I agree, but I think there are three reasons for the bad results:
- Google tweaks. They target more and more the main stream users and thus neglecting the power users with their Google hacks knowledge
- Content drain. More and more content is created in walled gardens, like discord, facebook, etc.
- SEO. These optimized pages pollute the results
Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
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Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this something accessible through the Settings, bottom right? I cannot find it.
no, not in Settings. The 'Tools' option only appears at the top right of the screen after you conduct a google search in the normal fashion. So search for a term, then click Tools at top to switch to the verbatim option.
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Re: Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's depressing is that this problem keeps getting worse and worse! It used to be a problem you'd encounter very occasionally, but I now experience this crap every few days, sometimes even for things that seem very obvious.
I see a silver lining: When Google no longer has economic incentive to deliver quality search results, new search engines can finally take a market share. For a year I've been using DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and they're both great, but sometimes there's something they just don't give me, and I've felt the need to Google it. Now that Google's results are deteriorating, I find myself doing that less. I've been able to…
I've tried to move away from Google several times over the last decade but always found myself coming back because Google has always provided me with better results and I would often struggle to find what I needed on other search engines. These days I find myself in the opposite position to the point where I'm using other search engines as default depending on what I'm looking for.
Image searches on Google are just terrible now I normally use Bing by default. Anything news / politics related tends to be heavily censored / curated by Google so I normally use DuckDuckGo for that. Really the only thing I still prefer Google for is code related searches which to be fair probably makes up 90% of my searches. As soon as I feel I can get comparable results on another search engine I'm done with Google.
I've also recently been using ProtonMail as a Gmail alternative and I've been really impressed. It's also nice knowing that should Google's AI ever randomly lock me out of my Google account I can still access my emails.