The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't they?
> Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index?
Yup!
Try searching for "ruby net::ldap search", without the quotes. For me, a CPAN page is the second result. (This is even logged out, in a chrome incognito window, so no cookies are sent to google.) That page doesn't have "ruby" or anything related to "ruby" on it, at all.
But even if I was searching for something esoteric like an error message, it's much more helpful to give me no results than it is to give me irrelevant ones. Irrelevant results just waste my time clicking/skimming through them, where an empty result set will signal to me very clearly that what I'm searching for doesn't make sense.
I see cpan in 4th postion, but I'm not sure I see the problem?
Net::LDAP is a perl module too, one of the things it does is search, so 3/4 of the words are not just matched literally, but are the right kind of net (not fishing or stockings), the right kind of ldap , the right kind of search.
You claim there is nothing related to ruby on that page, yet how many times must people have linked to both those languages from a webpage, perhaps alongside other related terms like python?
Its not perfect, and it's not magic, but is that really the level we expect from Google, so much so that we're in a huff if we have to scroll past one easily discounted search result?
I expect that if I use a search term, Google won't ignore it. I used the word ruby in there because I specifically care about ruby-related search results, not perl ones. When google ignores one of my search terms in the name of giving me more results, it gives me less relevant results.
They had to put a lot of effort into a search system that can ignore words that you're searching for. I'm wondering why that's necessary when I can clearly get better search results when all of my search terms are included.
FWIW, when I do the same in a chrome incognito window, all of the results are ruby (the language) related. But us seeing two different sets of results may make the problem worse, not better :)
I get GP's result when using DuckDuckGo with g! (which should be the same as incognito), so there is that. However I don't see what's the big deal with that CPAN result - it's not like the useful results are drowning in these links here and you can always use quoted if you don't want that. In fact I think it's sometimes useful information that there are very similarly named things than the one we've searched for.
