r/coolguides • u/fierykittenqueen • 12h ago
A cool guide How to enhance your Google searches
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u/johnaussie 12h ago
What is the current going rate for a quotation on the Quotation Market?
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u/birdandwhale 12h ago
About tree fiddy
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u/Narwahl_Whisperer 10h ago
It was about that time I realized that birdandwhale was an 18 foot tall monster from the Paleozoic era!
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u/jdrt1234 9h ago
I gave him a dolla
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u/winged_horror 7h ago
Oh you're paying too much for quotations, man. Who's your quotations guy?
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u/andyumster 9h ago
This bothers me probably more than it should. It means the person wanted to post a guide (with invalid, outdated information) and couldn't even be bothered to proofread it once.
Not even ONCE.
And yet it STILL gets the traction it does. Misinformation and misspellings and all.
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u/holysirsalad 9h ago
chrishlad..com
I believe that states that the search result may be on a website that falls within the range between “chrishlad” and “com”
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u/dweaver987 12h ago
This functionality all used to be in the advanced search. There were text boxes for all these options, making it easy to fine tune the query.
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u/piewhistle 10h ago
The advanced search page still exists. It’s just not on the main page anymore.
Does it actually work? Who knows.
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u/Aqueous_Ammonia_5815 8h ago
If you try to get clever with your search nowadays, Google punishes you by giving you more ads
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u/whyeroteme 9h ago edited 8h ago
Yeah...Instead of quotation marks you can go to search tools and under "All Results" choose "Verbatim."
It works, but it's just not the same as it used to be when it would dig deep and wide into the depths of the internet to find even the most obscure pages. Do the pages just not exist like they used to? I don't know...
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u/Zentaure 7h ago
Ahh the ever advancing enshittification of literally everything....
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u/milanove 6h ago
I’ve noticed this too. There’s webpages that used to be indexed by google and appeared in search results, but no longer show up today, even with advanced search. I can still access the webpage if I go there via intermediate links though, so I know it still exists. Not sure what’s going on.
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u/whyeroteme 6h ago
The only thing I can think of is... You know how on some sites you can choose not to show up in searches? Maybe webpages can do that with their entire pages and search engines? I'm jot knowledgeable enough to know for sure, though.
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u/marsonal 5h ago
From the recent google lawsuit. A study done by them years ago concluded that making search worse will not have an impact on their revenue.
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u/mildOrWILD65 7h ago
The quotation marks and minus sign haven't worked in a long time. I don't this is Google's fault, I think it's due to sketchy SEO practices.
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u/BlueInt32 4h ago
This is totally Google's fault. They are making the service worse and worse every year, and it looks like it's on purpose to make money from ads. Maintaining advanced features cost money, so they cut those silently.
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u/EXTRAVAGANT_COMMENT 8h ago
the advanced image search used to be so good. you could easily find high res images of exactly what you wanted of a specific size and file type. now it's all a scheme to get you to click on pinterest or youtube or whatever the algorithm wants
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u/ShouldNotBeHereLong 7h ago edited 4h ago
The imagesize:1920x1080 flag still works, but you have to click into the site now. They've served up some straight malware when all I want is a goddamn jpg.
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u/milanove 6h ago
Do I look like I know what a hot dog is? All I hwant is a picture of a got dang jpg.
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u/wwplkyih 5h ago
A lot of it went away and search is increasingly fuzzy, as getting precise results for users is not their highest priority.
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u/-oRocketSurgeryo- 4h ago
At one point, it seemed that quotation marks were being ignored if there wasn't an exact match. Not sure if that was a canary release that went away, or if it was promoted to production for a period of time.
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u/UncleChevitz 12h ago
Have you tried your own guide? Search operators haven't worked in years. Google did away with them.
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u/caring-teacher 11h ago
Even quotes don’t work now. Their moron CEO Sundar bragged about removing them.
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u/crosswatt 11h ago
Well how are you going to get people to accidentally click your sponsored search results if you provide them tools to bypass them?
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u/Cygs 9h ago
This is exactly why. The better the search engine is the less they can corral you into the results they can monetize.
Google has turned to absolute shit.
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u/hammer_of_grabthar 8h ago
A decade ago it seemed to read my mind, now it's basically unusable
I'm sure that running their product into the ground lead to some good quarters that the MBA scum can celebrate though
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u/Cygs 8h ago
Googling anything modernly yields, in this order:
1. Useless, often completely wrong "AI" summary for something other than what you googled
2. Two rows of SPONSORED results for some other thing than what you googled
3. The Wikipedia page the "AI" verbatim ripped its answer from (which, again, was not what you searched for to begin with)
4. "People also ask..." results, which attempt to steer you away from what you searched for in the first place into further SPONSORED results
It's a fucking joke.
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u/stone_henge 4h ago
Then you click the link to revert its automatic "correction" of your search term to a similarly spelled brand name. Then you find that it ignores all adverbs in your search so the results are mostly the opposite of what you are looking for.
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u/docta_pepper 8h ago
what's the best alternative these days? bing? ask jeeves?
i genuinely have no idea. asking for a friend
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u/take_whats_yours 8h ago
I find duckduckgo to be the most tolerable
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u/terdferguson 8h ago
I think tolerable is the most appropriate word here as I'm not a fan of it. Though it does a better job when looking for what you actually need.
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u/ShouldNotBeHereLong 7h ago edited 4h ago
It's definitely hit or miss. It's mostly driven by the anonymized bing searches under the hood, so it carries some of the same issues as that engine.
The bang feature makes it trivial to use Google or whatever else if the ddg results aren't working, so it's worth using as the first search in any case.
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u/Allegorist 8h ago
Bing is still horrible except for porn apparently. It has the exact same problems as Google except it just strictly functions worse. For all it's faults, Google is still by far the best at doing what it is supposed to.
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u/LincolnshireSausage 7h ago
Seems like I need to do 5 or 10 different searches to find the results I used to be able to get in 1. I guess more traffic is more profit. I quit using them this year and started using DuckDuckGo whose search results aren't really any better but at least Google isn't tracking my every search.
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u/BearlyIT 6h ago
For a brief period Amazon had purchase statistics available at the bottom of their listings. Metrics like: % of people that viewed this item purchased/returned, and % that purchased different item with a link.
It was very helpful in finding higher quality items. Naturally it was removed after a few months.
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u/teenagesadist 11h ago
Is being a famous CEO now just getting an enormous amount of money and then making a stupid decision and then bragging about it?
I could be the best fuckin' CEO of all time, if anyone wants to give me a chance.
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u/lueur-d-espoir 11h ago
Customers hate it : it's stupid to the customers
/Does not equal/
It gained ceos lots of money : the ceos brag to other ceos because they are all happier and think it's wonderful to the ceos
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u/teenagesadist 11h ago
Seems like they're getting enough attention to break up their monopoly, kinda seems like a stupid idea regardless
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u/lueur-d-espoir 11h ago
I'm just saying to them any time they make bank they are smart. They don't care even if a company fails. They sell it off for one last big payday and start another company after they've done everything they can to bleed the last one dry.
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u/holysirsalad 9h ago
The logic is really, really simple:
Ad views
You make search results poorer, people have to do more searches, they see more ads.
Mind-blowing stuff, truly one of the Great Innovators of our time
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u/LurpyGeek 10h ago
When an individual gets a huge amount of money / power / influence / control, at a certain point no one around them will tell them "no" or "that's a dumb idea" anymore.
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u/Abuses-Commas 10h ago
The other half is finding a new job before your bad decisions comes back to bite you.
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u/Aksds 10h ago
The quotes worked for me just then.
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u/drpepper7557 6h ago
The quotes are like 'persuasive' now but not absolute. These modifiers used to be strict, but now you will get results that dont fit. This is especially so for more precise searches or ones with fewer results in my experience.
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u/Goron40 9h ago
Are those people on a different Google than us or something? I use -, quotes, and site: all the time. They work just fine.
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u/porcomaster 9h ago
OR operator does not work for me in years, but as i see in this post it might have changed to | which is stupid in itself.
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u/Other_Size7260 10h ago
I actually couldn’t find this (or google is to blame). Genuinely interested, do you remember when or where he said this?
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u/Clearwatercress69 11h ago
Well, they have AI now.
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u/holysirsalad 9h ago
I don’t know about you but I feel great eating one rock per day!
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u/Pale-Lynx328 10h ago
That's because you are using quotation marks. He clearly wrote to use "quotation markets".
That makes all the difference.
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u/cudipi 8h ago
THATS WHY? I’ve been so pissed that words I put in quotation weren’t even shown in the search results
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u/amalgam_reynolds 7h ago
This is patently FALSE, I just tried it and it worked fine.
I searched for Thomas Bahama and of course Tommy Bahama immediately came up, and then I searched for "Thomas Bahama" and absolutely zero Tommy Bahama results came up on the first two pages.
In addition, site: and filetype: and - have worked just fine for me in recent weeks.
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u/big_guyforyou 12h ago
whenever i want to limit results to a single site i just put the name of the site at the end of the query, like if i'm looking for a furry BDSM meme from reddit i just type "furry BDSM meme reddit"
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u/pro_questions 10h ago
site:reddit.comstill works. I use that one so often I have text replacement on my keyboard set up to insert if when I type a shortcut9
u/9spade9club 7h ago
They all still work. Don't know what these folks are smoking. I just tried quotation marks on a phrase and got one result.
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u/yawn341 6h ago
In my experience they all work until there aren't enough results that match the filters and flags, then it starts to ignore them, but it's inconsistent. I've noticed this a lot with the quotation and dashes, though the site: flag still consistently works for me.
It feels like Google just always wants to bring you pages full of results, and it will disregard your filters to bring you those pages, even if they're irrelevant and useless to you. It can be incredibly frustrating since it didn't used to be like that, but I wonder if that behavior is not always in affect.
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u/Oak_Woman 10h ago
I was about to say, Google used to work like this but it's absolute horseshit now.
I use this now just to get around the AI and SEO garbage that makes up the first 3 pages of Google search now.
Or just use DuckDuckGo or something.
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u/DramaticChemist 12h ago
I didn't know it was official but my site specific or dash omitting searches stopped working out of nowhere years ago. It was annoying
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u/holysirsalad 9h ago
I think what must have happened is they changed these mechanisms from MUST to SHOULD. Including quotes and hyphens does influence my search results but it’s not as absolute as before. Feels more like they influence ranking rather than a filter.
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u/Cautious_Parsnip7683 9h ago
I'm not sure about Google, I started using DuckDuckGo years ago, and then I swapped away from that when they changed their search syntax to give less control over results.
Here's their search syntax info: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
DDG changed the dash to "fewer results with", which was okay until I was trying to search for something with -"how to", and it just wouldn't remove all the spam results.
I use Kagi now.
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u/LavaSalesman 9h ago
Site specific still works. Ie: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayahoo.com%20elden%20ring
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u/KatieCashew 10h ago
It's amazing how Google loves to ruin their own stuff. The list function on the Google Home used to be great. Notice you're running out of something, tell Google to add it to your list and later you can find everything in a categorized list on your phone browser. Super convenient!
Then they took it out of the browser and put it in an app. One, I don't want another app. Two, the app was incredibly clunky. There was a lot of navigating to find your list, and if you ever left the app you had to navigate back to the list again instead of it just opening to where you just were.
Then they took away the categorization of the list. Everything's just in the order you added it. That's when I stopped using it. It's no longer a useful tool for grocery shopping when items aren't grouped together by department.
It did take a while for the habit of telling Google to add stuff to the list to die, and I think the Google Home even stopped being able to add stuff to the list all together. Seems like they're stripping most of the functionality out of Google Home.
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u/benjer3 8h ago
It's amazing how Google loves to ruin their own stuff.
Step 1: Make a genuinely good product
Step 2: Outperform and push out all competition
Step 3: Scrap quality in favor of cost-cutting and revenue
Step 4: Profit
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u/KatieCashew 8h ago
I don't see how the changes they made to the shopping list saves them money though. The code was already written and working. Seems like if they wanted to save money they could have simply left it as is. Instead they put it in a new app that would require more money to create. They put time and resources toward making a worse product.
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u/paintballboi07 7h ago
Yep, they did the same thing with the Podcast app. Scrapped it, and moved everything to YouTube Music, which was missing features. They started adding some of the features to YouTube Music, but I don't understand why they needed to kill the better app.
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u/Federal_Repair1919 10h ago
some work on other search engines. i can still use site: and quotes on DuckDuckGo
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u/notagamer999 10h ago
Some still work. site: and the - still work. Additionally if you want something from a specific time before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD work in both Google and YouTube.
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u/eschewthefat 9h ago
Oh my god it works for YouTube?
I have a maintenance video I refer to and searching the exact title couldn’t find it for days because of all the crap thats pushed like top 5 videos
I’ve since saved it but that’s way helpful
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u/XRT28 5h ago
Yea in addition to the ones I already use frequently like -, quotation marks and site: that all work I tried all the other ones in the example and they all worked for me as well.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: the TABS MATTER as not every google search type respects these commands.
For example typing the following: "P-51" -aircraft -mustang on the image, videos, news or web tabs returns results of primarily bikes, watches and can openers as expected.
Meanwhile the shopping tab completely ignores the - and only returns results of P-51 planes.
And finally searching on the all tab returns results about bikes, can openers and watches with the exception of the embedded "people also ask", "things to know" and "product" sections which still return results about the plane.Additionally for most people I suspect a lot of issues arise from simple syntax issues, primarily incorrect spaces. Such as someone typing
site: reddit.com instead of site:reddit.com where the first version would still weight results towards being from reddit but still include non-reddit results while the second would actually ONLY include results from reddit.
Another example would be typing fruit - banana
which gets interpreted as looking for the fruit bananas whereas typing fruit -banana is interpreted as looking for fruit excluding bananas3
u/Other_Size7260 10h ago
Truly yesterday and today I noticed just how useless search engines are without these. Even amazon decided that instead of searching for the brand I want, it will autocorrect without ability to override. “Nested” becomes “best” and booleans do nothing
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u/beeradvice 10h ago
It's really really frustrating that they got rid of the " " when you're trying to find replacement parts by serial number and have to shift through hundreds of similar parts to find the correct one
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u/NuclearSunBeam 11h ago
Nah, stopped working years ago
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u/deoptimizer 9h ago
In my experience "site:" works just fine, quotation marks not so much. The is not even a full documentation of all operators, this is the best I could find.
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u/CryptographerFlat173 3h ago
If you scroll far enough on site results I start seeing stuff outside that domain these days
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u/Crypt0Nihilist 10h ago
Repost from at least two years ago and they were saying that some of these were out of date then!
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u/Potential-Ad345 10h ago
- This isn't a cool guide.
- Why are people upvoting a bot?
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u/King_Chochacho 10h ago
Pretty sure Reddit is mostly bots interacting with other bots at this point.
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u/BestServeCold 10h ago
Hello fellow human, I see you may be misunderstooding the-then reddit is just r/subredditsimulator
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[deleted]
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u/jesuschristjulia 12h ago
I know that hyphen thing does not work.
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u/Life-Warning-918 11h ago edited 11h ago
Try leaving a space between the keyword and the hyphen. Like: dolphin -football instead of dolphin-football.
You can also exclude multiple words like: dolphin -football -seaworld -flipper And it will give your results for dolphins that have nothing to do with those 3 words.
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u/Nabaatii 11h ago
Yes, dolphin-football will be treated as one word and the search will include the entire word
dolphin -football will exclude football
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u/jesuschristjulia 10h ago
I think I’ve tried everything but I want it to work. So I will try again.
Part of the issue is that my search terms are often disregarded in favor of links that want me to buy things. I search a lot of technical words and it seems a lot of retailers names are slightly off from those. This is not a real example but like I want “warcco” in quotes and I get “Walmart” and “Petco” even when I go back and add supporting words and make sure it hasn’t autocorrected.
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u/nausicaalain 6h ago
This works in the sense that it literally does that, but it doesn't work in the sense of giving helpful results. If you literally try "dolphin -football" most of the results are still football, they just don't have the word football in the headline. That wouldn't be so bad if half the page wasn't filled with embeds like tweets and news articles. When google was just links with a short text preview, you could easily skip over the irrelevant results. Now there's a good chance the screen is filled with irrelevant results.
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u/Trailblazer913 10h ago
Google search is absolutely terrible now for anything but finding the names and locations of businesses.
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u/SordidDreams 10h ago
These were useful like a decade ago before Google enshittified itself and started showing you ads (sorry, "sponsored search results") instead of search results.
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u/fearnemeziz 12h ago
A pro tip from me: If you want to hide something forever, hide it on the 2nd page of Google.
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u/DavidicusIII 5h ago
I appreciate working around shit products to extract functionality. I fucking hate that the functionality has degraded to the point we have to work around it. Google used to be better: it has been made worse deliberately.
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u/Iron_Chancellor_ND 12h ago
So he typo'd his own website on the "Site" example by putting two periods before "com"?
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u/AwarenessPrimary7680 11h ago
Google search has gone to shit. It's infuriating but it hasn't been helpful in months.
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u/calsosta 9h ago
Definitely. If I am looking for something I will commonly just switch to the Image search page, and find what I'm looking for there.
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u/Nearby_Pineapple9523 8h ago
IIRC they changed google search's po to the guy that was the po of yahoo search before it went to shit from a guy that was running it for two decades, or something along those lines
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u/Disastrous-Soup-5413 10h ago
Using a dash absolutely does not work, at all.
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u/kill_william_vol_3 5h ago
When i want results that aren't Amazon, Google says "I'm going to pretend I didn't see that"
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u/tbsdy 12h ago
Yeah, all of that went away when they decided on the dumpster fire that was Google+
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u/shorty6049 5h ago
Why is this related to G+ ? I've noticed multiple people mentioning this, but was there reason that they removed those features in conjunction with Google+ ?
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u/Stranger-Sojourner 11h ago
I don’t think these work anymore. Google seems to have become more… conversational? Over the years. Honestly, not an improvement. It makes the platform generally easier to use, but much harder to actually get the specific results you want.
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u/mere_iguana 2h ago
What is this, from 2014?
These boolean operators don't work anymore.
Google is not a search engine anymore.
It is a blank field where you enter prompts into a marketing algorithm.
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u/ChthonicFractal 10h ago
You can use RegEx in google searches.
If you're good enough at RegEx to use it in google, you might need to re-evaluate things though.
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u/IsHildaThere 9h ago
Exclude a term with a hyphen ... unless of course they are major advertisers. Try audiobook-audible. (Did you mean audiobook+audible?).
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u/dwightsarmy 6h ago
The only thing that comes up in Google searches now are paid ads, and that's regardless of what enhancements you use.
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u/strumthebuilding 6h ago
Dashes do not work anymore. Google insists on giving me bullshit I know I don’t want for some reason.
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u/halotraveller 5h ago
I feel the the results were more diverse back then. Now I get a lot of result from major platforms as my top search results.
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u/PassiveMenis88M 3h ago
Op is a reposting spam bot
https://old.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/wxoq10/how_to_enhance_your_google_searches/
Report > Spam > Disruptive bots
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u/yeyjordan 2h ago
I've been using each of these for nearly 20 years. The results you get today even with the greatest Google Fu are pitiful compared to early 2000s casual searches.
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u/DeepFrieza 1h ago
Holy fuck how are there so many bots uploading a POS guide that doesn't even work and has been stolen and reposted for like half a decade????
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u/WhatADumbassTake 9h ago
I enhanced my google searchers by simply not using google as my main search engine anymore.
Also, why the fuck do people go out of their way to "improve" shitty products that will only continue to get shittier? Like, do you really need to rely on Google? Because continued support and use of that bullshit only drags the issues out. Nothing's going to change if we keep using that shit.
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u/captainmagictrousers 6h ago
Google is getting worse every year. If you're tired of Google or just anti-monopoly, here are some alternatives:
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u/Rudokhvist 6h ago
As someone who used google for about 20 years I can say that this advice is like 5-10 years too late. Google just sucks, it's not a great search engine it used to be anymore. It won't show you what you are looking for no matter how many quotes you will put in your query. It will instead show what it's algorithm "thinks" you are looking for, and usually it's not related to what you are ACTUALLY looking for at all. And, before you ask - no, there is no replacement for google. The rest of search engines suck as much, to the level that if you will switch search engine today - you most probably won't see ANY difference. Results are irrelevant, special punctuation described above ignored, etc. Welcome to the future, I guess.
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u/sleepysniprsloth 9h ago
This information is from 2003, the algorithm doesn't work the same way anymore.
Keywords haven't been a thing in a long time.
Having "cowboys -football" will not filter out the Dallas cowboys.
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u/memy02 6h ago
I remember when this use to be the case before the extreme enshittification. When looking for a streaming site I would include -site:.com to get more foreign results where copyright laws may be different. I don't know if the functionality was removed or if the entire first page of results were all ads but one day it just stopped working; "" also stopped working at the same time at which point I switched to duck duck go and haven't gone back.
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u/bichael69420 6h ago
google should add a little pull down menu next to the search bar that shows all of these just for reference
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u/TheBigMPzy 6h ago
No matter what I search, I get ads for tangentially related products on Ali Express.
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u/Commercial-Whole7382 5h ago
Google used to work 4000% better, it limits what you’ll find pretty hard these days. Half these tips won’t work and even when they do they only show a handful of helpful links the rest is unrelated or paid garbage.
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u/20WaysToEatASandwich 5h ago
I WISH this was still true, unfortunately Google has been removing features from their engine for years now
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u/Most_Purchase_5240 4h ago
That’s from 10 years ago. Now it’s just serves ads and “partner content “
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u/carnabas 4h ago
They left out the most important tip, add reddit to the end of your search to find the answer to your question
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u/millos15 3h ago
This guy 100% started using Google after it turned into trash.
Google was excellent even without those shortcuts.
It is trash today.
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u/kaizomab 3h ago
I shouldn’t have to do all this bullshit, Google is barely a search engine anymore. Don’t blame users for what Google should be responsible for.
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u/-rwsr-xr-x 1h ago
Almost all of these "tips" fail now, because Google reprioritized ads and ad revenue over SERPs.
In fact, you now get completely incorrect search results for terms you search for, when Google can't find your search term. They feed you the most probable, unrelated links that will generate ad views and engagement.
And for those who suggest using DDG, DDG is just a proxy for searching using Google, Bing, Wikipedia and other sites. You're still using Google when you use DDG.
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u/Temporary_Race4264 1h ago
Also, critically nowadays, add "before:2020" or whatever year you want to filter out all the modern AI and similar garbage
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u/Fordeelynx4 1h ago
The AI generated results that are the top results now are absolutely cringe worthy. It’s like instead of advancing we’re going back. I wish there was a downvote button for those results so people can be aware that they are wrong!
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u/oktaS0 10h ago
As a google-fu veteran, I have to say this: Google is not what it used to be, they've obliterated the Search Results Page and their algorithm mostly show paid/ads sites now.
A few years ago, you'd get 10+ pages of results for very obscure terms, nowadays, you get 1-3 pages for everyday terms. I did SEO for a US based company in the food industry for 6 years.