>AND operator will return only results related to both terms:
html AND css
This is new to me. So what is the difference between searching html css and html AND css?
Get better at Googling
61–70 of 297 posts
Re: Get better at Googling
#62The article is missing several operators that are useful. Like inurl:, intitle:, allintitle:, etc. The "AROUND" proximity search is neat as well, especially for words with dual meaning. like: bootstrap AROUND(6) cpu Finds "bootstrap" within 6 words of "cpu", which culls out most (not all) of the unwanted results about the bootstrap js library. This article seems to cover most of the ones I'm aware of: https://ahrefs.…
From the linked article:
> “search term”
> Force an exact-match search. Use this to refine results for ambiguous searches, or to exclude synonyms when searching for single words.
Author claimed they tested all of the operators, but this one in particular I can confirm haven't worked reliably for me for over a decade and across a number of machines and accounts.
Some times it can be traced down to things like me searching for "foo bar" and Google thinking
> He said foo. Bar immediately replied [...]
is a valid match which is kind of understandable.
But most of the time I can't really see why the page shows up at all. No trace when searching in the page nor in the page source.
Re: Get better at Googling
#63Re: Get better at Googling
#64Google used to be better, I feel. Nowadays when you add a particular word to make the search specific (otherwise it's too general), Google decides for you, there aren't many results with that keyword, so it excludes the word and gives you a list of irrelevant things. Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes, but why doesn't it do that by default?
> Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes That also doesn't work reliably anymore. Somewhere along the line Google changed it from "exact words" to "exact words and synonyms", with its definition of a synonym being pretty dumb. Search for something obscure to do with "nginx" and Google shows you results for apache2, even bolding apache2 to indicate a match. Using DDG's !bangs is far superior.
Bang for what engines?
DDG has a similar problem with the usage of “-dogs“. This just means fewer dogs in results, not excluding all results with dogs. If you want more dogs you can actually do “+dogs” which somehow changes the weighting of terms.
Re: Get better at Googling
#65Not sure how is this related to the SW development, this is just a general set of Google keywords. I might sound like an old fart, but I feel like it is much more helpful to learn your way around the docs as a developer. I regularly see people googling all kinds of basic language knowledge that can be found in documentation. However, googling might lead to outdated or incorrect information, especially when people jus…
The problem is that each documentation has its own search function, more or less efficient, each with its own quirks. Search engines are much better at finding information and they provide a consistent UI. You can search "php array sort", or "python array sort" and you'll get a link to the relevant page of the documentation.
In comparison if I search for "array sort" in the Python doc directly, the first result is about "bisect" (vaguely related but too specific) and the second about "ctypes" (unrelated), the third is "Programming FAQ" (unrelated). Not one result is the generic "Sorting HOW TO" page, which Google links to first, and which is the most useful when you want to learn about sorting in Python.
Re: Get better at Googling
#66I suspect that testing job candidates for Google-fu would be much more productive that trying to find out whether they remember off the top of their head how some obscure algorithm works.
Re: Get better at Googling
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes That also doesn't work reliably anymore. Somewhere along the line Google changed it from "exact words" to "exact words and synonyms", with its definition of a synonym being pretty dumb. Search for something obscure to do with "nginx" and Google shows you results for apache2, even bolding apache2 to indicate a match. Using DDG's !bangs is far superior.
Bang for what engines? DDG has a similar problem with the usage of “-dogs“. This just means fewer dogs in results, not excluding all results with dogs. If you want more dogs you can actually do “+dogs” which somehow changes the weighting of terms.
Using "nginx" in DDG will never return websites that have apache2 (and not a single mention of nginx) as a match, Google will.
As for the last sentence, I was using the said example to generalise that it's far better to learn which website is right for the query and add a bang. In this case " nginx !sf", which will return serverfault.com results, which also won't do this stupid thing of equating apache2 and nginx.
Re: Get better at Googling
#68after: is my favorite so far. Almost every search I do these days brings up results using very old versions of the JS/CSS libraries involved in my search, and adding "after:2019" or "after:2020" helps bring more relevant results.
Re: Get better at Googling
#69I think google does a great job of organizing information, that's why it's useful. As I've used google for as long as I had access to internet I've built up a mental network of things in the internet and also skills associated with finding reliable information in the web.
Just knowing how to search something is not enough, knowing what to search is even more important and what links to follow.
Google is like a huge personal notebook available to me so that I don't have to take notes and can look up easily when I forget something.
Re: Get better at Googling
#70What's often overlooked and omitted from this sort of guide is a person's ability to identify the trustworthiness and usefulness of a website that shows up in search results. It's not enough to juggle operands and search hacks. You also need to know which result to click. Another commenter suggested just searching for your error message. Try searching for "cannot read property of undefined" and scroll through the res…
I buy a lot of obscure stuff off ebay. Mostly old computers / engineering equipment build for a specific purpose.
Because of this, i normally try to google around for the product to see if I can get some information or a manual on it so I don't end up with something next to useless because I can't figure out how to use it. Unfortunately a lot of the time I get these sort of sites that are basically just archives of previous or current ebay listings.
Even weirder, I'll get some really strange URLS (I swear one or two I've found before didn't even look like the TLD's were real). The text below the link will often look like a keyword dump that just happens to have what I typed in plus all sorts of other random words and such. Clicking on them usually just leads to an unresolved link.