4 ms·

I want a search engine that only returns results containing words I specify. Is that asking too much? Google is not that search engine.

new_user_final 2y ago
Use Google verbatim mode. https://www.google.com/search?q=beer&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=beer&tbs=li:1
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  That is unbelievably better. The ads are even off to the side!
genewitch 2y ago
remember when "Human speech" -robots -alien worked? those were the days. I guess there's just too much data now to search stuff like that.
- esperent 2y ago
  > I guess there's just too much data now to search stuff like that. That seems extremely unlikely as the reason. It's far more likely that some executives looked at the numbers and decided that removing search operators would make people more likely to click on ads, while leaving them in would make people click on the actual results that they were searching for.
  - hattmall 2y ago
    It's not only actual clicks, it's impressions too. make search worse = more searches are performed = more ads shown It's anti-consumer but every company is like this now.
  - genewitch 1y ago
    i was being glib. Of course it's possible to have functional search for people that remember the good old days of google dorks and switching search engines to find deeper links. That's gone away, for the reasons you and sibling(s) mentioned - ad revenue. I am unsure if it is possible to run a "free" web search without having a benevolent benefactor paying for the scraping and maintenance and staffing. Furthermore, someone has to play mouse and mousetrap with the "gaming" of whatever "algo" one chooses to use to rank results. Maybe a list is the wrong way to display search results. maybe a contemporary snapshot of the page with the search text highlighted might work better. It might even convince a lot of sites to clean up their landing pages and their blog/article formats. I know how to stand up and start a web search engine, and probably could implement a decent chunk of functionality myself. it'd be slow and fall down if 100,000 people hit it at once, but nonetheless, the hard part isn't getting one running and starting the scraping. The hard part is results and funding. I envisioned, last night, in a fever dream: maybe some metadata that the crawler and the sites share, to encourage Value for Value. If a site is willing to be scraped, but would like some nominal bandwidth costs recouped, or perhaps some sort of data agreement that is mutually - mutually - beneficial; or a site like NYT chipping in to the search hosting costs if the search company has really good results, like better than NYT could implement, then there could be some value for value there, too. Search engines provide a valuable service for humanity, as a general concept. Search engines as they exist now provide a valuable service for their shareholders. remove the shareholders, make the service valuable for humans, and the human stakeholders in the search company (employees, vendors, etc) might not be so greedy or "legally obligated to make numbers go up". Encarta and Britannica existed. Wikipedia exists - as well as the forks and archives.
joe5150 2y ago
I think google several years ago had gotten very good at matching on related concepts, but it just fell off a cliff after that.
al_borland 2y ago
Isn’t that what quotes do?
- nixpulvis 2y ago
  I feel stupid for asking, but do quotes even do anything anymore? I feel like I try them and it just gives me the same results.
  - bttrpll 2y ago
    For me, quotes no longer are exact match. Google Search is kind of a bust.
    - beefnugs 1y ago
      This combined with the ability to negative = remove results was the last straw of usability for me. I cant even imagine why they got rid of that, unless hundreds of thousands of people started pasting 1000-character search terms removing all the known ads currently flying around
  - tech234a 2y ago
    On Bing I think you have to put a plus symbol immediately following the quoted word: “keyword”+
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    They always seem to work for me. I regularly over-specify obscure error messages and get no results.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  No. But it's what verbatim mode does.
bobek 2y ago
Maybe try Kagi. I am pretty happy with the results.
saltysalt 2y ago
I felt the same frustration: I just want keyword matching without any filtering. I'm building https://greppr.org/ https://greppr.org/ to scratch that itch.

new_user_final 2y ago

Use Google verbatim mode. https://www.google.com/search?q=beer&tbs=li:1 https://www.google.com/search?q=beer&tbs=li:1

robertlagrant 1y ago
That is unbelievably better. The ads are even off to the side!

genewitch 2y ago

remember when "Human speech" -robots -alien worked? those were the days. I guess there's just too much data now to search stuff like that.

esperent 2y ago
> I guess there's just too much data now to search stuff like that. That seems extremely unlikely as the reason. It's far more likely that some executives looked at the numbers and decided that removing search operators would make people more likely to click on ads, while leaving them in would make people click on the actual results that they were searching for.
- hattmall 2y ago
  It's not only actual clicks, it's impressions too. make search worse = more searches are performed = more ads shown It's anti-consumer but every company is like this now.
- genewitch 1y ago
  i was being glib. Of course it's possible to have functional search for people that remember the good old days of google dorks and switching search engines to find deeper links. That's gone away, for the reasons you and sibling(s) mentioned - ad revenue. I am unsure if it is possible to run a "free" web search without having a benevolent benefactor paying for the scraping and maintenance and staffing. Furthermore, someone has to play mouse and mousetrap with the "gaming" of whatever "algo" one chooses to use to rank results. Maybe a list is the wrong way to display search results. maybe a contemporary snapshot of the page with the search text highlighted might work better. It might even convince a lot of sites to clean up their landing pages and their blog/article formats. I know how to stand up and start a web search engine, and probably could implement a decent chunk of functionality myself. it'd be slow and fall down if 100,000 people hit it at once, but nonetheless, the hard part isn't getting one running and starting the scraping. The hard part is results and funding. I envisioned, last night, in a fever dream: maybe some metadata that the crawler and the sites share, to encourage Value for Value. If a site is willing to be scraped, but would like some nominal bandwidth costs recouped, or perhaps some sort of data agreement that is mutually - mutually - beneficial; or a site like NYT chipping in to the search hosting costs if the search company has really good results, like better than NYT could implement, then there could be some value for value there, too. Search engines provide a valuable service for humanity, as a general concept. Search engines as they exist now provide a valuable service for their shareholders. remove the shareholders, make the service valuable for humans, and the human stakeholders in the search company (employees, vendors, etc) might not be so greedy or "legally obligated to make numbers go up". Encarta and Britannica existed. Wikipedia exists - as well as the forks and archives.

joe5150 2y ago

I think google several years ago had gotten very good at matching on related concepts, but it just fell off a cliff after that.

al_borland 2y ago

Isn’t that what quotes do?

nixpulvis 2y ago
I feel stupid for asking, but do quotes even do anything anymore? I feel like I try them and it just gives me the same results.
- bttrpll 2y ago
  For me, quotes no longer are exact match. Google Search is kind of a bust.
  - beefnugs 1y ago
    This combined with the ability to negative = remove results was the last straw of usability for me. I cant even imagine why they got rid of that, unless hundreds of thousands of people started pasting 1000-character search terms removing all the known ads currently flying around
- tech234a 2y ago
  On Bing I think you have to put a plus symbol immediately following the quoted word: “keyword”+
- danpalmer 2y ago
  They always seem to work for me. I regularly over-specify obscure error messages and get no results.
pseudalopex 1y ago
No. But it's what verbatim mode does.

bobek 2y ago

Maybe try Kagi. I am pretty happy with the results.

saltysalt 2y ago

I felt the same frustration: I just want keyword matching without any filtering. I'm building https://greppr.org/ https://greppr.org/ to scratch that itch.