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thfurantoday at 1:58 AM2 repliesview on HN

Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.


Replies

ssl-3today at 5:40 AM

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.

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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.")

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lelandfetoday at 2:44 AM

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.

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