Is Google wildcard search severely broken right now? Thread poster: Artem Vakhitov
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Suddenly, a search string such as "that * is most popular" returns 7 hits for me. Is that normal?
| | | | | I get 3 pages | Nov 17, 2016 |
Artem Vakhitov wrote:
Suddenly, a search string such as "that * is most popular" returns 7 hits for me. Is that normal?
Aren't you missing 'the' before 'most'?
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Mikhail Kropotov wrote: Artem Vakhitov wrote:
Suddenly, a search string such as "that * is most popular" returns 7 hits for me. Is that normal? Aren't you missing 'the' before 'most'?
No, I'm not, because in this case I mean smth. like "it's no secret that (among all places) X are most popular in Y area".
Besides, the variant with "the" returns 11 hits.
[Edited at 2016-11-17 19:29 GMT]
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| Curiouser and curiouser | Nov 17, 2016 |
Now I get 31 hits total for this variant, of which 11 are real and all the rest aren't exact.
Without "the", it's now 20 hits total, of which 2 are proper.
Bummer.
| | | | Natalie 
Poland
Local time: 02:49
Member (2002)
English to Russian
+ ...
Moderator of this forum SITE LOCALIZER
1,290,000,000 hits:
| | | | | Look at the bottom of the page | Nov 17, 2016 |
Natalie wrote:
1,290,000,000 hits:
Yeah, Google does that... but if you look at the bottom of the page you should only see 3 pages, and if you click on the third, you'll get the actual number of hits (22 in my case).
Even when you do a search and get a lot of pages, if you keep moving toward the last page, sometimes you realize the results/pages actually shown are much less than those mentioned on the first page.
| | | | | Even if you're getting slightly more hits | Nov 17, 2016 |
Even if you're getting slightly more hits than I am, doesn't it seem to you that this number is too low anyway?
[Edited at 2016-11-17 20:09 GMT]
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Rolf Keller
Germany
Local time: 02:49
English to German
| Google is different | Nov 18, 2016 |
Artem Vakhitov wrote:
Even if you're getting slightly more hits than I am, doesn't it seem to you that this number is too low anyway?
Google treats "that" as a stop word in English, anyway.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stop_word_list/google_stop_word_list
So the results may differ depending on the search language.
Apart of that, there is another issue: As "is" and "most" are stop words as well, your scheme might fail.
In order to complicate things further, Google uses a special algorithm to deliver hits in certain cases where a certain stop word is meaningful.
https://www.quora.com/What-constitutes-a-stop-word-in-the-context-of-a-Google-search
Whether we like it or not: Google Search is no machine that delivers exactly predictable results. Google want to sell ads, that's Google's business. Ads are for the bulk of the population, so the search algorithms are tailored to this clientele. Translators etc are fare dodger only.
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