Curse you google and your imprecise statistics!

[MonkeySage]

Simple question, asked in quotes: "How many Americans died from bladder cancer in 2016?"

I expected an answer to that specific question, at least from CDC or Cancer.net. Instead, cancer.net gives me an estimate of how many Americans will die from bladder cancer...

Not useful information for this project.

[gomipile]

Simple question, asked in quotes: "How many Americans died from bladder cancer in 2016?"

I expected an answer to that specific question, at least from CDC or Cancer.net. Instead, cancer.net gives me an estimate of how many Americans will die from bladder cancer...

Not useful information for this project.

I think you are using too narrow of a search. If you just put "bladder cancer" in quotes, and tailor the rest of the search around it, you should get better results, because it allows for phrases other than the one you put in quotes.

[Peelee]

Simple question, asked in quotes: "How many Americans died from bladder cancer in 2016?"

Whoah whoah whoah. In quotes? Like, you were looking for a site that asked that exact question?

Google search (sans quotes): "bladder cancer deaths 2017". Second link: useful stats (https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/urinb.html).

[Knaight]

As a rule typing actual questions in to google is bad procedure. There's exceptions (most notably trying to source quotes that are questions), but they're few and far between.

[Xyril]

Why did you use quotes?

Googling quotes is a pretty fun tool--I particularly appreciate it when I can remember fairly precisely some song lyrics or a snippet of a book quote and I want to find a source or a review that also enjoyed that quote. It's also useful, as others have suggested, for narrowing down a specific term that's comprised of a few more common words put together in a particular way.

If you want to do a natural language search (which honestly I rarely do except when deliberately trying to find funny results) just leave the quotes off.

[erikun]

In general, you want to use quotes for an exact phrase in search engines. Quotes find that exact phrase, and only that exact phrase, outside some possible minor variants. So a full question ("How many Americans died from bladder cancer?") is a bad idea because it will only look for pages which that exact phrase or maybe "How many Americans die from bladder cancer?" but not similar topics phrased differently. But if you put in the question with just quotes around the parts which cannot vary (How many Americans died from "bladder cancer"?) so that you're searching for "bladder cancer" specifically rather than other forms of cancer, you will probably get much better results.

You can also specifically try searching for keywords, again using quotes when a pair of words need to be together. So a search like (number of American death "bladder cancer" 2016) would probably locate what you want really well. You can also subtract terms (number of American death "bladder cancer" 2016 -Canada) if for some reason that one term is showing up in all the search results you don't want.

[aspi]

As others have already indicated, Google is a search engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine), not a question answering machine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering). The two concepts are almost entirely distinct in information retrieval research. One ranks documents based on their relevance to your input, the other tries to interpret your question to provide exact answers.

If you input your question into a proper QA service such as Wolfram Alpha (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+Americans+died+from+bladder+cancer+in+ 2016%3F), you will actually get a pretty good result for this type of question.