3 ms·

Sometimes I get really frustrated with Google when doing programming-related searches. After spending a minute trying to coerce Google into recognizing an API c

by biot 14y ago

Sometimes I get really frustrated with Google when doing programming-related searches. After spending a minute trying to coerce Google into recognizing an API call exactly and having to exclude popular typos and alternate spellings of what Google thinks is the root word, I end up switching to DDG and getting the answer I was looking for. Google is awesome for general queries, but lately I'm finding more and more that it tries to be too helpful and the search results for my precise, specifically crafted query end up being so broad that it's useless.

ntoshev 14y ago
To make Google search for the exact word you type, put it in quotes.
- biot 14y ago
  That is the coercion I mentioned. I wish I could provide an example, but there have been times where I have to both "quote" the terms I really want and -"quote" the terms it corrected things to. It usually only happens for longer queries when I'm trying to drill into a specific issue. Come to think of it, perhaps this is their feature which uses previous searches and treats your current search as a continuation of the last one; though I've altered my query the search terms I abandoned get resurrected. [Edit: confirmed!] I just tried this in relation to another comment I posted. I typed peer to peer lending into Chrome's bar to search for this. A bunch of finance related results came up. I was looking for movie lending, so I altered my search to peer to peer lending movies and looked at the results. Still unsatisfied, I thought that maybe the term borrowing was better than lending. So I changed my search to peer to peer borrowing movies. Lo and behold, the search results show a page full of results with the word lending bolded and no results that show borrowing at all: http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY If I absolutely didn't want the word lending in the results, I would need to alter the search to peer to peer borrowing -lending movies to avoid this. For development searches where I'm sometimes trying to find a needle in a haystack, I don't want to have to keep excluding numerous terms I have already decided are undesirable. As I never sign in when searching and I can't be bothered to find and change whatever Google setting causes this every time I fire up my browser, I find DDG to work the way I expect and often with better results too.

by biot 14y ago

ntoshev 14y ago

To make Google search for the exact word you type, put it in quotes.

biot 14y ago
That is the coercion I mentioned. I wish I could provide an example, but there have been times where I have to both "quote" the terms I really want and -"quote" the terms it corrected things to. It usually only happens for longer queries when I'm trying to drill into a specific issue. Come to think of it, perhaps this is their feature which uses previous searches and treats your current search as a continuation of the last one; though I've altered my query the search terms I abandoned get resurrected. [Edit: confirmed!] I just tried this in relation to another comment I posted. I typed peer to peer lending into Chrome's bar to search for this. A bunch of finance related results came up. I was looking for movie lending, so I altered my search to peer to peer lending movies and looked at the results. Still unsatisfied, I thought that maybe the term borrowing was better than lending. So I changed my search to peer to peer borrowing movies. Lo and behold, the search results show a page full of results with the word lending bolded and no results that show borrowing at all: http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY If I absolutely didn't want the word lending in the results, I would need to alter the search to peer to peer borrowing -lending movies to avoid this. For development searches where I'm sometimes trying to find a needle in a haystack, I don't want to have to keep excluding numerous terms I have already decided are undesirable. As I never sign in when searching and I can't be bothered to find and change whatever Google setting causes this every time I fire up my browser, I find DDG to work the way I expect and often with better results too.