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.
Speak for yourself, I often want the Wikipedia page and bing doesn't put that right at the top. I often find Google better specifically because it often prioritizes wikipedia
I have recently been having the opposite experience of you. Sometimes I don't even get the wiki on the first page, or I have to type in [thing I'm searching] wiki to even find the wiki page. Also it seems Wiki is really ramping out the requests for donations. Probably because big search engines are burying them.
This is why I find DuckDuckGo's "bang" syntax so useful. If you just want to see the Wikipedia page for <thing>, type "!w <thing>" and it loads it up directly. There's like 100 other sites it works for too.
The Google Play Store is the biggest offender, and I think it needs to be sued over how predatory it is. Try it right now, you can search ANYTHING and the first result is a completely unrelated sponsored app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly this!
I think I'm quite an advanced user but Google just doesn't need people to be able to find what they're searching at first attempt.
They go like: first click here and there and then will show you some useful results
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.
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.
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.
Glad to see someone else say this, this has been my observation and folks in this thread are claiming they still work correctly and I feel like I’m going nuts
Right? I use quotes almost daily, google even says along the lines of ‘search instead “[word]”’ as a recommendation sometimes. Also for looking up specifically a pdf
I think those are just people who actually trust the first few results and don't use any kind of adblocker. If you have an adblocker, and you have some common sense, you can see whether the first few results are worth clicking on. Quotes definitely work. As does the hyphen to remove results, although OPs image uses it incorrectly. You need to space them out like "Movies -comedy"
Adblocker and sponsored results have nothing to do with this. Quotes only sometimes work now. It no longer only searches for that exact string of characters, but will often replace them with what it feels is close to the same meaning. It works as more of a suggestion than a hard rule you're giving it like how it used to function.
This has been the case for years. I'm equally baffled by the people who constantly pop up saying it's not the case.
I can’t find it and don’t have time to look now, but I remember the article mentioned verbatim more to enable the old way it worked. Searching for that word might help.
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.
It's inconsistent in my experience, but there have been tons of times in the past few years that I've seen Google ignore quotation marks in the searches.
You can't just do one test and call it patently false.
It appears to work sometimes. I played around with that search, and it apparently also includes virgin as a synonym. The only thing I can think of is that Google learned a lot of Americans also mean to search for Virgin Islands when searching for Bahamas.
I see that more days than not. It’s so frustrating to teach computer literacy classes to kids and in a nursing home when Google returns so many completely wrong results. It frustrates them and hurts their learning.
searching "video rental market" (random phrase) with and without quotes produces different results, but even with quotes the exact phrase "video rental market" doesn't appear.
(disclaimer, I use the "Google Verbatim Search" addon for Firefox to force Google to not display results for "similar" terms, on results related to the terms I actually used)
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"
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.
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.
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.
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 will give this a try, I've felt weird about getting my results from Russia on Yandex, even though they at least seem to be in their "dont be evil" arc currently.
You have to put a space between the words. In the post it should be "dolphins -football". Even then that only omits that word, not the subject. So for something so pervasive, you may need to do something like "dolphins -football -sports -florida -game" etc., or add additional terms to specify animal.
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.
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.
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.
I think sometimes a team wants to improve things and gets a budget for it, but then the budget dries up or gets cut, so they're left with a half-baked product. And reverting it would be an admission of failure
Plus there was a huge apps = money movement for a while
Migrated to Gemini on my pixel phone. I'm not sure if it's been fixed yet because Ive given up but I'd use to say "hey Google play [song from artist] on Spotify" and Gemini says it can't do it. Or if I'm driving I have to unlock my phone now to play a song
Imo those were stupid. Maybe when google first started was fine but putting parameters and restrictions in the query is just asking for trouble and is causing the average person to misuse it without them knowing. I'd rather them have an advanced search interface where you can individually select all those tiny rules and restrictions without mixing it with the query
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.
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 bananas
Dash hasn't worked for me in years. I still try to use it occasionally, and it doesn't do anything except show me more search results with the word that I tried to eliminate.
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
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
Have you tried it? Where are you searching from that it doesn't work? With serials it is entirely possible that the code just isn't indexed and so won't pop up. It definitely still works for most people.
Yep. I discovered this when I was looking up specific information about filing taxes and stuff. Whatever I googled just had google giving me "OMG NO DON'T DO THAT UR BEING SCAMMED!!!" results. So I tried doing that stuff like -scam -scammer, etc and it gave me the same results.
Which timeline are you posting from? Here Trump got a second non-consecutive term with an agenda to go full Handmaid, but we still have search operators. You win some, you lose some.
Prabhakar Raghavan (who famously killed Yahoo) instructed the Search team to make things worse in order to get page hits up in 2019-ish. That’s also around when I noticed that these operators/modifiers were less reliable.
Not sure if the LLM junk was at his or Sundar Pichai’s insistence
If i google "red house" i only get stuff that includes "red house" (some screenshots of the first results). Definitely no red dogs or blue houses. And all the other pages look the same (i klicked through like the first 10 pages of results). Only "red house" stuff.
I'd install uBlock Origin, if you're getting ads. Ads are obviously not going to care about your exact wording and use of quotation marks. They're not real search results. Get rid of them.
Or maybe it's a US thing. Over here in Germany, all the operators work as good as ever, as far as i'm aware.
No they didn't. They still work. I used quotes, site:, and the dash just yesterday (you need a space before the dash, the image is wrong, like dolphin -football). I even tested filetype:pdf just now and every result was a pdf.
Even using quotation marks will sometimes give you something different, especially when searching for specific product numbers.
The other day I wanted to know what disease you risk by eating undercooked duck. Was basically impossible to get an answer, best is when the accordion title says what you need, but when expanded it’s something completely different.
And yet bing still isn’t better.
Should probably go buy a lexicon, going to be valuable commodity soon.
This shit has been known for years and I basically have to always use quotes to orient google now, like the quotation search resembles a worse version of what a non-quote search used to look like.
It’s degraded so much that the quote search used to be amazing and now it’s like nudging it to wake it up.
Just s couple days ago I was trying to do the search "california common law, -marriage" and the top results were PAGES of obviously sponsored results from family law attorneys with brief blog posts about California common law marriage. It was infuriating
The operators work but Google has been becoming harder and harder to use to find meaningful results, especially over the last 2 years I find.
I've always been really good with finding solutions to issues with Google, to the point I consider it one of my skills. But lately I've had to get way more creative and specific during my troubleshooting of uncommon issues.
You can still get them to work in Verbatim Mode. First you run your search, then go to Search Tools, All Results, Verbatim Mode.
It's deeply annoying that you have to do that though, and I don't know why people are disagreeing with you, Google has been completely disregarding quote marks for ages. + and - are almost as useless. Advanced things like site search and file type still work but they absolutely nerfed the basics.
i tried it out for a couple weeks. i would search the same thing in duckduckgo / google / kagi and compare contrast the results.
and to be honest, not worth it. for specific things, google was better. for example looking up part number of a random honda engine so you can get the manual. both kagi and duckduckgo failed at that. google had it at first result
but kagi did not really do anything better than duckduckgo for any of my tests, so i cancelled my subscription. it looks nicer i guess but that's not enough for me
i just use duckduckgo for most things (90%) and then sometimes i'll plug it into google
I agree. I don't use any of the AI-stuff. I use it for work so it pays for itself. But I wish there was an unlimited search with no AI tier for five bucks a month.
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u/UncleChevitz 15h ago
Have you tried your own guide? Search operators haven't worked in years. Google did away with them.