Google returns unwanted search results

[Keeve]

@tim314

Google’s algorithm will try to show you the best results it can, even if they aren’t exactly what you asked for.

You’ve pretty much summed up the whole problem here. Google gives results that it thinks you’ll like, instead of following directions.

Or, here’s a whole different spin on it:

I, and many other people, are very familiar with the idea that “Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, whether that’s what you wanted or not.” That line, I suppose, was written by someone who gave a command to a computer, and was either too specific, or not specific enough, or made some other sort of presumption, and the result was that while a human would have clearly understood the request, a very literal-minded computer misunderstood it. It seems that Google Search is trying to compensate for this. For example, Google Search does not look only at the actual text on a web page, but it also looks at various tags and other words that are hidden in the HTML code. Based on that, Google will say, “The words that Rune is looking for don’t appear on this page, but they do appear in the links and tags, so there’s a good chance that he’ll find it useful anyway, so I’ll include it as a hit.”

[Gary_T]

DuckDuckGo can be a good alternative to Google. I don’t know exactly how it handles searches, but it doesn’t track and its results for the OP’s query aren’t the same as Google’s.

[Princhester]

@tim314

It’s a judgement call though when no results is better than results that don’t quite match. If the user really wants to know “Are there any pages on the Internet that contain the words astrid, Venus, and morningstar?” then yeah, no results would be the more useful response. But if the user wants to know “more information about that other morningstar goddess, kinda like Venus, I think her name was astrid” and then it turns out her real name was Freja or something, then it would actually be better (i.e., more useful to the user) to return that result even if it doesn’t include the name astrid.

I think Google is betting that returning some results that don’t quite match is more often than not more useful than returning no results. (Where “betting” probably means “their research suggests”).

Although I can see how it’s annoying in this case, I’m not so sure it’s the wrong call on the whole. But I agree there should be an option to get just what you asked for. As far as I can tell putting all terms in quotes does exactly this.

You may be right about Google’s line of thinking. Also, of course, you aren’t Google’s customer, you are Google’s product, and it probably keeps Google’s customers happier when some results are returned.

Personally I’d rather just know there are no pages that have what I am looking for. I can always keep taking keywords out till I get some results. What is truly a PITA is word searching page after page for my key keyword, often only to find that it simply isn’t there.