[mappingbabeljc]

Hiya, author here - yes, you are correct. RankBrain is one of hundreds of distinct signals that go into the results page. It just happens to be one with a great deal of influence, which I think demonstrates the surprising generality/adaptability of this type of approach for natural language processing and interpretation.

[kuschku]

Well, except the results of Google got worse and worse over the past years (since around 2013 I could pinpoint the issue), to the point that by now often only one or two entries on the results page are relevant.

Even if I search for a very specific query, Google will just only give me results ignoring several parts of my query, and at best one or two about my actual query.

Even duckduckgo manages to give better results often at this point.

EDIT: Just found verbatim search, at least that gives almost equal results as duckduckgo. Still not as good, but it’s okay.

[dingaling]

> Just found verbatim search

Even Verbatim search will happily lop-off search words.

Tonight I was searching for "raf ballykelly vulcan" and after a few puzzling results realised that Ballykelly had been discarded. Since it was the airfield in question the results were therefore useless.

[kuschku]

It is exactly this kind of issue that I am talking about. Even DuckDuckGo manages this better than Google. It’s seriously an issue.

And with Google Maps being already worse than Bing, OSM, or even fucking Apple Maps, all Google products I actively used are now useless for me.

[DanBC]

Either they've fixed it or I'm not seeing the problem - I get a bunch of pages that include ballykelly and vulcan. Forcing "ballykelly" didn't seem to make any difference.

[moultano]

If you'd like to share the query I'd be really interested to debug.

[kuschku]

I don’t have one specific query – it is EVERY query where Google will ignore 90%+ of the words I entered, and show me around 5 related results, and otherwise completely bullshit results, with no way to see more.

[wslh]

Use [Search Tools] => [All Results] => [Verbatim] that is a known issue for people who have been using Google Search for years. There are many discussions about this topic, like: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4744658.htm

[kuschku]

Even that doesn’t solve all issues – it still shows results that are irrelevant to my query and do not even match the query.

It should not be hard to convert a query into a regex for content, title and URL and apply it on the index.

[moultano]

That sounds really frustrating. Any examples you can give would really help to debug.

[kuschku]

Often the issue occured with searching technical things, like, I copy-pasted a python exception, and Google would tell me where to download python and which python books to get and that python is a type of snakes.

It’s incredibly frustrating, but if I, by accident, use Google again and see the issue, I’ll tell you.

[kuschku]

Here, a recent case, where Google tries to completely ignore half of my query: https://www.google.de/search?q=TLD+.gov.sa