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Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

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Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#81
post #42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partial fix for the minus or the double quotes? Both are such a critical part for searching anything these days, it’d be a real shame to lose either.

Both.

That'll be awesome. The parts of the web that don't respect operands feel awful.

Having a minus act like a plus has been particularly tough (for years now, I believe).

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#82
post #37
post #13

When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/

I’ve used DDG exclusively for a couple years now and at least with my usecases have found it better than Google in every single way other than images (which I still use it for, but need to do !g to proxy Google maybe 1 in 5 times).

FYI: !gi on DDG for direct Google Images search.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#83
post #70

Kagi. 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?

I believe DuckDuckGo does (or at least they did) this with Bing. Starting a new scraper at a scale that users would need to be useful for what they're used to is such a huge jump. I'm sure if Kagi continue to grow they'd prioritize their own scraping too, but that's just not feasible at first.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#84
post #70

Kagi. 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?

that's what that means yeah, but not necessarily present it in the same way

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#85
post #34

Kagi. 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.

100% agree on Kagi. Happy customer. Thought it would be just another one of my attempts to use Duck Duck Go that dies after two weeks of !g usage. Turned out Kagi just works. The biggest improvement / gains is on mobile, where you suddenly don't need to scroll through 5 screens of ad results to get to the content.

I wonder if part of why its better is due to other users providing feedback about results, but also you can pin results from specific domains to the top. Like I can pin any results from StackOverflow, instead of the garbage StackOverflow rip off sites Google keeps giving me, its pretty obvious its ripping off SO because I just read the same thing word for word on StackOverflow three links ago. Thanks Google.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#86
post #83
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex”. They pay google to do this?

I believe DuckDuckGo does (or at least they did) this with Bing. Starting a new scraper at a scale that users would need to be useful for what they're used to is such a huge jump. I'm sure if Kagi continue to grow they'd prioritize their own scraping too, but that's just not feasible at first.

Back in the day I'd suggest doing it via Alexa top sites, but now that Alexa is gone, I'm not sure what strategy I would use, but I would want to hit sites that are like the "top 10000 most popular" first, and scrape every inch I could.

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#88
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just as an extra data point - same here, got shown MtG results, never played it (though I might have searched about it a few times way back).

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#89
post #56

> 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 just tried https://www.google.com/search?q=%22I+used+this+quite+frequen... and it works for me now, but I definitely recall having problems searching verbatim before, perhaps they improved/changed it recently?

Re: Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?

#90
Thank you for asking the important questions, you've saved me a large amount of time here realizing that this isn't just my particular case of search terms being broken somehow. I guess we've all counted on google being reliable all these years and it's kind of a shock that they've gone and tanked their own usefulness after building up like twenty years of trust. Rude.
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