this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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What search engine is currently showing the most useful results? What other tricks do we have aside of adding "reddit" or whatever internet community to the results?

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[–] apis@kbin.social 189 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Don't even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect my search queries.

Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 80 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn't use it if they didn't know about it. They felt "natural language" would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for "foo and bar" it'll return me results for foo and ignore the rest

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 year ago

That's not why they ignore them. They ignore them because it is profitable.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So google has reverted to late 90s search behavior

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Considering what happened to late-'90s search engines, that seems like a rather dangerous idea…

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

They got killed by Google. I was a Dogpile man myself, until someone showed me the google search.

[–] CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

Does anyone know the AOL keyword for Lemmy?

[–] HaiZhung@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] VoxAdActa@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I frequently have to look up whether a term is a misspelling/mistranslation or an actual technical term (or a term in British English, or a British spelling for a technical word). For me, quotes do nothing. It will frequently refuse to look up the term I'm specifically hunting for, just the term it thinks I should be hunting for. Sometimes that means it's a mistranslation... but not always.

Next time it comes up for me, I'll keep a note of it and get back to you.

I have an even bigger problem trying to exclude terms from a search. The example I always use is try to look up "Dolphins -football", and use any version of "-" you'd like (NOT, etc). The first results will always be the latest scores for the Miami Dolphins.

[–] StandingCat@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

Ssh, you’re ruining the circle jerk.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Too complicated for them and their optimisations, maybe?

This still works if you use double quotes!

[–] rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago

Yeah I really miss those days of logical operands. Back in the Alta Vista days I could do Boolean searches, but yeah that's been replaced with speech recognition which doesn't work as well. To this day I still like the Boolean search better. Newer does not always mean better. Most of the time it only means dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

[–] Erk@cdda.social 1 points 1 year ago

Operands still work. You may be confused because the se will offer you results without them if your operands produced nothing.