Seriously, Google, Can You Just Make Exact Match Exact?
A few years ago (2014), Google eliminated advertisers’ ability to exclude close variants as part of “exact match,” and they got away with it. People were angry. The industry suffered a blow. But people gradually moved on.
Now they’re messing with exact match again, but this time they’ve gone too far.
In the new exact match universe, an “exact match” can include close variants of the keywords and can also include the same words, but in an entirely different order. Google is denying the importance of syntax, at the expense of the industry and, ultimately, itself.
The article is about AdWords, but the general Google Web search seems to also find matches that don’t actually contain the quoted words in sequence.
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I'm pretty sure searching for an email address is impossible on Google, even if you put it in quotes I remember when anything that you put in quotes would result in a literal search. Now they seem to be doing too much guessing and interpretation of what they think you meant, which doesn't make sense if you're putting something in quotes. Quotes means you're specifically telling google to only find that string of text but sometimes they kinda ignore it. I don't know why they even give you the option if they're not going to strictly follow it when returning results.
And while they're at it, matching punctuation would make every programmer's day.