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I use DDG all the time now for personal use, but I still use Google at work. Try this one weird trick to get only what you searched for on Google: Click on th
by mattlondon 9y ago
I use DDG all the time now for personal use, but I still use Google at work.
Try this one weird trick to get only what you searched for on Google:
Click on the "Tools" link (under the search box) and change "All results" to "Verbatim" and I think (I dont know for sure) that this will only search for exactly what you typed.
- hinkley 9y agoDo googlers hate you?
- prepend 9y agoThanks. This is really helpful. Comically I googled and DDG’d for how to do this to no avail. And last time I checked under tools I didn’t notice verbatim as an option. But tools is different now. The shifting UI should make me recheck. Even though I can’t set this for a default, I can at least choose it when necessary and it’s faster than quote escaping terms.
- beejiu 9y agoI experience the "overgeneralized results" issue multiple times every week for maybe the past year. It frustrates me every time. If I have to click Tools > All Results > Verbatim every time, frankly I am ready to switch search engines. I am afraid to say that Google has really let itself go.
- gkya 9y agoIs search still the core of their business? Or does most of their income come from things like advertising, AppEngine, google apps for business and android-related stuff? I too feel that google search has been decaying, and saw many people here complainin about the same thing. Maybe they don't want to bother that much with it anymore if their focus has moved to stuff that they actually sell.
- Trundle 9y agoSearch isn't an alternative to advertising. It's what generates the advertising.
- gkya 9y agoIs it though? They have sooo many sources of input, embedded ads everywhere, social buttons, gmail, calendar, documents, photos, android, blogger, youtube, google+, and probably others that IDK, that search is just one---and probably a less important one---of those. As a means to show ads, again, they have uncountable spots all around the internet that they can place ads, and many google apps that one might be using, that the search results page is again just a slice of a big pie. Or maybe they figured that most people do very simple searches nearly all the time.
- Trundle 9y agoI know they earn a lot more from ads on google properties than on third party sites, you can see it in their financial docs. It's something like 80% of their revenue. So we know embedded ads all around the internet aren't challenging it in any way. That said I don't know what percentage of their "google property" ad revenue is youtube, gmail, etc. Maybe they're cash cows? I'm inclined to think it's still mostly search though simply because it's the most valuable source of lead. One where the consumer has buying intent. Searching for a new car Vs trying to watch a show and having a car shown to you before it.
- sidlls 9y agoI can't remember the last time I used a general purpose search engine with an intent to buy. The closest would be an intent to comparison shop, but then I'm explicitly searching for feature comparisons, not stores to buy from.
- hedora 9y agoResearch shows that you can show people intentionally screwed up results, brand them as “google results”, and they’ll prefer them to real google results with swapped branding. The amount you have to screw up the results to get people to prefer the real results is greater than the difference in performance of the major engines. Conclusion? Search quality is a cost center at google at this point in the game — they have no economic incentive to improve it further.
- srathi 9y agoYes. But then you can't filter by time range. In their infinite wisdom, Google has made it either-or. Either I can filter by time, or by verbatim. It drives me nuts!
- Unkechaug 9y agoSeriously? This would be a deal breaker for me. It would also be nice to be able to save preferences so that I only ever get results from the past year unless I specify otherwise. It just takes additional clicks and is a big pain from the search engine that's supposed to be user friendly.
- tudorw 9y agoGoogle is a sitting duck for innovation, why does it not suggest scopes for search (paris = person / place), or show me a graph of results over time, or let me exclude pages with X% similarity and show me the most likely original source, there is so much room for improvement, exciting times...
- extempore 9y agoA couple years ago I worked out how to use these simultaneously. I always meant to publish this but I've sat on it all that time. Here you go: https://gist.github.com/paulp/91d657489b617dbb7de6db8b7c4fe4e4 https://gist.github.com/paulp/91d657489b617dbb7de6db8b7c4fe4... If you think you were frustrated before, just wait: you get to issue about three searches before you have to solve captchas to see the results. Google thinks only bots want to use those features simultaneously.
- dingaling 9y agoSadly Verbatim doesn't work for Image search.
- nielsbot 9y agoSeconded... I use DDG or Google + Verbatim mode. I set DDG is my browser default, and use `!g` to hit google if I don't like the results. (or !gis for google image search)