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> A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has a
by JetSetWilly 3y ago
> A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has an area known as ‘Saint Helena Island’. For this reason it is best when using Google™ to append to your search ‘-napa -carolina -california’, which will remove many of these irrelevant results.
Not any more! Since google "enhanced" their search to remove such operators. I just tried searching in this way for eg some restaurants and there was indeed a bunch of irrelevant results even with the exclusions. I wonder what they do now.
- beowulfey 3y agoWhen did Google do this?
- tomcam 3y agoAt least five years ago. Drives me crazy.
- chongli 3y agoIt’s their M.O. Relentlessly cut “power user” features. Relentlessly undermine the user’s wishes and redirect the user to Google’s preferred results. I don’t know why we continue to put up with it. Boiling frogs I guess.
- hutzlibu 3y agoBecause changing habits and routines costs energy and we don't like that.
- intelVISA 3y agoThe more direct their search the less opporunity to data mine, upsell you, or otherwise abuse your experience.
- varispeed 3y agoGoogle used to be the best site to find illegal content. Probably that's why they removed those "power user" features.
- warkdarrior 3y agoThe operators work for me. I get different results with and without '-napa -carolina -california'.
- dekhn 3y agoTruly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"
- chongli 3y agoYeah they're not actually parsing your operators anymore. They're feeding the whole query to some machine learning model they trained and pulling "what you really meant" out of that.
- Thorrez 3y agoIt seems to me the map at the top ignores the minuses. Do any regular web results show your - terms? I'm not seeing any in my testing. Disclosure, I work at Google but not on anything related to this.
- hutzlibu 3y agoI also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.
- mavhc 3y agoDepends where you live, for me in UK it brings up a) a location in uk, then the rest are about the island. [Saint Helena Island] brings up only results about the island
- EA-3167 3y agoI switched to Kagi and never looked back, it's like Google was before a decade of enshittification.
- vjulian 3y agoHow curated and censored are the search results with Kagi? As someone involved with Tantra, for example, I rely on sites that are niche and not always SFW.
- brynx97 3y agoYou can raise/pin the NSFW domains to curate the results yourself to what you'd generally prefer to see.
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoYou could also set up a seperate NSFW lens based on what style of results you want.
- rafram 3y agoKagi uses the Google Search API. Its results are largely Google results.
- EA-3167 3y agoSure, but without the ad and SEO spam, it's a totally different experience. It's really a testament to how much damage Google has done to its own product in the name of monetization.
- scottlawson 3y agoI typed St Helena island which worked grest
- scoot 3y ago[flagged]
- fisherjeff 3y agoNot sure what I’m missing but your link does not appear to support your claim? “For example is a common phrase used to indicate an example or illustration to support a statement. In writing, it is often abbreviated as e.g. and used to introduce an example or series of examples.” (emphasis added)
- shawabawa3 3y agoIf you're going to be overly pedandic please at least double check that you are correct