Search Engines and Common Queries

I’ve noticed that search engines, especially Google but also DuckDuckGo, seem to be optimizing for common types of queries, at the expense of less common ones. So if I want to find an Indian restaurant in a specific city, that works great. But if I want to find a restaurant with bench seating, that’s a much harder query to get answered. Google will fight you with your terms, replace with similar words, or ignore search terms, even if you use the plus operator, even if you put quotes around the term you don’t want dropped. Based on so much search data, Google’s algorithm now has a very strong opinion about what it thinks I want, and if the exact combination of words I’m looking for falls outside that scope, my query is internally munged to fit a more common pathway.

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