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I keep reading this, but Google still limits itself to your search terms 100% if you put them in quotation marks separately.
And you can exclude specific terms completely with a minus and quotation marks.
If you want results containing just one of your terms, put OR between them.
I haven’t found another (free) search engine that respects these limits completely.
If your results still suck using this trick, it’s because the internet as a whole sucks a lot more now. Forums are dead, blog posts are written by AI and heavily optimized to push them up in the search results, and all interesting info written by humans is in chat apps now.
Do you have an example? Cause that hasn’t been my experience.
And I’m not even trying to shill for Google, it’s usually my third choice when I haven’t found anything on Duck and Qwant.
(I admit for image search your point is very valid - Google puts mostly images of products from online stores up.
For image search I always use Duckduckgo, the results are better and it actually gives you the link to the full res image.)
The fact that results are worse because the Internet is worse is certainly a talking point Google is currently pushing hard. It’s nonsense of course. The Internet was absolute, abysmal garbage when Google was created, mostly filled with junk Web sites made by conmen, narcissists and high school kids. In short, it was no different from today. Google pulled up the tiny portion of value from the dredges, and it did so for years even as people kept churning out junk. The fact that they could filter through the immense pile of junk was, until recently, a key feature they marketed about themselves. What has changed recently isn’t the proportion of junk on the Internet. It’s how Google ranks its searches and the fact that now Google gets a large portion of its revenue selling ads on sites, sites it lists in its search results.
I keep reading this, but Google still limits itself to your search terms 100% if you put them in quotation marks separately.
And you can exclude specific terms completely with a minus and quotation marks.
"searchterm1" "searchterm2" -"excluderesultswiththisterm"If you want results containing just one of your terms, put OR between them.
I haven’t found another (free) search engine that respects these limits completely.
If your results still suck using this trick, it’s because the internet as a whole sucks a lot more now. Forums are dead, blog posts are written by AI and heavily optimized to push them up in the search results, and all interesting info written by humans is in chat apps now.
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Do you have an example? Cause that hasn’t been my experience.
And I’m not even trying to shill for Google, it’s usually my third choice when I haven’t found anything on Duck and Qwant.
Removed by mod
Here you go:
(I admit for image search your point is very valid - Google puts mostly images of products from online stores up.
For image search I always use Duckduckgo, the results are better and it actually gives you the link to the full res image.)
The fact that I have to put every word in quotes feels like getting on my knees and pleading for the search I actually want.
The fact that results are worse because the Internet is worse is certainly a talking point Google is currently pushing hard. It’s nonsense of course. The Internet was absolute, abysmal garbage when Google was created, mostly filled with junk Web sites made by conmen, narcissists and high school kids. In short, it was no different from today. Google pulled up the tiny portion of value from the dredges, and it did so for years even as people kept churning out junk. The fact that they could filter through the immense pile of junk was, until recently, a key feature they marketed about themselves. What has changed recently isn’t the proportion of junk on the Internet. It’s how Google ranks its searches and the fact that now Google gets a large portion of its revenue selling ads on sites, sites it lists in its search results.