[itp]

I suspect it's a reflection of the way the majority of their audience interacts with search.

For a large number of people, Google's ability to answer the underlying question, rather than explicitly identify pages where all search terms appear, means it works better. If you think of Google as a way to get answers, this is good.

If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.

As a personal anecdote, I was an early adopter of smartphones (particularly relative to a non-technical audience). So I was excited when I could speak to my phone, then disappointed when I discovered that I had to structure my queries and instructions very carefully.

A few years ago I was on a road trip with a very non-technical friend. We decided to stop for Chipotle. Had it been up to me, I would probably have pulled out my phone, opened Google Assistant (or perhaps Maps directly), and told my phone (speaking as clearly as possible) "navigate to the closest Chipotle" or something similar.

But I was driving, so she just pulled out her iPhone and half-shouted "I want a burrito!" at it. And that worked just fine.

Point being, I had expectations for how things should work based on interactions with earlier iterations of an interface. She didn't.

[CharlesColeman]

> If you think of Google as a search engine, and particularly if you have historical experience with (and expectations of) search engines, this is very frustrating. And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.

Google really needs to develop a "pro mode" search engine that works for this use case. I get the need for an "answers engine" for less savvy users and more casual use cases, but it's a massive company. It can afford to execute two products in its core competency (rather than umpteen messaging apps that it will kill, along with a lot of other useless and/or doomed stuff).

[cortesoft]

"Google really needs to" in the sense that it would be useful, or that it would be a good investment for them? Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money?

[sumedh]

> Sure it can afford to do it, but how would it help them make more money? reply

It keeps the power users on the site so they wont have to look for an alternative. Power users if they find something better might influence no power users to the other site

[sitkack]

All I can think of is the courtesy of a 404. No can be a powerful, yet welcome signal. The reticence to say No causes more harm that good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2vkiLHiTcY

[abruzzi]

While there is some truth that we are trained by the search paradigm we learned on, Google has a habit of ignoring key parts of my query just to show results. If I search for something like: spotmatic f schematic (which I did just recently), I don't want it to ignore "schematic" just because there are no matching results. It is far more useful to me to know that there are no matching hits that to make me click several links before I realize none will have what I want (in this case Google doesn't even do me the courtesy of telling me that it is dropping "schematic" from the search, or at least changing it into a word that doesn't return schematics.)

[tannhaeuser]

"Google knows better than you" gives way too much credit IMHO. Google Search is nearly useless for my most searched topics today, and even dangerous in that it gives you a very wrong perception of what is out there.

[mda]

Any examples? I find it hard to believe it is "nearly useless for most searched topics". It is easy to check, go to your search history and look at your last 10-20 queries and count how many them useless.

[reaperducer]

Today I searched for TPUG, which is the Toronto PET Users Group.

Google returned exactly ZERO results about TPUG. All of the results were about dogs.

[itp]

I just searched for TPUG on Google in both my logged in profile, as well as an incognito window. Both searches returned primarily results about the Toronto PET Users Group, including a knowledge panel specifically about the Toronto PET Users Group (founded in 1978 by Lyman Duggan).

That's either very quick turnaround to fix, or a deeper mystery!

[reaperducer]

No mystery at all. Google tailors the results to what it thinks you want, rather than what you asked for.

Two people sitting at machines next to each other can perform the same search and get different results. It's what Google's spent billions of dollars on.

[mda]

I expect it to change results, it would be a terrible experience if it did not

[mda]

The very first answer is Toronto Pet users for me, even with special box and the works.

[JohnFen]

> And the workarounds of clicking the "must contain" link (or surrounding all of your search terms with quotation marks) are a seemingly unnecessary inconvenience.

Plus, they're inadequate.

[afandian]

I totally take your point, but I don't think it's inconsistent with mine.

Search engines being 'about' a concept isn't a new thing. Bewlew's book from 2008 is called "Finding Out About". The dream is that the search engine can work out what a document is about, and what I'm thinking about based on the content of the document / query, and match them up.

The new thing in your example is that Google has gone beyond documents into burrito restauraunts, but it's not such a huge leap.

Maybe new adavances have brought new algorithms that are somehow better at finding and modelling those abstractions so the search engine is no longer a recognisable vector space model with predictable proxies. Even if that _is_ the case, they should be able to answer a query I have made, on my own terms.