for me more often than not; I almost always end up clicking the
link to go to the search results I actually asked for.

~~~
moultano
Send over the examples when you come across them (or if you have it turned on,
try www.google.com/searchhistory/ to find queries you've issued in the past.)
I'll make sure they get to the right place.

------
tomkarlo
I think it's forgotten in this discussion that the HN community is probably
very different from the larger internet population when it comes to search
queries. We all tend to do a lot more "exact/verbatim type searches" such as
looking up some library package, whereas your regular user has a lot more
"soft" queries where they're looking for a concept / business / song lyric
rather than an exact phrase, and having proactive spelling correction is a
huge help.

Correcting spelling automatically also probably helps guide those users
towards higher quality search results rather than squatters who have purposely
targeted misspellings of popular search terms to suck in naive searchers.

It's not realistic to expect a search engine targeted at all users to tailor
the UX to this group; the best you can expect is some secondary options or
commands that allow the extra control we want.

~~~
fuzzythinker
Counter example:

I just tried googling [how pronounce resig]. It thinks I want [how pronounce
resignation]. Both +resig and "resig" didn't work (heck, I even tried
+"resig"). Had to add -resign -resignation.

There is nothing technical about this search (unless Resig is such a unique
last name that belongs to only John Resig). I'm sure there's lots more counter
examples. I really doubt normal non-technical people actually likes the new
google search.

Btw, what's the answer? Only link I found was [1] someone says it's REH-sig,
not REE-sig (not too sure what's the difference). But I'm more interested on
how to pronounce the second part, is it more like "side"("sign" minus 'n'),
"seed", "sad", or something else?

[1] [http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-
not...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/09/22/sau-drs-sour-not-
super/#comment-839)

~~~
moultano
[how to pronounce "resig"] works for me now. (Or at least doesn't mess with
the query, though the results aren't great.) Do you remember what results you
were seeing before?

~~~
fuzzythinker
yea, that seems to work now. Wasn't getting any "resig"'s at all before unless
I added -resign -resignation. Now, ["pronounce" "resig"] seems to do the
trick, as w/o quotes or just '+'s still gives resign and resignation results.

------
mrich
Thanks for also considering the power users/edge cases.

Even better would be to have a prefix for the search, e.g. /l(iteral) so that
you could do the whole search by keyboard only (but perhaps there is a key
binding for the menu option? Would be great)

------
losvedir
Hooray! Does the "more search tools" menu learn from the user which tools are
useful to them? I seem to recall at one point having to open the search tools
for the helpful timeframe narrowing options, but now those routinely appear
exposed on the left.

If after a few times using verbatim it realized I was a "power user" and
always had that option sitting on the side for me, I'd love it.

------
DanBC
This is excellent news. I know when Google does stuff that they base it on
evidence, and they do it for the best of most users, and that my edge cases
are not what most users would have.

I was getting caught in some frustrating searches, so I'm really pleased about
this.

There's some amazing figures in the article:

> _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._

Wow.

Finally: If Google offered user controllable stemming that'd be awesome. When
I started using Google there was no stemming. Now there's either Google
suggested stemming or user-controlled no stemming.

------
mcn
> we’re also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as tuning
> the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger

As you are doing this, please keep in mind that when you incorrectly broaden
my query, and there is no immediately obvious way to re-narrow it, it costs
you _much_ more than you gain each time you correctly broaden my query.

------
rickmb
Does anybody else feel somewhat uncomfortable to live in a world where people
who a) know how to spell and b) actually want a search engine to search what
they are looking for are considered "edge cases/power users"?

I've always laughed at the idea of the internet and search engines making
people dumber, but this seems like hard evidence. Most Google users are too
stupid to have ever been able to use a library...

~~~
recursive
> actually want a search engine to search what they are looking for are
> considered "edge cases/power users"?

Arguably synonyms and word stemming still are what they are looking for. You
could easily argue that one either way.

~~~
TillE
Word stemming is often desirable. I wish it were possible to turn on just
that, and only for certain words.

------
espeed
_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. A couple of weeks ago we removed the “+” operator, encouraging
the use of the double quotes, which are more likely to be used correctly._

Actually, Google decided to repurpose the + operator for Google Plus Pages
Direct Connect
([http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p...](http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=direct_connect&answer=1711199)).

~~~
notatoad
that may have had something to do with it, but i think you can probably trust
the official sources that it really wasn't used much and was often used
incorrectly. i've met more than a few old people who had been told at some
point that they always needed to put plus signs between words instead of
spaces, no matter what.

------
thurn
I hope they also add a way to enable it from within the query string itself,
like 'verbatim: foo'. Much easier, and that way you can do it from search
boxes and such too.

------
tambourine_man
Hi Matt,

The problem is that, sometimes, even quoted queries don't guarantee that the
word will be there.

I hope verbatim solves that.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Yes, I believe it does. I believe verbatim requires an on-page page.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Thank you so much for this. I know I'm one of the less-than-a-percentage-point
of users for whom the suggestions were making me cranky; this will make me a
much happier Google user.

------
Shanewho
This sounds like it has potential, although I can't test it yet. You should
try searching Google for information on COM programming. Try finding
information on "COM Events", for example. Good luck. Macy's is on the the
first page! Bing is not any better.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I get "Understanding COM Event Handling" at #1, but agree that it's not ideal.
Some words like COM or IT have dual meanings where sometimes you want to treat
them like stopwords and sometimes you don't.

~~~
Shanewho
Just tried it with verbatim but results are still no good =( I can see how it
is doing exactly what it is told to do ("www.yelp.com/events"), but not what I
would like. I like the idea of being able to do verbatim searches though! (and
still miss the + button...)

------
joebadmo
It's encouraging to me that Google takes users' concerns into consideration. I
prefer this dialogue to Google just 'getting things right in the first place'
in fact. This is one example. Gmail's redesign is another. And I'm sure more
changes are coming to both. I hope Google never stops making aggressive
changes and listening to feedback aggressively.

------
botker
Here's my Google Verbatim search engine plugin for your browser.
[http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-
engines.html?name=google+ve...](http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-
engines.html?name=google+verbatim)

------
bh42222
It might be just my home and work connections and their latency, but for me
the auto-complete has hugely slowed down my searches.

I type rather fast (as you can tell by all the typos in my posts) and today I
type something in and then wait for all the auto-complete options to settle
down.

Sure, I don't have to hit the search button to get results anymore. But
previously it was faster to type, then hit search, then get results. Much
faster.

~~~
tgrass
Mine returns faster than I can finish typing and look down.

------
GraffitiTim
I just added a custom Google Verbatim search engine to Chrome with keyword
"gv", so I can type "gv testing" in the URL bar and get a verbatim search for
"testing".

To do this, go to the "Manage Search Engines" section of Chrome preferences
(Firefox has a similar feature somewhere) and use this URL:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1](https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1)

------
zobzu
Woohoo! that's actually something that was annoying me greatly. Type stuff and
Google just search for whatever it thinks is best. Bleh!

Anyway, that's awesome.

------
Dylan16807
It's still stemming for me. I'm using my normal pathological search of
[["everything wrong" crossfade]]. Verbatim mode roughly cuts the number of
results in half but keeps giving me pages that only have the phrase
[[everything's wrong]] and not the phrase [[everything wrong]].

------
RexRollman
I still love Google's search product but I am not real happy with the recent
UI changes they have introduced. I particularly don't care for the preview
arrow thing that now goes down the right side: I keep triggering the damn
thing on accident.

~~~
beernutz
Yes, THANK YOU! I find myself doing that as well. I don't understand why that
is seen as an improvement.

Also, I always used the + to mean "the following word or quote surrounded
string HAS to appear in the result text".

That seems different than quotes meaning "use this text exactly as i typed
it".

~~~
RexRollman
I generally quote string searches but I do use pluses when I want to search
for two separate strings in the same page, such as:

"Hacker News"+"Steve Jobs"

------
teilo
This is what I liked about the original method that Google used back in the
90s. It was always an exact text match for all words. At some point that
changed, and to this day I still forget to use + to force the old behavior.

------
ldng
Well for a verbatim search of map(call())

I wouldn't expect google to filter out parenthesis. More than ever now that
code search is dead.

"map(call())" would work either.

So much for verbatim ...

------
mattmanser
Wow 2/3rds of people use it wrong. That surprised me.

On the other hand, the post tries to pretend that this had nothing to do with
+ _username_ or + _brand_ and Google+.

No, it's the users, it's their fault, not our new product naming boo boo.
We'll just silently break our flagship product and hope no-one notices.

Blame the customer seems a bad strategy.

Just wish they'd man up and admit it. Even if it's really not the reason,
because that's the belief on the internet. It's times like this that remind me
how Google really doesn't get customer service.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
It's definitely the case that <0.5% of searches use the plus operator, and
most of those searches aren't using plus correctly. If you used the plus
operator correctly, you're well within the 1% of most savvy searchers.

You might be surprised and discouraged to discover that most people don't know
about things like the minus operator to exclude terms from search results.

If you really want to be depressed, read this:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-
of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/)

~~~
anjc
Could you explain how exactly the + operator is used incorrectly?

I know that personally i often end up with bizarre looking searches, purely
because i know what i'm searching for. e.g. it might include purposeful
spelling mistakes, requiring the plus to avoid autocorrection...but this
doesn't mean i'm using the + incorrectly.

I just can't imagine somebody, potentially, understanding boolean logic,
describing a search with it, and using it incorrectly. I can't even imagine
the most naive usage being incorrect, unless you're sure that you know what
they wanted to do somehow.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I'm at a conference and can't easily get on our internal VPN from here, but
I'll try to remember to circle back around when I can get on our VPN.

But in general, you see a lot of stuff that looks like semi-random punctuation
just sprinkled at the beginning of the query or throughout the query, things
that look like people are using plus instead of space as if they're copying
from an address bar, etc.

~~~
rhizome
To be sure, Google search used to allow the period to force a connection
between terms. "foo bar baz" == foo.bar.baz

~~~
anjc
No wonder my website, foo.bar.biz has been getting so much traffic :o

I'd rather . notation than "" any day. Doesn't seem to work now...

------
dholowiski
OMG Finally. This will make one IT Guy's day job much easier, and the same
guy's weekend/evening programming life easier too.;

------
hrktb
too little too late?

It's hidden into the prefs when I'd liked it always on, on any device I use
without having it tied to a specific account or anything.

I switched to ddg for regular and advanced queries, and use google for all the
fuzzy stuff or very specific queries. It's still easier than to care about the
verbatim setting.

------
ck2
What if you just want some words verbatim?

You'd just use +word right? Oh wait.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
No, now you would use double quotes. So instead of searching for [hacker news
ck2] you'd search for [hacker news "ck2"] to require the exact word "ck2". But
remember, that could match anchortext pointing to the page. You can use
"intext:" to require a match on the page.

------
101000101
Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time.

It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else.

Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a
copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a
clear, intelligent vision.

But time will tell who is the wiser.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Actually, usage of the + operator has been in steady decline for years. With
Altavista you had to use + to require a word. When I started at Google, many
_many_ more queries had tons of pluses.

Google's demographic was much more tech-savvy in the early years, but as we've
struck partnerships with companies like AOL, the population of people
searching on Google has become broader. I don't believe that 95.5% of users
will be searching with + or double-quotes any time soon. But for the power
users like people on HN, they now have an extra option that allows better
slicing/dicing of search results.

~~~
101000101
You seem to be suggesting that Google's new demographic will never become more
tech savvy or at least not "any time soon".

That's an interesting view.

I'm just a bit more optimistic.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more
"tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and
I don't really see anything wrong with that.

~~~
101000101
Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.

And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather
than later. They want immediate results.

Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make
them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the
results immediately.

The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more
people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".

We know where Google stands on this.

Let's see what happens.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
I definitely agree with you that it's probably faster to teach a single
individual with a mild interest in becoming more techie than, for example,
change an industry standard for search engines. But I'm talking about entire
populations of humans and machines.

Changing an entire population of computer software/hardware is a far easier
and faster process than changing the entire population of humans. We're much
more stubborn creatures than we'd like to believe, plus we also have a longer
lifespan thus making any dramatic cultural changes (techie or otherwise) a
more or less generational thing. On the other hand, just look at how fast
something like cell phones or the internet is changing on what now seems like
a monthly basis.

People will always do the same things they've always enjoyed doing: eat at
restaurants, socialize with friends, play games, listen to music... but in
what way technology is involved with those activities will only be affected by
how fast the technology can change to become more human-friendly, not the
other way around.

~~~
101000101
Understood.

But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've
simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because
they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or
using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?

It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean
searches more troublesome.

And the reason they have removed this operator?

Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Oh I wasn't really commenting on Google's decision and whether it was right or
wrong. Like you said before: "Time will tell". I was just offering an
alternate view to your expressed optimism that Google's demographic (aka
everybody) is becoming more tech savvy.

------
Metapony
More like adds and then buries. I'd rather have the plus sign operator back,
google.

