I see that the quotes in your title are not regular ASCII quotes. I agree that Google's search result quality has been quite horrible, but could the fact that your system is somehow not emitting "real" quotes also be the cause? I've seen plenty of problems caused by those horrid "smart" quotes in the past.
Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
61–70 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#62When 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.
I think the "-" is case-sensitive sometimes. So if you write "-honey" it'll still return "Honey" results, so you have to write "-honey -Honey".
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#63Kagi. 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.
Weird question that I have that I'd love anyone who makes a Kagi account to trial after reading the parent comment to answer: When you make your account, you're given the option to customize. When you do, you can pick things like color theme and how URLs are displayed. On the right hand side of the page there is a preview of what your Kagi searches will look like. In my example, the demo Kagi search is Magic The Gath…
Yes it's what showed for me as well and I've never played or searched it. Just a coincidence.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#64> I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore That's not my experience? The quotes still seem to work for me? Do you have a specific example? And / or can you point to said HN post?
I can confirm the experience that sometimes searches for quoted terms yield pages that do not contain the quoted term exactly. I don't have a specific example from the top of my head.
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#65You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
Why would they make their very expected functionality something you have to dig around to find now? That just seems like really bad decision making that should have been spotted by someone on top and screams that the people on top are now disconnected from reality.
I swear that it used to work for certain strings I'm trying to find now which I was able to find information on and now it isn't even returning, with "verbatim" set, something that is in a very well-known program's documentation. Bing finds like three results. Google has dropped the ball so hard it's embarrassing
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#67> I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore That's not my experience? The quotes still seem to work for me? Do you have a specific example? And / or can you point to said HN post?
I can confirm the experience that sometimes searches for quoted terms yield pages that do not contain the quoted term exactly. I don't have a specific example from the top of my head.
Is it possible that the results simply don't exist and instead of giving you nothing it gives the next possible match?
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#68Can you give an example? Searching for "news.ycombinator.com" works just fine for me. No unrelated content.
How do the search results for a site: query compare to just quoting what appears to be a DNS domain containing punctuation tokens?
inurl:news.ycombinator.com
site:news.ycombinator.com
"news.ycombinator.com"
news.ycombinator.comRe: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#69[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
#70Kagi. 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.
“ Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex”. They pay google to do this?