91–100 of 113 posts
Did you try http://www.google.com/linux ? Although I alternate search engines regularly, I do think the way Google indexes for specialized searches is pretty smart.
Is there a list somewhere of all the specialized searches?
Only 5 topics, unfortunately.
Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ . Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…
Hate to disagree with everyone here but I haven't noticed much of a change. For me, Google is still the best search out there by a long shot. My behavior has changed slightly though. Increasingly I'm using twitter, reddit, delicious, & hacker news to search and browse for content. Google site search for Hacker news has also come in handy.
Back to the Altavista days of +search +must +include +plus +signs +"and quotation marks" Seriously, the problem is advanced users get unexpected results with the query expansion and refinement layers they've added on. While dropping obscure words is helpful when grandpa has misformed queries, it's maddening for a technical user looking for a very specific, infrequent keyword. However for grandpa, it's probably a bett…
Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ . Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
Yes. One thing I noticed is that searches no longer require that all words in the query be present in the search results. Adding a + before a word is now required to ensure that it's present in results. That frequently results in me having to do 2-3 searches to find something that could previously be found with one.
This seems to be an optimization for their average user, but is really inconvenient for people searching for system errors, mathematical/cs theory terms, or other queries where acronyms are common.
It's eye-opening to try "Blind Search", which submits your query to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing simultaneously, and displays to you the three sets of results without (at first) identifying which is which: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ I was amazed to discover that I was consistently choosing the blind results from Yahoo! as best for my own searches.
I've used google since it was google.stanford.edu, and it's clear to me the results have suffered. My feeling is that two of the problems are SEO and feedback effects of google's own popularity. SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. And it works (sorta). Just consider crap sites like Experts Exchange that we've only learned about because they pollute many…
A lot of non-technical people lately seem to type whole questions and sentences in the search box. Syntax analysis is hard for them, it seems. But Google now encourages this and levels everything down.