> But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo.
However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.
Sure, correcting typos, I wouldn't hold that against them. However, when they intentionally scratch out search terms for no apparent reason and show extremely vague matches, it's completely useless. I was searching for a specific error message that was causing my MacBook to freeze on login. Instead, the only two terms Google preserved were 'mac os'. First result was Apple's own page on the OS. Every result was entirely useless. Fine, if there's no actual result for this error message, tell me, but don't make me scan through a page full of irrelevant links and make me figure out myself why they're irrelevant.
The real problem here is that Google does this even when we use double quotes and the verbatim option :-/
I switched to DDG a while ago, -it is about as good as Google now, much thanks to Googles own effort ower the last decade to nerf its own search engine.
Since they are now about equal I use the one that doesn't track me and doesn't support Google.
I've been using DDG for about half a year now, most of the time it does its job, but just yesterday, there was a case where I had to run back to Google: Searching for the "Ship of Theseus" with the words "ship replaced part by part" on Google lead me straight to the Wiki article, whereas on DDG...
Not sure if they're using a statistical (DDG could never compete, too few searches performed) or an algorithmic (DDG could, in time, get this far too) pattern to achieve correct results.
EDIT: It's about the tenth result on DDG, the last one to show before having to click to load more results. Not bad, actually.
Google maps, Wikipedia and other sources apparently spell it Suliven [1], and a Google search for that, without quotes, returns it. Searching for "sulliven" (in quotes) finds a few (possibly mis-spelled?) references to the mountain (and some other things, mostly people named Sulliven.)
I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo.
However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.