How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature?
I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren't any exact matches, which is the whole point.
Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?
Don't use Google you moron
I agree that as a programmer who frequently needs to search for long literal strings verbatim, Google has become notably less useful than it used to be.
I wonder if there is now a gap in the market for some kind of "literal" search engine that makes no attempt to infer meaning on your search terms and simply gives you the closest results? In other words Google ca 2012.
> Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for.
site:example.com and -site:example.com still work, I think.
Use Bing? I've found for code/error message snippets in particular Bing is often better, while Google will incorrectly guess I mean some related but different thing and serve the wrong results.
Kagi. Never have I been so happy to send someone $10 every month. When you become the customer, not the product, it’s amazing what can happen.
You have to use a special "verbatim" search product from Google, it isn't the main search box anymore. Look under Advanced or something.
For locking to a particular domain I had always added `site: example.com` to the query, rather than adding domain to a double quote statement.
I have used double quotes to limit to a particular _phrase_ as recently as last week. I'm not privy to the improvements you mention, do you have a link?
Have you tried using "Tools -> Verbatim"?
The minus (-) operator isn't a hard and fast rule anymore either. It's particularly galling when you want to search for something that's similar to something else that's very common.
> Google """"improved"""" it last year
Google's done a lot of "improvements". I hate to say it but its quote feature has been broken for a decade. You're only now noticing?
I've tried using other search engines. I've settled on DuckDuckGo. It also does not have a working literal-quote feature. But it's much less infested with SEO garbage.
Wow I didn’t know they changed this. No wonder my quotes searches made no sense anymore…
A HN comment recently recommended Yandex describing it as what Google search used to be.
After seeing the post and trying Yandex it was absolutely right, it’s what Google search used to be.
Now whenever I use Google and it’s just a list of ecommerce adds or content farms duplicating the same content without substance, I head to Yandex and get the type of results I used to get from Google.
Can you give an example? Searching for
"news.ycombinator.com"
works just fine for me. No unrelated content.
Similar vein, how the hell do I search an image and combine it with text anymore? I hate Lens and there's apparently no way to properly "image" search anymore.
It's never stopped working for me, for all queries, and believe me, I use it very often.
Just give up on trying to make google work. Google has definitely not improved. Recently I tried searching "hugginface madebyollin" (with a slight type to hugginface instead of huggingface) and it literally didn't show the obvious result. https://www.google.com/search?q=hugginface+madebyollin (Seems to work in incognito i.e. some A/B variant. But my account doesn't, and it's crazy that that would be an alternative they present to users.) I've switched to duckduckgo and couldn't be happier.
Quotes don't work but
>>>>Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content
I believe if you search for site:domaingoeshere.com yourqueryhere
That will spit out results only from that domain. I think that still works ?
Brave search is pretty good. I don't like their browser but use their search with firefox.
I see that the quotes in your title are not regular ASCII quotes. I agree that Google's search result quality has been quite horrible, but could the fact that your system is somehow not emitting "real" quotes also be the cause? I've seen plenty of problems caused by those horrid "smart" quotes in the past.
> I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore
That's not my experience? The quotes still seem to work for me? Do you have a specific example? And / or can you point to said HN post?
The solution is to simply stop using google and find other search engine, eventually decide to pay for really useful search engines like kagi.
I still try to use + but I guess that hasn't worked since before Google Plus. I never thought I'd want altavista back.
yandex.com
duckduckgo.com
Thank you for asking the important questions, you've saved me a large amount of time here realizing that this isn't just my particular case of search terms being broken somehow. I guess we've all counted on google being reliable all these years and it's kind of a shock that they've gone and tanked their own usefulness after building up like twenty years of trust. Rude.
Piracy has basically been purged from google. Duckduckgo isn't much better, since it's Bing on the backend.
Instead, use Yandex. It returns direct relevant hits and just bloody works. And if you're in the USA, you're also shielded by the fact that Yandex wont share your searched etc with the USG. You know, being a Russian search engine :)
Bing. Not that it works well. Also, spending less time on the computer. The more time you spend on the computer the more money google makes. They don’t want to help you find the thing you need, they want to do the opposite so you spend all afternoon searching so they can sell more ads.
site:domain.com is how you do a site URL restriction, if that's what problem you're having.
Enable verbatim mode to make quotes work better. Even then I don't think it's absolute.
I stopped using google search because it is infuriating.
Weird, I still use the quotes to search for phrases, IDs and other things and it works well. Never noticed they changed anything.
Any specific examples of queries you wish worked differently?