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Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.
I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)
link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/
quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence
Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.
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.
deleted
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.
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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