I was under the impression "verbatim" is to disable filter-bubble personalisation.
Normal queries are tailored to your personal filter bubble. You can't see what other people see from same search, and if you're doing SEO or just trying to find who tends to come top in results for something you have a lot of history looking at, you can't tell who comes top for other people.
It’s like being able to touch your nose in the dark, or even having been blind since birth.
Verbatim searches are for those easy tasks when you know literally, exactly, what you’re looking for.
Something tells me that a lot of folks on HN are being let down by Google in this area. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I want to identify these issues to help everyone. I wish the UI of search wasn’t so textually-bound.
Is there such a thing as an augmented reality search engine? You search like you do at the library, or when you lost your keys. But for data and virtual objects, they lose out - their evanescence creates a perception gap. There is no correspondence with physical objects, etc. We are getting better with haptics, however.
Rainbows End[0] is a future society I’d choose to live in, especially right about now.
Normal queries are tailored to your personal filter bubble. You can't see what other people see from same search, and if you're doing SEO or just trying to find who tends to come top in results for something you have a lot of history looking at, you can't tell who comes top for other people.