We can argue whether there is place for more operators, or whether it's better on average for an average user to still be "outsmarted" by the engine, but it's clear what's going on - these aren't exact match results and the results often have zero relevance with what user is looking for precisely because the user knows the specific word WILL appear on the page they need and a page without that word WON'T be what they need. I don't know how much clearer we can be :) It used to work (or seemed to). Now it doesn't. It frustrates some people. That's it.

Don't mess with my search terms! Bring exact matches back! Only show pages that match the search terms!

https://github.com/HTTPArchive/legacy.httparchive.org/blob/m...

You can search for anything in the source-code of pages, using any regex or grep you can imagine.

Obviously running your custom filter logic across every byte of data that has ever existed on the internet is compute heavy... But Google has lots of that!

"azure" devops agent "checkout" "freeze"

I'm obviously searching for something very specific here, and Google helpfully decided to show me results omitting "freeze" and "checkout" so I had to quote them.

I also notice that it looks like Google thinks that check-up is the same thing as checkout, which in context are not synonyms, though this would require Google to infer "git checkout" but I didn't include git because that would introduce another universe of unhelpful results.

https://dzone.com/articles/getting-started-with-jenkins-the-... was included which doesn't include "azure" at all, though this is obviously Google being cheeky.

Of course I could also call this somewhat sinister, as Google is basically saying I should ditch a direct competitor to their services and instead use a self-hosted service. Or maybe I'm projecting since I would like to ditch Azure DevOps and use Jenkins, but in any case there's an example.

Feel free to play with it: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS820US820&biw=1...

Of course, in this case it was a networking problem so I do have to admit that usually when Google starts ignoring what I typed it's because the answer to the question is something else entirely. Though sometimes I know exactly what I'm asking for and Google doesn't get it.

Because anyone who's used Google in the last 10 years knows that Google tailors its results to what it thinks you want to see.

So a search query that fails for one HN reader may work for another, or at least work differently.

A repeated frustration in my life has been explaining to bosses that the search results that appear on their personal phone are not the same as what will appear on a client's computer.

Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to use Google Search for searching in Internet. You are only allowed to look up viral memes and query neural networks, trained by other people's searches. Searching for rare and unique things will quickly get you banned. An interesting side-effect: using modern Google to check if name is vacant is meaningless. I used to google for names to see, if something else used them, but Google's search repeatedly returned me 0 results, even when there were multiple pages with that particular name in title, many of them years old. Searching for the same thing couple of weeks later have suddenly returned hundreds of hits.

I wonder, how much it costs to actually query Google's database instead of some distant neural network approximation. Apparently, Google's own employees can't afford it anymore — some of them are using DuckDuckGo instead (they even added it to Chrome, lol)