I hate that search engine degradation is what’s lead me to use AI more. Instead of searching past pages full of 8 ads for a waffle recipe, I ask Copilot or something: “Give me a basic waffle recipe”.
So much computation to go back to what the web used to be great at.
I knew Google started ignoring double quotes for required text years ago, but I found out yesterday that it doesn’t even think “site:xyz.com” needs to be followed.
I was researching something and saw some Reddit posts. Clicked below it to view results from Reddit and a third of them were other websites.
Google has always respected my double quote and site: searches. Please share a screenshot of it borken, I looked online and don’t see examples. If you have the time for a silly little thing :)
There are literally tens of thousands of examples of them ignoring any and all of their operators on Reddit and Google help. You can find them easily if you look.
The examples I’ve found fall into “caveat” territory.
Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.
Caveats:
Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page.
Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs.
Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms.
Quoted searches don’t work for local results.
I would be ticked if quotes didn’t work. My screenshots do show them working.
An example of them appearing to ignore quotes came up. When they pull this, I can ignore the results below the error/red line:
I can’t reproduce but I wanna! (Prolly not kids though)
I know Lemmy doesn’t like it, but Kagi is really great
Lemmy doesn’t like it for a reason.
Im a massive proponent of FOSS, But I have not heard a single sustainable FOSS model for maintaining free search engines. It just takes so much capital to operate.
I think a paid model is much better than a privacy disrespecting / ad driven one.
Hey, here’s some random shit that isn’t related to your search at all, but it has a word slightly similar to a word in your search! BUY IT!!!
“I know the word you typed is a real word, but I searched for something else anyways because that’s what more people do”
This post article goes REALLY into why. I am in no way a techie nor do I really care too much what goes on in the tech sector. I will never build a PC. Regardless, that article is extremely well written and worth the time despite the length.
Cannot upvote this enough. I subscribed to this guy’s newsletter because of this article; it’s honestly excellent.