Search Results with no Corrections - Google Introduces Verbatim Search

[tedster]

Many people have been frustrated in recent times with Google's search corrections and personalizations. Recently some of the complaints have been quite loud!

In their blog, "Inside Search", Google writes:

...we've received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We've been listening, and starting today you'll be able to do just that through verbatim search.

With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as

making automatic spelling corrections

personalizing your search by using information such as sites you've visited before

including synonyms of your search terms (matching "car" when you search [automotive])

finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to "floral delivery" when you search [flower shops])

searching for words with the same stem like "running" when you've typed [run]

making some of your terms optional

[insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

You can access the new "verbatim search" on the left hand menu, under "More search tools." And all I can say is let's use it... or we'll lose it!

[deadsea]

Setting my default search engine in Firefox to:

http://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&num=30&q=%s

(num=30 in there no longer works :-( but I'm hoping they fix that at some point)

[aakk9999]

Or better, just bookmark this and search in verbatim mode from the Google home page:

Google.com http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1 [google.com]

Google.co.uk http://www.google.co.uk/webhp?tbs=li:1 [google.co.uk]

[HuskyPup]

Excellent aakk9999

[Leosghost]

Definitely not available at Google.fr ..oh well ..just have to search in French from Google.com

lucy24 the javascript "squiggle" ..pulls up a multi-choice tiny pop up which allows one ( if one was so foolish) to share one's viewing of that help page with world plus dog via buzz , twitter , orkut etc ..

[santapaws]

hopefully this new feature turning off all new features will come to youtube soon, will be nice to find 20 to 30 ontopic vidoes rather than 2 and a load of tangents.

btw i dont know why they dont just offer a legacy site with a legacy algo? Its clear more and more of the guy on the street is saying in general conversation "cant find anything on google any more". My mom said it to me yesterday, so i am not making this up. :)

[HuskyPup]

Your mom's a guy? :-)

[nickreynolds]

If this takes off will this mean we go back to having websites with deliberate mis-spellings and variations (eg web site, website)

[netmeg]

Still more bother than +, but it's better than nothing.

[J_RaD]

I don't see local stuff either. Pictures and videos are gone. Nope, there's a few.

if you gota search google... just use s c r oo gle scraper.

[netmeg]

Wish I could use verbatim AND specify the date range, but apparently we aren't there yet.

[ErnestHemingway]

Great thing as I read it but hey this should be on by default because 99.9% of my searchers are laymen looking for information and they don't know all these things.

And most people don't even care. Although a great feature.

[ken_b]

Well apparently you can still make it pop with the ...
Did you mean....

...thing.

Better than regular G though.

[HuskyPup]

Well apparently you can still make it pop with the ...
Did you mean....

I've noticed that today, I'm sure it wasn't like that yesterday.

[shazam]

It's definitely an improvement. Too bad they hide it away to make sure nobody accidentally uses it.

[lucy24]

D'you suppose they want it to fail so that in years to come they can say "We offered it as an option but nobody was interested?"

(It happens. I'm reminded of a local bus company that started offering Saturday service-- but wouldn't advertise or publicize in any way, so naturally the service didn't last long. Hey, we tried, nobody used it, don't blame us.)

I don't mind "Did you mean...?" Sometimes I do mistype. And sometimes my source did. It's the "You can't possibly have meant..." construction that riles me.

But overall things are less annoying in Advanced Search. I recommend it, even if you miss out on all the pretty pictures and strummable guitars.

[lexipixel]

DuckDuckGo

I give DDG a +2

1). It's clean and simple.

2). They appear to put user privacy ahead of tracking and re-marketing your every move.

[dickbaker]

Man, I just went to DuckDuckGo and typed in dozens of keyphrases for which I ranked first-page on Google prior to Feb. 24th. My pages were all there, with many in the #1 and #2 spots as they once were on Google.

So, my site ranks on page one for I can't even count the number of phrases on Bing and Yahoo, Google Verbatim brings up my pages as they used to be on Google, and DuckDuckGo seems to be the same. Yet Google has changed its mind about the site after seven years, and it now ranks almost nowhere.

Weird.

[lucy24]

Has everyone in the world but me seen the cartoon version [dontbubble.us]?

[Content_ed]

Interesting. It's not just my two Pandalized sites that do better on verbatim search of old phrases I remember, it's my non-Pandalized site as well. And it completely rearranges the results for other sites in non-obvious ways, it's not just going by title keywords that match or anything simplistic.

[daveVk]

site:example.com keyword searches return more results with verbatim. Perhaps more accurate ?

[piatkow]

I like the "Do you mean" because it brings typos to my attention but verbatim should be the default in my view, or at least set on the first screen not after the initial search.

[TinkyWinky]

At last -if only they would make it the default, then we would really start having search worth using.

Don't know if anyone else spotted - but strips out all the crappy Google local results for me in the UK... which is nice.

[rlange]

ken_b wrote:
OK, how do we tell this thing we want "kw1 kw2" +"kw3"

What substitutes for the +now?

Using verbatim, you'd search for ["kw1 kw2" kw3]. No need for the plus or quotes to force the inclusion of single words, because a verbatim search won't drop them to begin with.

McMohan wrote:
Verbatim search just the normal search within quotes?

Nope. It's quite a bit more than that. For instance, using quotes in a standard search is still subject to personalization whereas a verbatim search is not. Besides, putting your entire query in quotes would have a standard search looking for a phrase containing those words if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, Google may decide on its own not to treat it like a phrase and drop words anyway.

HuskyPup wrote:
I've noticed that today, I'm sure it wasn't like that yesterday.

Google offering a spelling correction? Yeah, that was there yesterday, too. One of the first searches I tried was for a misspelling of the word "something" and it offered the correct spelling at the top. (Bizarrely, though, the standard search isn't offering up the spelling correction for me.)

--
Ryan

[petehall]

Great results - just a shame 'average jo' will never find this option :(

[daveVk]

To get it from firefox search box add

<Param name="tbs" value="li:1"/>

to google.xml in searchplugins directory

[McMohan]

McMohan wrote:
Verbatim search just the normal search within quotes?

Nope. It's quite a bit more than that. For instance, using quotes in a standard search is still subject to personalization whereas a verbatim search is not. Besides, putting your entire query in quotes would have a standard search looking for a phrase containing those words if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, Google may decide on its own not to treat it like a phrase and drop words anyway.

Yet practically it is more or less same, just that Verbatim saves the time to type in quotes. If I am the kind that uses Verbatim search, I would know well to disable personalization anyway. And in reality I would hardly be looking for a phrase that Google can't return any result for? If there is no result for any out of the world phrase I come up with, Google wouldn't drop any words, but the quotes.

[Reno]

Too bad they hide it away to make sure nobody accidentally uses it.

Google has a huge advantage with the public at large, which has to do with the vast majority of people not knowing the difference between intentional search (default) and verbatim search (well hidden). Most users go to Google, put in the query, and one second later they start looking at the results. They don't even marvel any longer how incredible it is to get all those results in the wink of an eye. It's just what they expect Google to do, and Google does it immediately & dependably.

So the new verbatim search is the bone that Google is throwing the 1/2 of 1% that may care enough to look for it, but for everyone else, it'll be whatever it will be (intentional or whatever), and the public will come to expect more of that until the engineers change it again, then they'll gleefully expect that too. It won't matter how it works or what it's called, as long as it's from Google, they'll be happy.

Google certainly knows that's the case, so they can try whatever they want, whenever they want, and as long as the results are not disastrous (bringing back nothing but adult sites no matter what the query, as an extreme example of "disastrous"), we should assume that they'll follow the plan that Eric Schmidt announced, which is to know what we want even if we don't know what we want. That's the plan, and they're sticking to it.

...........................

[tedster]

That's the plan, and they're sticking to it.

And they've invested an incredible depth of resources in that direction, for many many years. As I see it, only a relatively small portion of the searching public really care about this issue at all... mostly people doing research of one kind or another.