uhmm, weirdly enough it might explain why some (myself included) have found that Google's results were shit /sub-optimal. Turns out I might have been using Google wrong for the last few years. I am used to using specific boolean search parameters while it seems that Google have been optimizing for natural language. An example from the announcement may clarify - "Here’s a search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.” The word “to” and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn't understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query." Personally I would never have formatted a search query in natural language. Perhaps I should have been.
Yes, this is the exact problem I'm running into, I hammer out my search queries like its a wildcard CONTAINS SQL statement, because a simple inclusive search should bring back predictable results.
If you can remember any of the queries that failed, I'd be happy to pass them along to debug. If you have it turned on you can look in your search history here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?product=19
I was after a specific legacy driver last night which the vendor no longer has available. Google returns zero results for this, bing returned a few relevent results (but sadly still didn't help me get what I needed) in the end I went mooching through the way back machine.
It's this class of search that bugs me the most, I know for a fact something with that exact filename is out there on the web, I just can't find where easily.
If I run into more issues or can recall anything else, I'll forward it on.
