5 ms·

> Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. Wasn

> Google is like an abusive partner: it may be gifting you something nice, but in the end we all know he's doing it only to soften you and hurt you later. Wasn't this something nice just a normal, granted thing at the start of this relationship? I'm not using their services for few years now but I remember the search engine working well with quotes in the past - before they started bubbling people in personalized results.

autoexec 4y ago
Google seems to periodically disregard pretty much everything they said they supported in terms of search options. Whenever I try something else to actually get the results I want (or remove the ones I don't) they throw up a captcha and treat me like I'm some criminal hacker warning me that my IP address has been logged. Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore. Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Google does provide regex search of the Chrome codebase: https://source.chromium.org/chromium https://source.chromium.org/chromium For example, if you are interested in knowing how people typically tag raw strings in c++: https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&ss=chromium https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&... Disclosure: I work at Google.
- bhrgunatha 4y ago
  I've also found DDG ignore quotes often too.
- psydvl 4y ago
  What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG
  - hericium 4y ago
    Yup. Those work as intended with DDG: hacker news -site:ycombinator.com office -microsoft picard -"star trek" japanese fish and rice -sushi
    - autoexec 4y ago
      heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page! I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem
      - duckmysick 4y ago
        Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.
        Thorrez 4y ago
        Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me: https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web
        duckmysick 4y ago
        Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above. Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results. If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.

autoexec 4y ago

Google seems to periodically disregard pretty much everything they said they supported in terms of search options. Whenever I try something else to actually get the results I want (or remove the ones I don't) they throw up a captcha and treat me like I'm some criminal hacker warning me that my IP address has been logged. Sadly, even duckduckgo can't seem to figure out what the '-' operator means anymore. Here I was hoping that by now we'd have a decent search engine with full regex support, but instead I'm longing for features we already had 20 years ago.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago
full regex support sounds incredible, but is probably pretty damn hard to do now with the scale to which the internet has grown.
- autoexec 4y ago
  You're probably right, but our servers have greater capacity and capabilities than ever and in a lot of ways, the web is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. Most people have a handful of sites they regularly visit and they only occasionally stray outside the confines of social media. Reddit alone caused the death of countless forums and online communities. Most of the search results we see today are just useless spam. Once you strip out the ads, the massive amounts of JS and the CSS the text you're left with should be easily compressible and quick to parse. The actual content people care about is more centralized and standardized than it's ever been. That has to count for something.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Google does provide regex search of the Chrome codebase: https://source.chromium.org/chromium https://source.chromium.org/chromium For example, if you are interested in knowing how people typically tag raw strings in c++: https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&ss=chromium https://source.chromium.org/search?q=r%5C%22%5Cw%2B%5C(&sq=&... Disclosure: I work at Google.
bhrgunatha 4y ago
I've also found DDG ignore quotes often too.
psydvl 4y ago
What you mean by minus operator? If one that exclude word from search results, you're wrong https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG https://imgur.com/a/mOYUGsG
- hericium 4y ago
  Yup. Those work as intended with DDG: hacker news -site:ycombinator.com office -microsoft picard -"star trek" japanese fish and rice -sushi
  - autoexec 4y ago
    heh, not only was: 'office -microsoft' filled with microsoft links but when i tried 'office -microsoft -site:microsoft.com' all I got was a blank page! I'll give them some credit though, using duckduckgo.com I only got a page full of Microsoft that shouldn't have been there. It looks like it's https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ that has the blank page problem
    - duckmysick 4y ago
      Are you talking about duckduckgo? I tried `office -microsoft` just now and got the expected results: tv series, tv series podcast, government sites, bunch of businesses named Office. Nothing about Microsoft Office.
      - Thorrez 4y ago
        Huh, it's showing Microsoft stuff for me: https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://i.imgur.com/jrNw5LX.png https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=office+-microsoft&t=h_&ia=web
        duckmysick 4y ago
        Interesting. I clicked your second link and I still got the results respecting the negative operator I mentioned in my post above. Edit: To confirm, `office` alone returns a page full of Microsoft results. If anyone from DuckDuckGo is lurking by any chance, I'd love to hear what makes it different.