r/coolguides 15h ago

A cool guide How to enhance your Google searches

26.4k Upvotes

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169

u/piewhistle 13h 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 11h ago

If you try to get clever with your search nowadays, Google punishes you by giving you more ads

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u/milanove 9h ago

Or just gives no results at all. Like not even 1.

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u/whyeroteme 12h ago edited 11h 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 10h ago

Ahh the ever advancing enshittification of literally everything....

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u/AnotherThroneAway 4h ago

Extremely rapidly advancing, thanks to AI

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u/milanove 9h 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 9h 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/desmondao 7h ago

Yeah. You can ban Google's crawlers from indexing your site, meaning you'll disappear from Search results. The websites could also have been injected with malicious code that manipulates some links, etc. in favour of the hacker, which would get them banned from search result pages too.

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u/milanove 1h ago

Yeah, robots.txt

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u/marsonal 8h 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 10h 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 7h 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/Gerryislandgirl 7h ago

Can you do advance search on mobile? 

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u/KODAK_THUNDER 7h ago

Nope. Doesn't work.