Google followup

[tahnan]

Since rubrick asked:

I've noticed that Google's results seem to be fairly erratic for some searches.

For instance, using a wildcard to search for, say, {"glass * water"} gives me unexpected results, in two ways. First, the wildcard doesn't match only a single word--as it used to--but anywhere from one to four: "glass distilled water", "glass of ice water", "glass; pitcher of water", "glass of salted tap water".... Second, though the page claims that there are 2.6 million results, which sounds fairly likely, less than 200 are displayed.

Another example: Google seems to be reinterpreting my searches. "Phil", for example, appears to be matching "Philip" and "Phillip"; plurals seem to match both plural and singular words on pages. At its worst, the results seem to include forms that Google thinks are related, but which are not: searching {bases accusations} returns results with "base" and "based" bolded, which is worse than unhelpful if I'm looking for accusations with more than one basis.

(In fact, I was curious to know if this was true of other plural words with more than one singular form. So I searched on {bases axes premises}. The first hits include "sound base for multi-axis system", "work-based video surveillance...Axis network"...in fact, I have to go to the 25th hit or so before finding what I'm looking for, or indeed any page at all that includes the actual three words I searched for.)

All of these oddities make Google much less useful to me than I would like. I hope some of these problems can be addressed?

Thanks!

Sent to Google. Lord knows whether they'll answer.

Comments

[neilfred.livejournal.com]

you can use + to prevent stemming -- e.g. [+bases accusations]

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Good Lord, so you can. And I feel somewhat guilty for being a Bad User, who didn't go looking through the manual after running into a problem. Somewhat in my defense: I didn't go looking because the behavior of things like stemming and wildcards changed unexpectedly and without (apparent, obvious, etc.) explanation. I'd've been more likely to look for help pages if I had just found Google, and seen that it didn't return results the way I expected.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the default looking for plurals, but yeah, Google has been slightly overprocessing queries recently.