Mountain View, California — Juggling to differentiate its “+” product from getting jumbled, search engine titan Google on Wednesday announced that it is rolling out “Verbatim Search,” a new search tool designed to make up for the absence of the “+” search operator that existed until recently. This is the latest in a line of fresh improvements.
Google provides services that facilitates search results more accurate for users. For example, the “+” operator helped search for specific terms. But a few weeks ago, Google announced the termination of the ‘+” operator, stating it was being used incorrectly two-thirds of the time, to the astonishment of millions of its users who were not very happy with the move.
While, Google claims that less than half a percent of searches actually utilized this, but you would not know that from the outpour of anger that came following this news. Since then, Google has reviewed requests for a better way to deliver search using exact terms for users typing into the search bar.
Earlier, the search engine titan used to provide this capability through the + operator, which searchers could preface search queries with to ensure that results would include the exact term. For example, a search executed as: [Google launches +Android Market] would include the term Android Market in all results. The company has now enabled a novel ability for users to search for results using precise terms they type in the search box.
Now to appease its users, a new search tool named verbatim is released, which will expand searches to request the actual words users searched for, instead of Google filling in what it thinks you might be searching for, based on previous search results.
Users who had grown fond of the Boolean + operator cried foul. Google Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said on Twitter he would look into the matter, which Google Operating System detailed well.
When the feature is activated, Google will search without making usual improvements such as automatic spelling corrections; personalizing search by using information such as previously visited Websites; using synonyms of search terms; finding results that match similar terms to those in your query; searching for words with the same stem; making some terms optional.
Furthermore to verbatim search, which will gradually be made available to all users, we are also applying similar ideas directly to our algorithms, such as harmonizing the accuracy of when our query widening search improvements trigger, explained Corin Anderson, a principal engineer for Google search, in a blog post.
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To select verbatim mode, which can be accessed by clicking ‘Show search options’ in the left-hand column of a Google results page. In addition, when users can select the verbatim search tool under the more search tools option in the left-hand rail of Google search results.
Nevertheless, verbatim search is the latest upgrade Google has made to tune its search engine, which is under scrutiny for the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Congress and the European Commission. Some other tweaks include serving fresher results for 35 percent of queries, including those that feature hot trends, current events or recurring events.
In addition, Google also increased page content and decreased header and menu content for its search snippets, extended rich snippets for applications, and improved the way its finds official Web pages.