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Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#12yandex.com
duckduckgo.com
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#13When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#14You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#15I agree that as a programmer who frequently needs to search for long literal strings verbatim, Google has become notably less useful than it used to be. I wonder if there is now a gap in the market for some kind of "literal" search engine that makes no attempt to infer meaning on your search terms and simply gives you the closest results? In other words Google ca 2012.
https://publicwww.com/ is a great tool for this, though the size of its index leaves a lot to be desired. Still, for enumerating well-SEO'd homepages that use a certain tech stack, it's quite useful!
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#16Use Bing? I've found for code/error message snippets in particular Bing is often better, while Google will incorrectly guess I mean some related but different thing and serve the wrong results.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#17> Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. site:example.com and -site:example.com still work, I think.
That limits results to pages on example.com (or neg for the second) but that's not what OP is trying to do. Searches for "example.com" should return pages where the exact domain "example.com" appears in the page. It does sort of work for "example.com" itself, because it's so common presumably, but doing it with other domains that are less common is far less likely to produce anything useful.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#18Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#19When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/
I find better results on it in general.
I use Google as a fallback but these days it happens perhaps once every couple months, and mostly I don't get anything out of it.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#20Have you tried using "Tools -> Verbatim"?
+1, this is the only way to get old-school(ish) results, even without explicit quoting. Unfortunately, it can't be enforced just by adding parameters to the URL and has to be selected manually every time. (edit: actually it can, see below)
Verbatim really highlights how almost useless the default mode has become.