4 ms·
I actually miss old AltaVista I always could find what I was looking for with their boolean expressions. Yes, perhaps it was harder to some, but it worked well.
by takeda 11y ago
I actually miss old AltaVista I always could find what I was looking for with their boolean expressions. Yes, perhaps it was harder to some, but it worked well.
With Google, I feel like I have to fight with it. If I'm searching for something obscure or perhaps a word that is misspelled on purpose it thinks it knows better what I'm looking for. It also often returns searches without the word that I searched for and often ignores when I prefix it with + or put in quotes.
- nandhp 11y agoIgnoring words in your query that it doesn't like is a relatively new behavior for Google -- in the last three years or so. But yes, there's a reason why I keep a search keyword for Bing.
- yolesaber 11y agoIt is one of the most annoying and user unfriendly anti-patterns I've ever come across. It is SO irritating when you are searching for, say, "Hackernews ramen" and you get thousands of results all with the little gray strikethrough text saying "ramen" doesn't appear on the page. If it's not there why bother even returning the result? I know the answer (Ad money / SEO) but it's like one of the basic tenets of information retrieval and they just said fuck it.
- neolefty 11y agoBut synonyms! I want to say that if I search for "London Ferris Wheel" and I find "London Eye" without the words "Ferris Wheel" anywhere on the page, that's fine. However, 5 minutes looking through my Google Search History, and I don't see any examples where non-verbatim results would have been useful, so hmm.
- yolesaber 11y agoIf Google highlighted that these synonyms appeared in the article, that'd be great. They don't. Thus I, the user, am forced to conclude that the relevancy of the result is pertinent to the other words i.e. the more general search I was trying to avoid by adding in the other word! It's madness I tell you.
- vgeek 11y agoThey have to grow query count (see: marketable inventory), and what better way to do so than serving useless results on your first queries, leading to additional queries?
- leeoniya 11y agoAltaVista was excellent because of those booleans. Particularly, "NEAR".
- kolinko 11y ago"NEAR" is default in Google I think. If you look for "car" it will find sites that say "automobile"
- leeoniya 11y agoNEAR worked differently. it would search for text where 2 unrelated words were physically close to each other, like in same paragraph. it's more simple than what google does, but surprisingly effective. e.g. "brakes NEAR ford NEAR (problem OR issue)" would bring back results with "brake issues with fords..." as opposed to AND where all words simply appear on the page. no other search engine at the time offered anything near this power. the amount of crap eliminated by a properly constructed query was breathtaking
- _delirium 11y agoLexisNexis (database of court decisions, newspaper archives, etc.) still has the NEAR feature, and I've found it very useful there.
- alecrn 11y agoAs far as I can tell, intext:<word> still forces it to always include <word> in the results.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lobster_johnson 11y agoIf you quote a word or phrase, it will be treated as required, just like "+" used to work with AltaVista. You can also click on the "Search tools" button and select "Verbatim" from the "All results" dropdown. This causes the search to only perform exact matches: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/142143?hl=en. And yes, I also spend a lot of time fighting Google's inferral rules. I remember doing a search for Biber at one point, and it asked if I meant Bieber instead.
- flyinghamster 11y agoNot quite: I've sometimes put "CentOS 7" in quotes when looking for something CentOS 7-specific, only to have Google return pages and pages of results for older versions of CentOS. These days it's almost a crapshoot whether or not I'll get relevant results from Google.
- lobster_johnson 11y agoDid you try the verbatim mode?
- Gracana 11y agoAs lobster_johnson says, verbatim mode is key. I wish it was the default - I'm always using specific phrases the google re-interprets into something more popular. A big pet peeve given my line of work: I know autocad is more popular, but please google, I really do want results about draftsight!
- RUG3Y 11y agoI miss AltaVista as well. I'm a rebel and I despise Google, however effective they are. I feel like they have way too much negative influence on the web.