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From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.
I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.
Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.
If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.
Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.
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Now unlike the above, this is merely "something I read somewhere at some point" and not official, but:
I've read that it's worse than that. They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.
The A/B testing is specifically trying to make the experience worse for users.
I was not in search quality, but that would not match my experience at Google. The idea was to return a useful result, not to keep the user searching.
The only thing I've encountered in this vein lately is that their bot-detection algorithm seems to interpret "many searches for slightly different search terms in rapid-ish succession" as bot behaviour, resulting in a captcha -- which kind of adds insult to injury when one is trying to nudge the algo to stop serving an infinite selection of (bot-generated?) obvious clickfarm results as the first page...
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Good to know, and I'll take your word for it over random-poster-on-other-forum.
I can confirm that this was not how Google-circa-2010 thought. A user having to redo a search was correctly treated as a negative signal. There was a joke along the lines of "we're the only site on the Internet that tries to get users off of it as fast as possible". I think even modern Google (which, IMO, has completely lost its moral compass and belief in free speech) wouldn't make an entry-level mistake like that. They're the leaders in the search market for a reason.
You're right about the constant A/B testing, though. And sometimes it's sliced by user, so you can't just try again in a new tab. Unless it's Incognito, and even that might not be enough - let me tell you about today's sponsor, NordVPN...
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