For the vast majority of users, things like spelling correction are a huge help. Roughly 10% of all queries are misspelled. Switching the default to "search for exactly what I typed" would hurt those users and lead to more spam and malware for the average user.
We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.
Personally, I like the previous "did you mean" behavior; if Google thinks I misspelled a word, or that I want a synonym, by all means give me the alternative, but by default I want the exact query I searched for, because more often than not I really did mean what I searched for rather than what Google thought I meant.
Can't agree enough this. I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else. The suggestions are helpful, but it should default to what I tell the fucking thing to search for!
If the computer successfully guesses exactly the thing you wanted and does that instead of what you said, it can make you marginally more happy than a "did you mean", since it avoids the reaction of "well why didn't you just do it then?".
However, if the computer guesses wrong, that will cause significantly more frustration to the user. This disproportionate amount of annoyance means that the computer must guess correctly far more often than it guesses wrong. Unfortunately, Google's current system frequently guesses wrong, and then compounds those incorrect guesses by using them by default, taunting the user with their original search.
That's been our observation as well, and we've tried to constrain launches in exactly that way. Techniques that can fail in a way that disrespects the query have to have a much much higher win to loss ratio in order to launch.
What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result. This is one small step in the direction of fixing that, but it's an issue we're paying close attention to, thanks in part to the feedback we've seen on HN.
We very much want to avoid systematic failures like this, and if technical queries are a blind spot then please send them over whenever you see them. My email is in my profile and I'll make sure they get routed appropriately, and I tend to watch threads about Google trying to get good examples to debug.
I'm getting worse and worse results for all sorts of queries over the past few years, not just technical ones. I can't think of specific examples from the main search right now (I finally snapped and switched to DDG a few weeks ago), but here's a particularly terrible one from the Android Market:
I appreciate that Google thinks I'm an illiterate chimp who doesn't know how to spell "your", but really truly, I was looking for a game with "yore" in the title. That's why I typed it. It's even an English word.
> What I think we're understanding now is that something that fails 1% of the time, might not fail for just 1% of queries, it might fail for 1% of the users and work perfectly for the rest, and that small set can be really unhappy as a result.
Excellent insight. Linux kernel developers have had a similar experience with the use of the likely() and unlikely() hints on conditionals; it took a while to realize that unlikely() has to mean unlikely for any user, not just "unlikely for most users, and likely for the rest". So, for example, it doesn't make sense to write "if (unlikely(feature_disabled))", because anyone with the feature disabled will meet that condition every time.
I've definitely had the experience that Google's automatic correction does the wrong thing for me more often than not; I almost always end up clicking the link to go to the search results I actually asked for.
Send over the examples when you come across them (or if you have it turned on, try www.google.com/searchhistory/ to find queries you've issued in the past.) I'll make sure they get to the right place.
"I'm pretty sure user interface research has shown that it's incredibly frustrating to users when you tell a computer to do one thing and it does something else."
You honestly believe that Google is doing something that is worse for the vast majority of their users? That makes the vast majority of their users more frustrated? And that they know this is true because research has proved it?
Why would they act like that?
Most of the people in this thread keep forgetting that they're not regular users. I'm willing to bet that the average Google user (90% of the population) often mistypes. I know I do, and I'm a pretty good speller and typist.
You keep forgetting that most people can't type fast, can't spell that well, and you know what, a lot of the people typing on Google don't even know English all that well, either. For them, Google's spelling auto-correct is incredibly useful.
You're putting words in my mouth. Please don't do that.
I think it should be a given that it's frustrating when a computer doesn't do what you tell it. That doesn't mean that the cost of that frustration isn't offset by the added convenience for many users. In my case it isn't, and those (relatively frequent) times when it does frustrate me, I seriously consider switching search engines.
Funny, for me spelling is least likely to be an exception to the rule. If I misspelled a word in my query then I meant it to be misspelled ... I was probably trying to track down a specific article in which I knew the word to be misspelled, or else I wanted to know how common the misspelling was. And my experience is that Google hates me a little more every year.
Meanwhile, the synonym replacement is actually helpful sometimes. I wish I could turn off one without the other: that's why "verbatim mode" isn't going to do it for me.
There's a magic "nfpr=1" flag in the query string that seems to revert back to the old "did you mean" behaviour. Sometimes it randomly fails though. I don't know if this feature is going away with this update.
This is especially true on Android and other low bandwidth/hard to type devices, where I have time and again searched for the specific exact thing I am looking for only to have instant search and spelling correction help me find something I could not care less about.
I think the algorithm does too many "magic" things lately. I've noticed this when I had some search queries for "flask" (python micro web framework) and some programming related input and most of the returned results were about "flash".
We're always trying to find the right balance. The nice thing about this change is that it gives people an escape hatch if we get it wrong. In theory, I could imagine we could look at the corresponding data to improve the balance in the future too.
Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting corrections does not interrupt my flow and are generally helpful. Auto-corrections are in great part highly disruptive for me. Please don't deviate from this very sound principle, at least not for us power users.
I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong.
My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.
Can I enable literal mode permanently with a cookie? Otherwise, you better make sure that going into literal mode is fewer clicks than, say, going to DuckDuckGo.
How do you tell the difference (for mis-spelled words) between people doing an actual search and people spell checking a word? It could be that a significant percentage of the 10% are not "search queries" but "spelling queries"
It'd be better if we could just append a "v" after the URL to make verbatim searches. That way we can bookmark it and there will be no need to be logged in.
Although now is not the time to be picky (to be thankful, rather), why not simply let logged in users default to literal search, while still displaying the "did you mean" suggestions somewhere on the page...?
All I really want is for google to tell me when it didn't search for what I wrote. I put a word in the search, I expect it in the results - even if the result has a low page rank.
If you want to default considering some words optional, that's fine. But say that above the search results.
I use Google as a spellcheck quite a bit, because it's generally better at working out what my tortured attempt at spelling really means than dictionary sites / apps.
We try to find the balance that helps users the most, and searching for a term with "term" or the literal mode provides an escape hatch for power users.