31–40 of 219 posts
Google's done a lot of "improvements". I hate to say it but its quote feature has been broken for a decade. You're only now noticing?
I've tried using other search engines. I've settled on DuckDuckGo. It also does not have a working literal-quote feature. But it's much less infested with SEO garbage.
I agree that as a programmer who frequently needs to search for long literal strings verbatim, Google has become notably less useful than it used to be. I wonder if there is now a gap in the market for some kind of "literal" search engine that makes no attempt to infer meaning on your search terms and simply gives you the closest results? In other words Google ca 2012.
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.
Have you tried using "Tools -> Verbatim"?
+1, this is the only way to get old-school(ish) results, even without explicit quoting. Unfortunately, it can't be enforced just by adding parameters to the URL and has to be selected manually every time. (edit: actually it can, see below) Verbatim really highlights how almost useless the default mode has become.
https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&num=30&safe=off&q=testEarlier quoted context omitted.
Duck Duck Go has similar problems for me. It's also recently started sometimes ignoring the "-" when you try to exclude a word.
We put out a partial fix for that recently and a more complete fix is forthcoming.
When this happened to me, I found better results on https://duckduckgo.com/
"news.ycombinator.com"
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.