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Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

alec.fyi

21–30 of 207 posts

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#21

I live two towns over from Dorking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorking

Also weird for me to see the name here (I’m in the next village over), not one you see popping up often. I occasionally wonder how many other HNers there are scattered about in my local area (I suspect not many).

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#23
post #16

Might be my librarian career bias but I'm always surprised at how few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people's queries, they are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at determining what I was looking for.

You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at doing various forms of searches.

No doubt. Enjoying & (feeling like compared to others I was) excelling at finding information was what made me get interested in information science in the first place, but I often felt advances in ML and NLP would allow for anyone to find exactly what they wanted (which would be great) even considering the increasing amount of information to have to search through. Google’s ‘I’m going to ignore half the words in your search query’ seem to be moving away from that for whatever reason.

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#24
Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except "youtube-ui.l.google.com".

Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage.

Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all.

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#25
A few corrections:

The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.

Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~.

I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and haven't found it to work in any logical way.

Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#27
post #25

A few corrections: The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated. Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~. I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and…

The plus operator in the page appears to be binary rather than unary. I've never used it. Is that affected as well? (Though I'm confused why AND is necessary. Isn't it implied normally?)

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#28

Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except "youtube-ui.l.google.com". Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage. Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all .

What is it you are searching for that the results are useless?

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#29
post #4
post #2

Why doesn't google.com have a comprehensive list of these? I'm constantly seeing new ones that I didn't know about, but google never teaches you about them so you have to find them in obscure blog posts

Google randomly ignores "search term in quotes". Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to use sites like alternativeto.net. ~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms by default phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this way +compulsoryTerm Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search…

Doing some "related:" queries returns some interesting results that look human-curated and out-of-date. related:google.com shows results for Yahoo, Bing, AOL Search, and HotBot (which used to be a search engine, but the brand is now for a VPN provider).

Re: Dorking: the use of search engines to find very specific data

#30

Last week I blocked every * .google.* domain on my network except "youtube-ui.l.google.com". Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage. Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all .

Google still good for coding related searches
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