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:
- The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
- 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.
Because business majors decided a search engines primary job was actually to serve you ads rather than to help you search for things
Yeah, even fucking linkedin can’t make the difference between C, C++ and C#
It’s largely the first one, at least according to The Man Who Killed Google Search.
See also the Hackernews discussion and this follow-up article by the same author (with links to an article with Google’s response, summaries of other discussions on the topic, etc.)
I could FEEL when amazon removed the not and quote functions… now it’s nigh-unusable.
I hate trying to search for specific things on amazon because negative operators don’t work. I’m frequently trying to find products that don’t contain specific words. Like when I wanted a foam mattress cover that wasn’t cooling. I need all the heat I can get when sleeping. But trying to find one that wasn’t marketed as cooling? No such luck. I tried using search engines that honor negatives but no such luck. Amazon has thwarted every attempt to find what I want.
I’m convinced there’s an AI in Google search now that reinterprets what you put. It never seems to give me what I search, only what it thinks I mean.
I said so-fucking-long to Google long ago and switched to DuckDuckGo. If I ever get really nowhere and think maybe googs might have a result for me, then on the Duck you just use a !g before your terms and it facilitates the search thru Google but without their ads.
Their focus shifted long ago from being the best to just figuring out new ways to get more out of users, no matter how deceitful and manipulative they need to be.
I know at least duckduckgo says on their syntax page that they’re aware that operator usage isn’t perfect on their site. Seems to come from the fact that they pull results from multiple sources
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.
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
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
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.
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
