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> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no

> Years ago, many people used operators because search engines sometimes needed additional guidance. Things have advanced since then, so operators are often no longer necessary. In my experience, things have degraded since then, so operators are increasingly necessary.

emrah 4y ago
> In my experience, things have degraded since then "In my experience" is exactly right, search results degraded for a fraction of users such as developers. It's good to see Google is going back to making those users happy although that probably means bad news for DDG et al
Ralfp 4y ago
My average search starts with „site:reddit.com” because otherwise first three pages of results will be SEO blogs where 90% of article follows „First, what is XYZ?” followed by „so we see why it serms hard, but if you pay us/our affiliate money we will do it for you nice and easy!”
- april_22 4y ago
  Try out alternative engines like You.com or Brave Search. They let you set reddit and other apps as a preferred source/show it on all relevant queries. https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth...
  - dr-neptune 4y ago
    duckduckgo also has "bang operators" that allow you to specify site. An example is !r for reddit or !w for wikipedia It's even nicer for some sites like Wikipedia because it goes directly to the page if theres an exact match instead of the intermediate search results page
    - richardsocher 4y ago
      those "bangs" were a good idea so we got them also at you.com
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Yeah this seemed completely bizzare to me, too. Not only are operators like site: and inurl: more necessary than ever, they're not even sufficient a lot of times, because if you don't know what website you're looking for you have to wade through oceans of blogspam that can't easily be filtered through operators since they're designed to match anything you search for. That's mainly a problem with the indexing; Google should be ignoring these sites. But it's probably padding their bottom line, so I guess they're not incentivised to. I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  This is exactly the problem. Most companies put 90 plus percent of their effort towards maximizing profit once they go public. Your reason for existence as a company is to serve customers and provide for employees, not only to make money. Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    But this is the same argument that the companies make, and they start foundations and think-tanks to write papers and do press releases against the stuff that they themselves do. Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger. Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation. It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.] Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
Yeah, I suspect when they added all the "filter out all the piracy sites" features, and anything else that's bad on the internet, it really ruined what was once the most powerful search engine I had seen to date. I don't think we'll ever see that again. Probably also when they "personalized" the search results more and more. What Google needs is a built-in way to block domains, like idk... Pinterest.
- flyinghamster 4y ago
  That's one more example of why operators are more necessary than ever - you can add a -pinterest to your searches and (at least for now) it respects it. But I'm glad to see something finally done about my biggest gripe with Google (and even DDG sometimes does this): search results that don't contain the phrase, or not even part of it, that I'm specifically searching for, quotes be damned. If Google is finally getting the hint, good. This has been driving me nuts for years. A plain, no algorithmic "enhancements," regexp search would rock. I've wanted that since the Alta Vista days, but I doubt I'll ever see it. It might be a bit expensive to do something like that over a Google-sized search database.
ubermonkey 4y ago
Exactly right. I hate modern "search". I understand nontechnical people probably like algorithm-based "enhanced" search fine, but if I search for something specific I want THAT THING ONLY. "Modern" search made it really hard to ask very specific, strict questions.
O__________O 4y ago
Which is the core issue, Google has likely gotten better for the average user, but worse for above average users; say this as an above average searcher that has helped average users search for years. To my knowledge Google neither publishes search quality reports, nor acknowledges that there’s a gap between their search quality for average users and above average users. In my experience even their “Search Quality Raters” (contractors paid to evaluate search quality) are rarely above average searchers, they are just good at evaluating what they evaluate.
- postalrat 4y ago
  I can see how things have gotten better for the average user. All searches seem to lead to ads and questionable generated reviews and content.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Average user either likely: does not care, values ADs, understands ADs pay the bills, does not care enough to understand ad blockers, cannot tell search quality has changed, is unable to tell real reviews from fake, etc. If you care, in my opinion, you’re not an average user, since if the average user cared, so would Google.
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Average users do care. How do you think google got to be so popular?
      - O__________O 4y ago
        Why Google became popular is way to complex a topic for a thread like this, but no, average user at this point does not with any meaningful cadence look for other search engines to use and likely started using Google not because they compared it to others, but because someone told them to use it. If you’re doing more than five searches a day, you’re not average.
jjoonathan 4y ago
Ugh, yes. Google is still pretty good for navigation-by-title on popular content, but it is increasingly terrible at search. Breaking operators is part of that story, but I've seen more and more instances where Google will prove that it can return a page but won't return results for some of the phrases on the page. I half suspect that behind the scenes there is a one-hot encoding or embedding that just ignores tokens with low frequency, which completely wrecks Google's ability to navigate technical writing with abbreviations, part numbers, small brands, etc. Sometimes it does work, so I think of it like a popularity algorithm plus a decrepit fallback for the content it deems "no longer necessary" to do a half decent job on.
Someone1234 4y ago
If you want the old, good, Google back: Turn on Verbatim Mode. Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. Instead of Google throwing away 90% of your search query and looking for the "top hits" (and returning almost entirely auto-generated pages), it keeps every word you entered and returns actually relevant stuff. It really is night and day.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Seconded.
quitit 4y ago
Google was never good enough to remove the operators, and as you said it’s gotten worse not better. Seemingly people using operators would produce additional training for the algorithm which is currently not possible. This could also be a factor leading to the results decay everyone has experienced when trying to find something that isn’t leading popular culture. It’s that peculiar behaviour where tweaking the search terms didn’t affect the results.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
Yea, this is a case of not being customer centric. I absolutely believe that Google has advanced technologically. Whether that's translated to improvements for users, it's not clear.
cientifico 4y ago
I am willing to pay for the search experience of years ago. In their defense, Google now gets right what my grandmother searches.

emrah 4y ago

> In my experience, things have degraded since then "In my experience" is exactly right, search results degraded for a fraction of users such as developers. It's good to see Google is going back to making those users happy although that probably means bad news for DDG et al

Ralfp 4y ago

My average search starts with „site:reddit.com” because otherwise first three pages of results will be SEO blogs where 90% of article follows „First, what is XYZ?” followed by „so we see why it serms hard, but if you pay us/our affiliate money we will do it for you nice and easy!”

april_22 4y ago
Try out alternative engines like You.com or Brave Search. They let you set reddit and other apps as a preferred source/show it on all relevant queries. https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://you.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth+it https://search.brave.com/search?q=macbook+air+m1+still+worth...
- dr-neptune 4y ago
  duckduckgo also has "bang operators" that allow you to specify site. An example is !r for reddit or !w for wikipedia It's even nicer for some sites like Wikipedia because it goes directly to the page if theres an exact match instead of the intermediate search results page
  - richardsocher 4y ago
    those "bangs" were a good idea so we got them also at you.com

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

Yeah this seemed completely bizzare to me, too. Not only are operators like site: and inurl: more necessary than ever, they're not even sufficient a lot of times, because if you don't know what website you're looking for you have to wade through oceans of blogspam that can't easily be filtered through operators since they're designed to match anything you search for. That's mainly a problem with the indexing; Google should be ignoring these sites. But it's probably padding their bottom line, so I guess they're not incentivised to. I'll keep saying it again and again. When companies have almost no incentives other than maximising profit, this kind of BS will invariably be what we end up with. Dark patterns are just too good for business if not kept in check through regulatory or other means.

hallway_monitor 4y ago
This is exactly the problem. Most companies put 90 plus percent of their effort towards maximizing profit once they go public. Your reason for existence as a company is to serve customers and provide for employees, not only to make money. Besides regulation for some industries, societal pressure and norms were the means of keeping companies in check in the past it seems. Boycotts would still work if people coordinated and cooperated on a massive scale.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  But this is the same argument that the companies make, and they start foundations and think-tanks to write papers and do press releases against the stuff that they themselves do. Companies are here to make money doing risky things. They (nominally) do this for the government, because the government wants to do things that are risky, but also wants to last forever, so it needs to offload the risk where it can. In return, they get limited liability, and often subsidy. It's the government's duty to set limits on what they should be doing. Any effective social pressure should be directed towards the responsible government decision-makers. Attacking companies directly is for emergencies and immanent danger. Also, companies have access to a lot of tools that we try to make it illegal for governments to use (although they do anyway, but sometimes it's stopped and sometimes it doesn't hold up in court.) They can look at everyone influential in your movement, find the most morally flexible and charismatic of them, then indirectly finance them and inflate their social media metrics - then hire them or put them at the heads of foundations. They can look at the others and pay people to troll them all day, get their ex-husband to file for full custody of their children and pay the lawyer, and get articles in the Atlantic about how they may have plagiarized their dissertation. It's a delusion that everything can be solved by slavishly imitating the early struggle for black civil rights in the US. Black civil rights weren't even improved by that movement directly, they were improved indirectly through white people watching the movement get absolutely brutalized, jailed, and murdered, and feeling ashamed. [edit: and also by the energy of young white men who feared the draft, and that fear made them feel like they were black people.] Corporate CEOs aren't going to be ashamed, and if they get ashamed, they'll get replaced. The funds that you've invested your own retirement into will be the ones whose pressure replaces them, too. Your mouth will be moving the CEOs heart, while your wallet is getting them fired.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

Yeah, I suspect when they added all the "filter out all the piracy sites" features, and anything else that's bad on the internet, it really ruined what was once the most powerful search engine I had seen to date. I don't think we'll ever see that again. Probably also when they "personalized" the search results more and more. What Google needs is a built-in way to block domains, like idk... Pinterest.

flyinghamster 4y ago
That's one more example of why operators are more necessary than ever - you can add a -pinterest to your searches and (at least for now) it respects it. But I'm glad to see something finally done about my biggest gripe with Google (and even DDG sometimes does this): search results that don't contain the phrase, or not even part of it, that I'm specifically searching for, quotes be damned. If Google is finally getting the hint, good. This has been driving me nuts for years. A plain, no algorithmic "enhancements," regexp search would rock. I've wanted that since the Alta Vista days, but I doubt I'll ever see it. It might be a bit expensive to do something like that over a Google-sized search database.

ubermonkey 4y ago

Exactly right. I hate modern "search". I understand nontechnical people probably like algorithm-based "enhanced" search fine, but if I search for something specific I want THAT THING ONLY. "Modern" search made it really hard to ask very specific, strict questions.

O__________O 4y ago

Which is the core issue, Google has likely gotten better for the average user, but worse for above average users; say this as an above average searcher that has helped average users search for years. To my knowledge Google neither publishes search quality reports, nor acknowledges that there’s a gap between their search quality for average users and above average users. In my experience even their “Search Quality Raters” (contractors paid to evaluate search quality) are rarely above average searchers, they are just good at evaluating what they evaluate.

postalrat 4y ago
I can see how things have gotten better for the average user. All searches seem to lead to ads and questionable generated reviews and content.
- O__________O 4y ago
  Average user either likely: does not care, values ADs, understands ADs pay the bills, does not care enough to understand ad blockers, cannot tell search quality has changed, is unable to tell real reviews from fake, etc. If you care, in my opinion, you’re not an average user, since if the average user cared, so would Google.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Average users do care. How do you think google got to be so popular?
    - O__________O 4y ago
      Why Google became popular is way to complex a topic for a thread like this, but no, average user at this point does not with any meaningful cadence look for other search engines to use and likely started using Google not because they compared it to others, but because someone told them to use it. If you’re doing more than five searches a day, you’re not average.

jjoonathan 4y ago

Ugh, yes. Google is still pretty good for navigation-by-title on popular content, but it is increasingly terrible at search. Breaking operators is part of that story, but I've seen more and more instances where Google will prove that it can return a page but won't return results for some of the phrases on the page. I half suspect that behind the scenes there is a one-hot encoding or embedding that just ignores tokens with low frequency, which completely wrecks Google's ability to navigate technical writing with abbreviations, part numbers, small brands, etc. Sometimes it does work, so I think of it like a popularity algorithm plus a decrepit fallback for the content it deems "no longer necessary" to do a half decent job on.

Someone1234 4y ago

If you want the old, good, Google back: Turn on Verbatim Mode. Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. Instead of Google throwing away 90% of your search query and looking for the "top hits" (and returning almost entirely auto-generated pages), it keeps every word you entered and returns actually relevant stuff. It really is night and day.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Seconded.

quitit 4y ago

Google was never good enough to remove the operators, and as you said it’s gotten worse not better. Seemingly people using operators would produce additional training for the algorithm which is currently not possible. This could also be a factor leading to the results decay everyone has experienced when trying to find something that isn’t leading popular culture. It’s that peculiar behaviour where tweaking the search terms didn’t affect the results.

SkyPuncher 4y ago

Yea, this is a case of not being customer centric. I absolutely believe that Google has advanced technologically. Whether that's translated to improvements for users, it's not clear.

cientifico 4y ago

I am willing to pay for the search experience of years ago. In their defense, Google now gets right what my grandmother searches.