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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?

#131

Post by JohnFen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #117
crazygringo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, wow. It's there (under Tools, you don't even need to go to Advanced), it works, and yet I've never once seen anybody talk about that feature's existence on HN until now. And people have been complaining about not being able to do verbatim searches for years and years here on HN. Second, I just looked up when this feature was introduced (assuming it was fairly new), and it was in... November 2011 . It's…

> I've never once seen anybody talk about that feature's existence on HN until now Every time I tried it, it didn't work. It certainly changed a lot on those years, but the reason nobody acknowledges it is probably because it's a coin-toss if Google wants "verbatim" to mean verbatim today. Quotes actually stopped working (they became a hint, instead of filtering the results) a long time ago, and many people insisted…

Yeah, I've never had much luck with verbatim search either.

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

#132

Post by elaus »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #86
jjice wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Kagi is going in the opposite direction: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

They try to highlight small, personal websites instead of the big mainstream sites.

(This was a HN submission 2 weeks ago)

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

#133

Post by lghh »

freediver wrote: post #106
lghh wrote: 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…

Vlad here, Kagi founder. Also an avid MTG player. I came up with the idea for that preview.

Hi Vlad! It's a fun nugget. I just suspect I'm in the very slim subset of people who was a little taken aback by it.

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

#134

Post by yieldcrv »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #18

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.

I’ve replaced most of my google searches with LLM discussions and some bullshit checking

I usually only need to understand a concept, not understand if the personnel and company names it made up actually exist

everything else I use google for are just addresses

so I’m wondering if a paid search engine would shift my behavior back to search engines, or if that ship has just sailed

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

#135

Post by JohnFen »

jplona wrote: post #71
jamal-kumar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ver…

It's also possible they they're correct, and the average user of today has much less need for verbatim searches than the average user when the search engine was first designed.

The quality of search results I get from Google has seriously degraded over the past several years (I think about the time they decided to start interpreting my searches rather than just search for what I asked for). From my point of view, verbatim searches are more necessary now than ever before, to work around that issue.

I tried using verbatim searches to make Google decent for me again, but Google defines "verbatim" rather differently than I do.

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

#136

Post by freediver »

lghh wrote: post #133
freediver wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vlad here, Kagi founder. Also an avid MTG player. I came up with the idea for that preview.

Hi Vlad! It's a fun nugget. I just suspect I'm in the very slim subset of people who was a little taken aback by it.

We all need a dose of healthy skepticism.

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

#137

Post by TradingPlaces »

bloopernova wrote: post #120
TradingPlaces wrote: post #18

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.

Do you ever go past the 1,000 search "limit"? I'm considering signing up; it would be one fewer service I'm relying on google for.

I do 500-600 a month pretty regularly. They provide stats.

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

#138

Post by rbinv »

chankstein38 wrote: post #97
tda wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great tip! Seems like this adds the query param "&tbs=li%3A1", so this might be something you can configure as an extra search engine in firefox. But then I am a happy kagi customer, and I was just thinking that I can't recall the last time I had to do a !g to find something. For me, google search si pretty much dead. I only use it now when on someone else's pc

Sounds like a good case for an extension even! "Auto add this when I go to google"

You can also adjust your browser's search engine defaults.

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

#139

Post by effingwewt »

freediver wrote: post #136
lghh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Vlad! It's a fun nugget. I just suspect I'm in the very slim subset of people who was a little taken aback by it.

We all need a dose of healthy skepticism.

I know it means nothing in the grand scheme of things, but y'all just got another customer.

I'd been on the fence but after reading through these threads and seeing a real reply from a founder (its been a while since I've seen an honest, non-PR Speak answer) I am excited to try y'all out.

This area was ripe for disruption with how terrible searches have become, especially on mobile. I'd be happy to see you eat G's lunch here.

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

#140

Post by MichaelZuo »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #76
MichaelZuo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure many folks, including me, would be willing to help Vlad organize a private acquisition if he suddenly had some pressing need to sell.

Don’t you work for Google or is that a different Michael Zuo?

I don't, but it's possible someone else does.

I signed up for HN before it was popular to include middle initials or other fancier forms for the username, I'll update my profile though.

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