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People are constantly saying these things about google and when I search for:

"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal"

I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.




It fails if you search for the incorrect quote; the last sentence should start "With" and not "Without". Checking competitors, Bing fails to find any variation of the quote, Yandex returns 5 results if you remove the incorrect word and quote it, but returns garbage otherwise. Considering the single-digit number of results for an apparently very obscure quote, and that it was incorrect, this does seem reasonable.

I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?


Trying this:

Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know

It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.


Fascinating. Quoting individual words like "terminal" or "shout" also works as a nudge for both Google and Yandex, but not for Bing.

And since our written observations modify the behavior, an update: quoting the whole sentence now returns a single result - this page.


Parent likely searched without hard quotes; leading to the bad results.




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