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Why do many search engines seem to ignore operators (e.g. exact phrases, term exclusions, OR, etc.)? Is there a good reason for having a dumb 1997-level search logic that I'm not seeing?

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58008@lemmy.world
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nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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Wouldn’t it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for “this is my phrase” rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?

There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website’s search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:

  1. The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
  2. They’re just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.

Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?

Cheers!

EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I’m mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don’t seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.

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Optional@lemmy.world
26 points

DDG, because they’re so heavily reliant on bing, has gone to absolute shit recently. I’m just about to quit them. Every link in the top ten goes to some M$N / microsoft-adjacent garbage.

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konalt@lemmy.world
7 points

Duckduckgo is awful at searching for specific memes I need. Sometimes I only remember the text and a rough description of the image, but DDG seems only to consider images with Impact TOP TEXT BOTTOM TEXT captions to be memes. I switch to Google and I find the one I want instantly. If there was a way to have the image results of Google with the web results of DDG my life would be complete

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invalid_display_name@lemm.ee
2 points
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If there was a way to have the image results of Google with the web results of DDG my life would be complete

You might want to look into 4get and SearXNG

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Flightbird386@lemmy.world
2 points

I use -msn , which seems to help somewhat

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pyre@lemmy.world
2 points

every day it looks more and more clear that we’re gonna have no choice but pay for kagi if we want to find anything worth a fuck on the internet

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Optional@lemmy.world
3 points

That’s the conclusion I keep coming to as well, and its kind of sad.

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Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz
3 points

Yeah, after some years of DDG getting worse I finally dropped them. I switched to Brave and it’s surprisingly decent for an independent search engine. If you search for something that they don’t have good results for they’ll ask you if you want to get anonymous results from google as well, which means I don’t usually have to switch search engines for harder results.

They do seem to have a much lower number of image results though.

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pyre@lemmy.world
6 points

brave can go fuck itself

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SanguinePar@lemmy.world
0 points

Why? I’ve never used it, so not disagreeing, but that seems a pretty strong reaction to a search engine.

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Bluefruit@lemmy.world
16 points

Oh so its not just me who thinks its gotten worse then. I was starting to go a little crazy man. It seems like its slowly gottwn worse over time. I wonder if its due to the amount of ai content messing up seo ratings or something

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Optional@lemmy.world
10 points

Not just you, no. Microsoft has just gone nuts with their overreach and DDG appears to be collateral damage. After ? A long time of being fine for 90% of what I needed.

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