The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

http://searchengineland.com/google-direct-connect-dead-194598

by fraqed • 12 years ago

167 77 12 years ago

Tiksi• 12 years ago

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...

Edit:formatting

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danmaz742• 12 years ago

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.

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reitanqild• 12 years ago

The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users.

The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)

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ht_th2• 12 years ago

The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user.

I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time).

I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?

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InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

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.

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vanderZwan• 12 years ago

DuckDuckGo fits very neatly in this niche, btw (although it has its own flaws of course).

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userbinator2• 12 years ago

Agreed 100%. It's extremely frustrating to have your search engine second-guessing you and making assumptions about what you really want.

If the majority of people don't know how to use a search engine correctly, maybe we should focus on teaching them how to use one, instead of dumbing down the search engine so it gives only "OK" results for stupid queries and is nearly useless for people who know what they really want. I know at least the "introduction to the Internet" courses used to teach how to use search engines effectively, i.e. use precise search queries, +/-/boolean operators, etc; don't know if they do anymore.

I hope this isn't the case, but to me it almost feels like they're trying to deliberately make it more difficult to find exact information on what you're searching for, and that makes it harder for people to get the information they need to make informed decisions, so they can be more easily persuaded to think what companies like Google want them to. For a lot of people, Google is how they view the Internet - in some ways, Google is the Internet for them. Google has immense control over what and how people can find things on the Internet, and that is what I find most truly quite worrying.

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ninkendo6• 12 years ago

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.

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pasbesoin• 12 years ago

It's been a while and I don't feel like digging up the details, but double quoting is not equivalent to what the former plus operator accomplished.

Broadly stated, double quoting permits more fuzziness that the former plus operator did. And there are times -- particularly with all the cruft in search results -- when you -- I, at least -- really don't want that fuzziness.

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AshleysBrain• 12 years ago

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].

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ttctciyf2• 12 years ago

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!

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esbonsa• 12 years ago

I seriously think that Google's end-goal is to show you only one sponsored result per search query whether it is relevant or not (there will be no real search results, it will be more like TV)

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magicalist4• 12 years ago

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.

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Donna_Conners• 12 years ago

+mars is now a new token not this: + AND mars

and not: ALWAYS mars

search for: +mars -mars

You might expect to always get 0 pages, but that isn't the case. You get pages that never mention mars and pages that contain +mars.

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0x0• 12 years ago

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 :(

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Kleinlieu• 12 years ago

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

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mcintyre1994• 12 years ago

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.

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Kiro• 12 years ago

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"?

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chris_wot• 12 years ago

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

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mikegioia• 12 years ago

I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.

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apricot• 12 years ago

Bing has quietly improved a lot and is actually pretty good now, certainly better than its reputation lets on. It's the Zune of search engines.

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marcosdumay• 12 years ago

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.

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Vik1ng• 12 years ago

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.

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hrktb• 12 years ago

For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness.

For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.

Also, the title of this article is so messed up...

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hga• 12 years ago

Interesting.

I get Wikipedia's Table Tennis entry first (I do use Wikipedia a lot). The first page includes 5 local/state related links, also has an "In-depth articles" section at the bottom with three items. The 2nd page is good as well, I personally can't complain, although I still rue the day they zapped the + operator.

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dredmorbius2• 12 years ago

I've been using DDG for over a year solid, and for the past couple on and off.

I still run the occasionally !sp or !g bang search (StartPage is a proxied Google, the other hits Google directly). And in almost all cases there's little if any discernable difference.

The main exceptions are:

1. Date-bounded searches. DDG doesn't support this.

2. Special collections. Books and Scholar in particular.

Until recently, I'd have included images, but DDG's added that. Maps can be searched through OSM.

My primary concerns are privacy and search bubbling, but quality is up there as well.

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wmeredith• 12 years ago

The only blind study[1] I've heard of on the subject put Bing ahead of Google at almost 2-to-1 (yes, seriously).

> Conducted by California-based Answers Research, the study queried an online sample of nearly 1,000 people at least 18 years old, all living in the US. None of the participants in the survey knew Microsoft was involved. Participants performed 10 searches of their own choosing, and were shown the results from both Bing and Google, side by side, with all the the branding removed. Additionally, notes Microsoft, “The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” For each search, participants chose which side showed better results, or could call it a tie. Of the participants surveyed, 57.4 percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often, and 12.4 percent didn’t prefer one over the other.

It was this study that inspired Microsoft's Bing it On campaign in 2012. Unfortunately, the ad campaign mostly consisted of Microsoft recreating the independent study, but cheating to make sure Bing would win even bigger[2].

1) http://www.seochat.com/c/a/msn-optimization-help/microsoft-s...

2) http://www.435digital.com/blog/2012/10/09/bing-it-down-a-not...

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DanBC3• 12 years ago

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...

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.

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barrkel• 12 years ago

When you say "+ was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches", it seems to imply that it was used incorrectly in 599 out of 600 searches. Your phrasing makes too strong a claim as most people understand the language, IMO.

Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.

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e12e• 12 years ago

So, 1 out of every 200 searches contain a "+", possibly for refinement. In 1 out of every three of those searches, the "+" helps the user find what's wanted. No information on a) some users are better at using the "+" correctly than others, b) If removing the "+" means that now three out of three of those searches fail.

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brownbat• 12 years ago

Less than one out of six hundred trips takes anyone to the hospital, but we wouldn't want a car that breaks down as soon as anyone is injured.

People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work.

Google gets ad clicks by building a brand, they want us to associate them with "competent to handle all my search needs." This is why Ford and Dodge make stock cars, not because they want to sell them on a mass market, but because they want to convince people the brand is capable of excelling beyond their needs.

UPDATE: I think you're right about Google's rationale, I just think execs are missing some counterarguments.

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TheCowboy• 12 years ago

People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work.

That was part of the draw of switching to Google way back when. If you had a more challenging search to pull off, you used Google, and eventually it became a habit to just visit Google in the first place.

Now I'm starting to try DDG when Google frustrates me. I also don't need 'Google Power' for a lot of my searches.

It's probably a good thing they're implementing these changes. It makes it easier for an underdog to come in and disrupt their core business, introducing some healthy competition.

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userbinator2• 12 years ago

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...?

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DanBC3• 12 years ago

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

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notatoad• 12 years ago

google knows if you found what you're looking for because they observe your behaviour. If you keep going through to page 30, it means your search was unsuccessful. if you search again for a similar term ten seconds later, it means your search was unsuccessful. they don't need to ask.

but in this case, it probably just means that people were using it like "cookies+cream". they aren't using + as an operator, they're using it as a synonym for "and", and they are better served by google parsing their query as native language instead of parsing it as an expression in a rarely used query language.

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danmaz742• 12 years ago

Just 1 in 600... and that's how many tens of million of queries? Or hundreds?

Anyway, losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business. Even when you really just care about the average Joe.

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dredmorbius2• 12 years ago

losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business

Absolutely. And Google have been stumbling hard the past 2-3 years.

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bambax• 12 years ago

users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches

Matt Cutts obviously isn't stupid, but that's a very stupid thing to say, or think, or act upon.

Many things are done rarely, that are extremely useful or important.

Hey, most search strings probably represent "less than half a percent" of all possible searches; so by that metric they could drop most of their index, and only answer the most frequent searches...

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magicalist4• 12 years ago

I wonder what tiny percentage of searches used a + to get to a google+ page and what percentage of those were using it incorrectly.

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chewxy• 12 years ago

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

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_greim_• 12 years ago

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.

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jacquesm2• 12 years ago

"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?

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alok-g• 12 years ago

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

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joeevans• 12 years ago

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.

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xor-ed-wolf3• 12 years ago

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.

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mixmastamyk• 12 years ago

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.

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The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

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