Friday, August 19, 2022

Google Searches With Quotes

Yonghao Jin:

Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.

Now we’re making quoted searches better. The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document. That means you can more easily identify where to find them after you click the link and visit the content. On desktop, we’ll also bold the quoted material.

[…]

As referenced above, sometimes quoted searches match content contained within a web page that isn’t readily visible, making it seem like the content isn’t on the page when it actually is present.

[…]

Sometimes people use the standard Find command in a browser to jump to the phrase they want, after arriving on a page. If that doesn’t work, though, you can try using a developer tools option. For instance, in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site.

Via Dave Mark:

My number 1 issue with “quote search” Google searches is clicking on a link and not being able to find the quoted term.

Same.

Previously:

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"Now we’re making quoted searches better. The snippets we display for search results (meaning the text you see describing web content) will be formed around where a quoted word or phrase occurs in a web document. That means you can more easily identify where to find them after you click the link and visit the content. On desktop, we’ll also bold the quoted material".

Great, but it would be better if they also changed the color of the quoted word or phrase.

ProfessorPlasma

I just want verbatim to be a default option. Nothing is more infuriating than searching for something and having the first hit say "Missing:" underneath it.

This is a classic example of Google weirdness.

I swear that I always see the keywords in the preview text, and that it's bolded.

But that's when I just search without quotes.

I also get highlighted text on the actual page once I click through.

And I forgot to say that when searching text strings between quotes, sometimes Googles wipes such quotes when changing time or time range, page of search results, etc. Really frustrating.

Finally, sometimes the cache and simetimes the language translation options are not available in search hits.

In literally every search I do on every search engine, I put quotes around every word or phrase. Because if I don't, it just gives me irrelevant results that don't contain what I actually searched for. And even then it still often doesn't include the words I searched for!

I remember Google started doing that sometime around 2015, give or take, and it suddenly became useless to me. I switched to DuckDuckGo (also for privacy reasons) which wasn't as good as Google prior to that change, but after the change it was better. But now they're just as bad. Web search is far, far worse than it was 10 years ago. (There are of course other reasons for this, but not being able to actually search for what you want to search for is a big part of it.)

A lot of my comments about technology have a annoying, repetitive theme to them... everything technology related was better 10 years ago. The technology may not have been as advanced, or as capable, or have nearly as much computing power, but in nearly every respect it was more pleasant to use and better at its job... along with not always being guaranteed to spy on you in every possible way it can.

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