I would love if you or anyone who ever has this happen can share an example, if you're comfortable doing so. We'll debug. But if you quote something, we shouldn't show anything but that which matches the quoted material.
Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."
And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.
Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.
Unless it's changed in the past 56 minutes, the SERP is pretty up-front that it can't find any pages with all three of those.
It literally says `No results found for "kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly".` right at the top, and then shows you the (properly explained) results for the non-quoted version of the query.
Mobile doesn't show that, at all. It also doesn't show that bit if you use the brand name "kitchenboss" instead of "kitchen boss", which I originally intended. My phone might have auto-corrected that without me noticing.
Anyway, with the terms I posted earlier, on desktop it says:
Results for kitchen boss g320 disassembly (without quotes):
It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search
Then it goes on to show me lots of unrelated results, instead of showing me the 'not many' great matches for my search. If my search doesn't turn up many good results (let alone great), that fine. Show me what you've got, let me decide how to broaden my search to get more. All of the unrelated results being shown are marketing spam sites. That's not helpful.
On mobile and desktop, I'm getting a message saying that when you search for ["kitchen boss" "g320" "disassembly"] that we have no results. And there's not much we can do if there are no pages we find that match all those words you required be present. There just aren't the pages.
What we can do is try searching for all of the words, so perhaps you'll find something useful that way. But even we can tell when doing this that the results might not be what you want, which is why that automatic warning about maybe these aren't great matches.
IE: we can't show you what we've got for a query where there are no exact matches. It's impossible. We can show you what we got if we don't require all the word be present. And we can tell you what we're doing. And you always have the choice to restart the query in another way if you don't like that.
Now here's something else. You probably used the quotes because I'm guessing you figured it was better to tell us exactly what to do than trust us to look at all the words and analyze the context and so on and see if we could make matches generally. If you had done that, just searched for [kitchen boss g320 disassembly], then the first web page result is the instruction manual for your sous vide machine. It has cleaning steps, which I'm guessing also might be what you're after? (It looks like it's just take off the outer casing).
Those results, doing it directly like that, are different than when we gave them to you after your quoted search failed. and that's probably because when you gave us quotes, and there were no matches, we might have tried some stricter matching to keep closer to the original requirements rather than use our general ranking.
To wrap up: maybe don't try the quotes at first. It's totally fine to type in a long natural language query like [how do I take apart a kitchen boss g320] and if you do that, the instruction manual is right there.
I added the quotes because I wasn't getting what I wanted without them. I don't need the user manual; I already have that and I'm not just trying to clean it. I wanted to find a guide to fully disassembling it, like the videos you find for phones when you want to replace a cracked screen yourself. Knowing that there are no matches at all is good information. (Disappointing, but good.) Trying to give me results for a different query, apparently assuming that I accidentally used the exact-match-only quotes, is not useful and kind of condescending. I think that's what leads people to think the quotes don't work the way they used to. Finally, the wording about not many good matches makes it sound like there are some good matches, but they've been mixed in with these other irrelevant matches. That's probably just a wording issue on the message, trying to soften the "We can't find anything" result.
Thanks for the additional information. It really helps understanding the situation.
Showing results for non-quoted words isn't intended to be condescending nor an indication that we think someone made a mistake. Apologies that it comes across that way.
We think we're clearly saying there are no matches with the "No results found" message. If we stopped there, the page would have nothing else. And I get that for you -- and perhaps others -- that might be preferable, a further reinforcement that there's nothing out there.
For others, not so helpful. They potentially might give up with no real way of going forward, when just losing the quotes perhaps could get them useful information.
And I get the trade-off concerns. I've seen many comments here that things done to support less "pro" users are annoying. And yet, we do need to find a way to support everyone. I think that's why we've probably gone with the message about no matches with and showing the quotes.
Perhaps we should consider making that an option -- "Would you like to try this search again without quotes."
As for the message about not good matches, we always try to show the best stuff we have first. That's the point of our ranking. The warning is meant to indicate that even though we'll list the best we have, for that query, none of it is particularly helpful -- not that here are a bunch of results, and there's some good matches mixed in with poor ones. Ranking that way would make no sense.
But it might be also that we're so close to it -- that we always try to rank the most useful stuff first -- that we didn't consider the interpretation you had. So thank you again, it's really helpful to get that feedback.
Sorry the information doesn't appear to be out there. I hope if you disassemble it on your own, you'll post the info out to the open web. I'm pretty sure you'd end up ranking well for that and helping others who might have a similar need.
Weird. On a computer, `"kitchenboss" "g320" "disassembly"` returns exactly six results, all of which appear to include the quoted terms. Plus the "It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" message at the top. Which sounds like exactly what you want. I wonder why it's different on mobile.
Now, if you quote something and put in other non-quoted words, then we'll look for stuff that matches the quoted part and the other things are optional. So when you see that strikeout message, it means basically "We found this page that has the exact words you quoted, and it probably has one or more of the other words or related words you didn't quote, but heads-up, it doesn't have one of those non-quoted words at all."
And we do this because sometimes there might be a useful page that doesn't contain all of your optional non-quoted words.
Totally agree it would help if we did a better job bolding the sections of a page where the quoted terms apply. Often we do, but sometimes the snippeting won't include them if there's better text to describe the page overall. But we're looking at maybe improving here.