201–207 of 207 posts
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I'm pretty new to HN so I'd really find that post interesting – having them listed in one place would be useful.
If you want, you can shoot me an email and I'll send a link to a page where I have them listed already. Not a blog post, and not much info about them, but I have a list. I just don't have a domain yet so I don't really want to go super public.
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This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho. But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.
Now when you
a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that
b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it
Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.
I have a question for anyone reading this thread: Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search? For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change? I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread. As I…
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho. But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
Use 'verbatim'. It's a drop down option, and it isn't as good as the old + or other operators (deprecated because of Google Plus). For example, with verbatim you can't only + one single thing in a search. Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
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.
The operators don't work as well as they used to, and even when using them lots of results are still left out or are not an exact match. The combination of the SEO arms race and Google's algorithms to filter "bad" information make it nearly impossible to find some things. Sometimes you are looking for that "bad" piece of info as a counter example rather than a source of truth, and don't need google's patronizing filt…
I’d love to see an “anti-seo search engine” that eschews all results that are oriented around selling a product, but I don’t think it’s feasible to bring back the joy of finding a new online community/forum every day.