3 ms·

Couldn't you use quotation marks to search for phrases? I do that all the time. The search is not verbatim, Google certainly stems the content of quotation mark

Couldn't you use quotation marks to search for phrases? I do that all the time. The search is not verbatim, Google certainly stems the content of quotation mark phrases, but I was under the impression that related concepts are not included. I'm not claiming to be sure about that, it's a subjective impression, so if someone can explain better, I'd be very interested. Since I use Google for work (more often than Google scholar), I'd hate not to find what I'm looking for, but generally Google results seem to be much better than others. It's the main reason why I don't use DuckDuckGo, ixQuick, Yandex, Bing.

hedora 8y ago
Aggressively “”’ing can help, but I think that also turns off useful stuff, like word stemming, when what I want it to do is not map to some other more popular term. I’m sure people have been trained to use google effectively, but I switched years ago, and find it harder than the alternatives. To be clear, this is all nitpicking. The last time this came up on HN the only query anyone found that actually showed practical differences between the two was the acronym FOSS. Google rewrote to “free open source software”, with no quotes, giving poor quality results (eg bsd software). Ddg gave the definition of foss, and relatively few results pointing at actual software, because that acronym was (is?) obscure.