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Get better at Googling

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Re: Get better at Googling

#201

Post by qyi »

> 1. Use quotes to force an exact-match search

Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time.

Bonus: If you use something like inurl: You get blocked for a "hacking attempt". Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so. In fact, they are the one big search engine who has done this the longest. Google search right now is like one of those dinky websites from the early 2000s that follows all kinds of insane practices like blacklists and filters.

What Google Search is trying to be is a thing you can ask questions and get an answer back. For example converting feet to inches, or where is Starbucks. I don't even understand why the niche (really, this is how academic research is done, but i guess you can just discount the entire web as an invalid soruce) of "searching for strings over a set of websites" is not even attempted to be filled. People are crazy.

Re: Get better at Googling

#202

Post by b215826 »

tyingq wrote: post #18

The 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.…

The inurl: keyword is extremely useful when combined with the site: keyword, e.g.,

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+inurl:progra...

This would pull up results for "Vim tutorial" from the /r/programming subreddit. Of course, there are better ways to search by subreddit, but using site: and inurl: is the most website-agnostic way to narrow down results. Both these keywords also work on DuckDuckGo.

I also often use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" keyword "\" on DuckDuckGo, e.g., to search for lyrics

https://www.duckduckgo.com/?q=\rebecca+black+friday+lyrics

Re: Get better at Googling

#203

Post by kens »

There are multiple comments that double quotes to force exact matches don't work anymore on Google. But I'm puzzled because I use quotes all the time to find really, really obscure documents and never have problems. Are different people getting different results, or are people messing up somehow, or am I just lucky?

Re: Get better at Googling

#204

Post by iagovar »

qyi wrote: post #201

> 1. Use quotes to force an exact-match search Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time. Bonus: If you use something like inurl: You get blocked for a "hacking attempt". Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so. In fact, they are the one big search…

This. Sadly it works poorly in other search engines too. I have a bookmark folder with a bunch of search engines, and use it like that.

Re: Get better at Googling

#205

Post by madacol »

madacol wrote: post #149
mywittyname wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A developer who is new to a technology absolutely needs to read the documents. No matter how good or bad, it's important because it probably tells you a lot of stuff you wouldn't learn on your own (or that someone else will teach you wrong). I do a lot of GCP work anymore, and the amount of devs who make service authentication way more complicated than it needs to be is really freaking high. It's clear that the peopl…

Cases where docs are not enough: - Beginners do not understand doc's jargon, or they need to learn too much stuffs to understand it that they'd rather quit. So they end up relying on third party sources/implementations - No English knowledge and no translations

I agree with the criticisms, my point is that there are many beginners in a state where the most rational or practical choice is to sacrifice quality by following third party resources.

I have a spanish-speaking group where me and others teach beginners programming, and many of them cannot use the docs, whether because of a language barrier, or a lack of foundational knowledge, and all they care is to get things done, otherwise they'd get discouraged and abandon it before even starting

Re: Get better at Googling

#206

Post by chucksmash »

okareaman wrote: post #193

My first job was writing 68000 asm for the yet to be released Macintosh. I had a list of opcodes and a register list for the chip. I had sparse, unfinished documentation of the Mac ROM. You will never hear me complain about developers using search engines to help them code.

Do you ever get nostalgic for it?

Most of my programming career has been in Python/JS and as I've gotten a bit older, I've found bare metal computing a very rewarding hobby. I'm curious if - having done this to pay the bills as opposed to noodling around - you miss that era?

Re: Get better at Googling

#208

Post by gropius »

I don't "google," I "web search." And I don't use big G as my initial, primary search engine.

Using Google "like a pro" may have been a possibility in the past but they stopped being a reliable professional tool a long vulgarized time ago.

These days Google serves up garbage search results for babies.

Re: Get better at Googling

#209

Post by narag »

qyi wrote: post #201

> 1. Use quotes to force an exact-match search Almost never works these days. Google now usually just quantizes your search terms into an ad or ultra popular news article written 3 minutes ago. It also ignores all your operators most of the time. Bonus: If you use something like inurl: You get blocked for a "hacking attempt". Google also has blocked Tor and VPNs since 2006 or so. In fact, they are the one big search…

Exactly. Google should get better at googling.
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