This is a misfeature that Google started using some years ago.
There is a tab-style link directly below the search box called "Tools" in the search results page. Once clicked it displays a few settings and one of them can be set to "Verbatim".
Choose that and your search terms will actually be what is searched for, as opposed to some arbitrary subset of it. I wish this was better documented.
Amazon. As in the shop - I can do one search and get a result, even a 'featured' result, and then change it to something more generic that's an exact match for the _title_, sort in a way that will make me easily see it again, (e.g. by ascending price) and it not show (e.g. first result is more expensive than the product I just saw).
It's infuriating, because presumably I don't always happen to see the unknowingly hidden option.
it seems like it used to be much easier to get Google to return exact matches. Just my subjective experience of course, but as accuracy for word-sense-disambiguation significantly improved it seems like Google has become much more comfortable returning what it believes are close or related matches. Overall it's probably better search, but I find myself having to put things in quotes more than I used to when looking for a very precise result.
Does Google get false positives (incorrectly detecting a mistake and “fixing” it?) or false negatives (failing to detect a mistake you make) more often? Is it possible that cognitive biases prevent you from giving Google credit when it fixes your mistakes? Is it possible Google has done extensive studies to find the preferred trade-off? Is it possible that your preferences are different than the average person because you’re an engineer?
I once was curious about this so I kept track of my Google searches for a week, and it was overwhelmingly the case that what it returned was what I wanted but not what I asked vs the other way around.
Another frustrating thing with google search is when it translates (or attempts to translate) queries for you and then fails to show you any results in the language of what you typed in. Even with languages specified in my google account I can't get it to stop without quoting part of search. I've switched to using yandex for a lot of searches just to avoid it.
It depends what you're looking for. If it's an error message, you probably want that exact string, not results that are errors but don't include the string.
It used to be that searching literally "restaurants" (i.e. with quotes) would search for an exact match (particularly useful for multi-word searches in those days), but no more. It's taken as a 'hint' or something, I believe, but not an absolute instruction.
If I’m doing a google search, you’re probably right. If I’m searching my gmail account, you’re probably wrong. I’ve searched for exact phrases that occur in my email (for both gmail and outlook) and failed to get the matches anywhere in the results (and had to find them by other means). Same with Jira. It’s very frustrating to have to sort through hundreds or thousands of messages for the result you wanted.
The gmail one in particular drives me absolutely bonkers. Like, I don’t care if the search needs to take 15 seconds to do, just find the email with the phrase that I know is there!
This is even more frustrating when you do a date constrained search and google tells you there are no emails from that date, but if you page through manually, it’s there. I feel like gmail is constantly gaslighting me.
Is it so weird that websites for restaurants would literally have the word “restaurant” on it somewhere? Eg
> Foobar Canteen is a 2 Michelin star restaurant located in the heart of Soho.
This used to be how search engines knew what was a page about restaurants and what wasn’t.
But in any case, the problem with not returning exact strings is those times when you do need exact strings. Like researching a famous quote, passage of text or software error message.
It's all part of their attempt to de-commoditize their stuff, changing from an indexing-and-keyword-tool to invasive "assistant" that Knows What You Meant To Say.
However, as someone who already learned to translate my desires into keywords, it's freaking annoying.
That, when searching for a string, I don't want exact matches to appear in the results.
If your search ever DOESN'T return exact matches (barring common misspelling correction), you're doing something seriously wrong.