Does Google search now have a problem with synonyms?

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I've had loads of trouble recently with Google searches recently.

It used to be you could search for very specific things very easily, but recently I think Google must have broadened or given greater weight to synonyms when searching. I've found Google has a lot of trouble with synonyms of words in certain contexts but not in the context you happen to be searching at the time. I presume that previously the search couldn't distinguish between them but it didn't matter much because synonyms weren't given much weight in the search listing.

Now though I'm constantly having to use quotation marks around everything to get useful results back. Making the search longer and more specific does not help anymore.

Anyone else seeing something similar or am I imagining it?

[DaMoggen]

Yeah, i've noticed this as well, it's a change that has made search results completely useless in many cases where i'm looking for something very specific.

[Riller]

Use quotation-marks around the word you don't want synonyms for.

[Levelog]

Yep, I've found the more Google moves in this direction the more necessary using search modifiers are.

[Download]

Well yeah, I did say that.

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I had a search today that decided "april" was a synonym of "september". Nice job Google.

[AtomicSans]

Wow, that's impressively terrible

[Trekintosh]

Bing really is a better engine.

[Big D Duchovny]

To be honest, I think Google has gone a bit overboard with the hand holding. I'm sure they probably have a bunch of data that shows that hit rates are higher than ever, but I'm gonna notice the times when I have to wrangle Google into searching for what I actually wrote more than the times where they corrected a typo. The more technical your searches get, the less helpful Google is (if you don't use "advanced" searching techniques, at least).

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Even advanced techniques are giving me shitty results now.