Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.
It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.
The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.
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(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.
But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.
In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim".
Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
I believe you may be correct, but they're both readable-enough.
Like "cannot" vs "can not": One form may be more-correct, but both are very readable.
Either way, it's easy enough to blame spell check on our personal pocket supercomputers for these things.
(Every year or two, Google Keyboard on Android makes it its purpose to screw up "its" vs "it's". You type it the right way, you see it on the screen as being correct, and then it changes it to the wrong form. This happens 100% of the time and then the problem disappears in a few weeks.
I'd give Google a break, but they don't deserve one.
I also blame them single-handedly for the variations in spellings of brake-vs-break on the longer timeline: Sometimes, people get it right and nobody notices. Oftentimes, it's all backwards. The oscillation suggests that it is an auto-derp problem more than it is a cognitive one.)
Cannot and can not are slightly different in that both are correct (in the prescriptivist sense, I suppose; arguably whatever gets the point across is correct). But there are cases where can not is more correct.
I use a keyboard (Thumb-Key to be precise) without autocorrect, though it doesn't stop me from making typing mistakes.
I (usually!) want to find documents that include the words that I'm searching for, not an endless stream of links that some particularly-useless bot thinks I might want instead.
(And when that search returns no results, then that is also a useful data point for me.)
For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:
"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"
Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too.
If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this.
A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term.
Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
Indeed.
Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.
It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.
The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.
---
(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.
But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.
In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
I've never seen it spelled as "oftentimes".
But as far as I can determine, often times is a misspelling of oftentimes.
I believe you may be correct, but they're both readable-enough.
Like "cannot" vs "can not": One form may be more-correct, but both are very readable.
Either way, it's easy enough to blame spell check on our personal pocket supercomputers for these things.
(Every year or two, Google Keyboard on Android makes it its purpose to screw up "its" vs "it's". You type it the right way, you see it on the screen as being correct, and then it changes it to the wrong form. This happens 100% of the time and then the problem disappears in a few weeks.
I'd give Google a break, but they don't deserve one.
I also blame them single-handedly for the variations in spellings of brake-vs-break on the longer timeline: Sometimes, people get it right and nobody notices. Oftentimes, it's all backwards. The oscillation suggests that it is an auto-derp problem more than it is a cognitive one.)
Cannot and can not are slightly different in that both are correct (in the prescriptivist sense, I suppose; arguably whatever gets the point across is correct). But there are cases where can not is more correct.
I use a keyboard (Thumb-Key to be precise) without autocorrect, though it doesn't stop me from making typing mistakes.
Great. Is there a way to make that the default?
I (usually!) want to find documents that include the words that I'm searching for, not an endless stream of links that some particularly-useless bot thinks I might want instead.
(And when that search returns no results, then that is also a useful data point for me.)
Then it's a good job we're talking about YouTube, not Google search, and that I tested what I described before posting.
For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:
"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"
Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too.
If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this.
A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term.
Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
There's a whole list of search operators: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/#li...