When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/
Duck Duck Go has similar problems for me. It's also recently started sometimes ignoring the "-" when you try to exclude a word.
Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
21–30 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#22You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
On the search results page, there's a "Tools" button in the upper-right that expands two dropdowns. Change "All results" to "Verbatim".
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#23When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/
Duck Duck Go has similar problems for me. It's also recently started sometimes ignoring the "-" when you try to exclude a word.
We put out a partial fix for that recently and a more complete fix is forthcoming.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#24Kagi. 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?
#25You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
On the search results page, there's a "Tools" button in the upper-right that expands two dropdowns. Change "All results" to "Verbatim".
Wow, that's a good tip.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#26Use 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.
confirmed (although I use ecosia instead of bing directly). Now its like:
semantic search + realtime needs = google;
raw searches is ecosia(bing)
and most needs are covered via GPT4 actually. Error debugging + code snippets, general interest explanations, arguing things, evaluating things interactively. Basically everything I don't need hard facts of the last 2 years for.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#27Wow I didn’t know they changed this. No wonder my quotes searches made no sense anymore…
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#28You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
I thought this was a joke.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#29When 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.
Yes. IMO DDG has been better for general questions for a long time.
Google remained better for programming questions for significantly longer (I speculate this may be because Google's own programmers used it, and complained when the results sucked :-)), but now it's not. Not really.
Like you, I still use Google as a long shot, but that's become quite rare.
I sometimes use Bing for Microsoft-specific questions, if DDG doesn't give me what I want. I have the sense that Bing covers Microsoft a little better than the others do. I have no real solid evidence for this, but it seems plausible on the surface.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#30When 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.
It depends on the usecase. If you're querying for something local like a restaurant or a store, google wins by orders of magnitude. If you're researching, duckduckgo is fine. Duckduckgo doesn't really compare to Kagi though.