Verbatim search produces unrelated image results, Wikipedia summary

AltaVista

Verbatim search for "icaroscope" (including the quotes) produces good Web results, but the images are of optical microscopes and Wikipedia summary is variously either the Microscopy article or the MicroScope (magazine) article.

There's actually an Icaroscope article, so that would kind of be the natural one to display for this query. But in general, a user selecting Verbatim probably doesn't expect non-verbatim results.

Luis

AltaVista Hey, I couldn't reproduce your issue when using verbatim mode,

I suspect there's a bug causing the interface to show Verbatim mode as selected, even though the searches are not being conducted in that mode. We will look into it and resolve it. In the meantime, turning Verbatim mode off and then on again should activate it correctly.
Could you please retry that search to confirm you get the same results I did?

AltaVista

Re-running the query now gives the expected Icaroscope summary whether or not Verbatim mode is enabled. The images are still of optical microscopes.

Interestingly, your search results instead show a video on the Metascope, which is relevant ... and pretty impressive given that the video only touches on the Icaroscope briefly.

Can a ticket be filed directly from a search result page so that you have the search engine's state to assist in this kind of debugging?

Luis

AltaVista We're considering making that possible (fully anonymised) in the future. Users will then have the option to open the Kagifeedback link if they wish to provide additional feedback or follow up on the discussion.
You can follow this thread for updates on that.

I'll go ahead and close this issue now. Please let us know if you find any other issues with this.