Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html

by Matt_Cutts • 15 years ago

263 162 15 years ago

insidesearch.blogspot.com

Matt_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

redler2• 15 years ago

Matt, do you know if there are any plans to once again allow the mixing of exact match with the regular fuzzier search functionality? It's great to have exact matching back, but I often found it a useful strategy to build the search loosely, then refine with +specifics. Perhaps something like this, in exact match mode:

  ~run ~sprint ~hurdle nike

could be the equivalent of the old:

  run sprint hurdle +nike

davorak• 15 years ago

Yes please allow something like this, mixing verbatim with fuzzier search functionality is powerful.

Xuzz2• 15 years ago

You still can do that, you just have to use "quotes" "around" "the" "words" instead of +putting +the +plus +sign +before +each +word. This just lets you get that type of search for every word easier.

DanBC2• 15 years ago

Isn't

    run sprint hurdle "nike"

what you want?

ctdonath• 15 years ago

Thank you. Irritation has been growing that I can't search for what I want without fielding all kinds of "well what about this variant..." results, without even + prefix and "" squishing into some unwanted twist. Would be nice to make (at least as an option) Verbatim mode the default, with a link provided per search to show variants.

brador• 15 years ago

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.

Xuzz2• 15 years ago

Not on US keyboards, I don't think.

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

Speak for yourself. I've been wanting this solution for years.

Matt_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

botker3• 15 years ago

That's the symbol for logical negation, which would make it a confusing replacement for +.

bambax3• 15 years ago

> This isn't really the solution we were looking for

What? Yes, yes it is. Please don't take it away now!

Gormo• 15 years ago

That character is most often used as a logical negation operator, so it may be confusing to use it as a force-inclusion operator for search.

It's also almost never found on standard US keyboards, which is why the tilde is often used as a logical negation operator in it's place.

kitsune_2• 15 years ago

finally... and thanks.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, how does google judge search result quality? It seems as though search is trending toward the idea that more results are better, when usually the opposite is true.

tamersalama3• 15 years ago

A bit speculative: this is more related to Ad revenue. A wider spectrum of search results means more Ad variety and the ability to serve more advertisers per search query.

I'm annoyed by Google's search quality by the day. I'm starting to use DuckDuckGo more (unless there are other alternatives).

moultano6• 15 years ago

Here's an official post on the subject: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at-...

tamersalama3• 15 years ago

Why aren't you allowing for both; The original +prefix as well as the quotes?

bambax3• 15 years ago

Although "sad" with where Google search is (was) going isn't the right term, I am now very much unpissed, so many many thanks for this.

How is "literal mode" different from what "allintext:" promised? And is there an option to turn this on permanently?

beernutz2• 15 years ago

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

Was this incorrect?

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

I seem to recall reading in prior discussion on this that +foo included stemming while "foo" does not? (And, therefor, some people were unhappy with "foo" not just due to the syntax change but also due to the difference in behavior.)

Some other people in this thread have suggested ¬ as a substitute (and no, it's not on a typical U.S. keyboard). Others point out that ¬ means negation in a typical context. Do you folks index backticks? If not, what about backtick? I guess that wouldn't be too *NIXy; however, most keyboards seem to have one, and if it's not currently indexed, might be a choice. (It's also "sort of quotish", in nature.)

P.S. Hmm... Backtick could cause unexpected results in the case of someone pasting a single quoted value from Word, or similar. Might not be the common, though, and I never did like Word's "smart quotes", anyway. ;-)

ElbertF• 15 years ago

I'm not seeing the change yet, will we be able to use "verbatim:hello world" to do an exact search? I don't see myself navigating through the sidebar each time I need to find something specific.

bromley• 15 years ago

Yes, please, verbatim: or similar would be great, especially for use on a mobile.

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

This is a good idea, it will allow us to use the string interpolation address bar search functionality we all love in our favourite browsers.

In general, nice one google for once again keeping an ear to the ground.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

Still waiting on being able to search for punctuation. Being able to search for "$. ruby" or "$_ perl" or "$: << '.' ruby" would be super handy.

edit: Just realized "$_ perl" actually does work. It would be nice, however, if we could search for these kinds of terms generally and not just in specific case.

polshaw• 15 years ago

1000 times this. I have been waiting a decade to be able to search for '1/2' or '6' 3"' or '£3.50' (not necessarily numbers, you get the point i'm sure), and i was dissapointed to find this post wasn't announcing that.

dncrane2• 15 years ago

I launched a search engine that does exactly this just over a week ago, you can see it here: http://symbolhound.com/

I freaked out when I saw this headline and thought it meant google had finally decided to implement this feature a week after my launch.

slavak• 15 years ago

This. Half my kingdom for this feature.

One of the biggest problems I have with Google search at the moment is when I need to look up specific functions or symbol names. If I'm looking for documentation on g_find_str, the LAST thing I need is to see results that contain "... are going. Find string is a ..."

gtani• 15 years ago

That's great, Google does n-grams/symbol search finally. Tho 'f# "|>" ' is way less common than "$_ perl", doesn't work yet.

And i think the folks that did, e.g. hoogle took some time to get it right for 1 language

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/

http://scalex.org/

goblin89• 15 years ago

Nice, now search personalization can be turned off!

> With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as <...> personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before

Personally, I appreciate this more than allowing to search for exact matches. Hopefully ‘filter bubble’ just became less… bubbley. =)

jerrya2• 15 years ago

Can you confirm or discuss more about what this does to the "filter bubble?"

In two windows of the same browser, I typed gyros, one immediately offered me an instant search result of gyros Phoenix (where I currrently am), the other window, in verbatim mode offered me gyros, gyroscope, and gyros recipe.

(Don't ask me why I tried gyros as my search example.)

Matt_Cutts14• 15 years ago

I believe verbatim mode turns off personalization, and it looks like it turns off localization as part of that. So the query [yoga] shows local places to do yoga for me, but in verbatim mode I don't see that.

wooster• 15 years ago

Thanks Matt. This helps with at least one of my complaints about the direction Google search has been heading.

(Now if you'd just eliminate that godawful slow URL redirector on result links…)

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

Why does this query not do what one would expect.

    halo -"halo 2" -"halo 3"

Also, removing "Advanced Search" from the main google.com and from the top of a search results page beats out moving "cached" to the preview page in terms of "stupidest decision Google has ever made".

Matt_Cutts14• 15 years ago

I'll ask about the halo query. In the mean time, it looks like [halo -halo.2 -halo.3] does what you want.

Do you see a gear symbol in the top of main google.com and the results page? I think that's where Advanced Search is now.

walropodes• 15 years ago

Could you guys consider bringing out a case-sensitive search feature sometime?

DanBC2• 15 years ago

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.

Metapony• 15 years ago

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

_pghu• 15 years ago

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_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

smackfu• 15 years ago

If only Google had some sort of "account" system that could store user-specific preferences...

timtadh• 15 years ago

How do you tell the difference (for mis-spelled words) between people doing an actual search and people spell checking a word? It could be that a significant percentage of the 10% are not "search queries" but "spelling queries"

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

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.

kitsune_2• 15 years ago

I think the algorithm does too many "magic" things lately. I've noticed this when I had some search queries for "flask" (python micro web framework) and some programming related input and most of the returned results were about "flash".

anjc6• 15 years ago

Spelling correction has nothing to do with "" being worse than +.

I think a lot of us would welcome spelling suggestions while we're using our + operator.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

For that 10% figure to be meaningful, we'd need to know how many people are trying to search for something precise and not receiving it.

bambax3• 15 years ago

Although now is not the time to be picky (to be thankful, rather), why not simply let logged in users default to literal search, while still displaying the "did you mean" suggestions somewhere on the page...?

SCdF• 15 years ago

I use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps.

I wonder how many of the 10% are intentional.

ars• 15 years ago

All I really want is for google to tell me when it didn't search for what I wrote. I put a word in the search, I expect it in the results - even if the result has a low page rank.

If you want to default considering some words optional, that's fine. But say that above the search results.

Kuiper• 15 years ago

What search engine do you use now, out of curiosity?

rkudeshi• 15 years ago

Probably DuckDuckGo.

1amzave• 15 years ago

> wrap all the outgoing URLs in click-tracking garbage then uses JavaScript in an attempt to hide it, with no way to opt-out

Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap? (e.g. with a user-script or something?) It's incredibly obnoxious. And sadly Google's not the only on that does it.

Frankly, it seems like a major design mistake from my perspective that Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar at all. It'd be nice to be able to remove that ability, if not "un-wrap" the links entirely.

oinksoft• 15 years ago

> Speaking of which, is there any way to disable or bypass that kind of crap?

If you have JavaScript disabled, or these particular event handlers somehow blocked, the href is never replaced.

> Javascript is allowed to manipulate the status bar

That's disabled by default in most browsers (see in FF about:config, dom.disable_window_status_change -> true). Look at the mousedown handler of links to see that the href attribute is changed on mousedown.

zargon• 15 years ago

There are a variety of scripts that remove the link tracking. I use this one: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/95092

mrich• 15 years ago

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)

zobzu• 15 years ago

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.

losvedir• 15 years ago

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.

espeed• 15 years ago

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...).

notatoad• 15 years ago

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.

rickmb• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

> 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.

TillE2• 15 years ago

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

waqf3• 15 years ago

Well, I feel uncomfortable using a product that is designed to fill such people's needs at the expense of mine.

Just like Yahoo's homepage full of entertainment news, Google's aggressive query correction sends me the message "You are not our target audience, because there isn't enough money in catering to you".

And when Google is sending that message to geeks, I can't help feeling there's some brand destruction going on.

joebadmo• 15 years ago

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.

1010001014• 15 years ago

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_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

1010001014• 15 years ago

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.

ck2• 15 years ago

What if you just want some words verbatim?

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

Matt_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

thurn• 15 years ago

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.

mattmanser• 15 years ago

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_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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-...

anjc6• 15 years ago

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.

hrktb• 15 years ago

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.

mcn• 15 years ago

> 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.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

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_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

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.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

Hey Matt, thanks for listening.

Since code search is gone, I'd really love a “grep” for the Web. Full page search, including headers,js,css,html comments, etc.

If you could pass that along, I believe it would make a lot of us geeks happy.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

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.

beernutz2• 15 years ago

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".

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

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"

conradfr2• 15 years ago

Also the cache link has been sadly moved in that panel.

unfasten• 15 years ago

If you'd like remove Preview then you can use the CSS from this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194164 to disable it.

conradfr: You may also be interested in the CSS snippet in the above post since it will make the Cache link show next to the URL.

dholowiski• 15 years ago

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

Shanewho2• 15 years ago

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_Cutts14• 15 years ago

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.

Shanewho2• 15 years ago

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...)

bh422222• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

tomkarlo3• 15 years ago

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.

fuzzythinker2• 15 years ago

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...

moultano6• 15 years ago

[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?

scott_s2• 15 years ago

Actually, I don't think that's accurate. It's not auto-correcting "resig" to "resignation" as if you misspelled it. It just naturally happens that "pronounce" and "resig" almost always appear together when "resig" is a part of "resignation". Evidence for this is that your post is now hit number seven.

tomkarlo3• 15 years ago

I'd suggest that if there's 100 users entering the query [how to pronounce resig], there are a lot more of them that have dropped the "n" from resign than are looking for the pronunciation of resig. And even more queries overall where "resig" was supposed to be "resign". I admit it's unfortunate that sites have to guess based on the behavior of the group (rather than knowing, for example, that you usually don't misspell things) but I'm not sure any of us individually has enough query history to make those kinds of guesses.

botker3• 15 years ago

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

teilo• 15 years ago

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.

Dylan16807• 15 years ago

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]].

GraffitiTim• 15 years ago

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

ldng• 15 years ago

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 ...

Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms

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