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Oh, it's definitely still possible. See here for example.

Beyond just the special operators, one of the key things to recognize is that today Google's search engine understands the context of words. If Google has misunderstood and thinks you're talking about a different definition of "Apple", then add a keyword that is only relevant to what you are searching for (e.g. "apple fruit" will generally only include mentions of the fruit, not the company).

If you don't think the ad results are relevant to you, or dislike the idea of ads, ignore them. They are clearly marked (you should be able to do a search for "Toyota" to see what ad results look like). The ads don't impact the other search results.

it most certainly does work, you're doing something wrongly.

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Let's face it, this is not an isolated case of reduced advanced features with Google.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

We also don't have:

- booleen search of even a basic level
- or ability to priortise each search term
- ability for phrase search: Results for separate terms will also be displayed. Some results contain none of the words in the phrase you searched for (They don't look like adverts either - I don't understand)

Yet there's the patent on PageRank so the competition is rubbish?

Operators are useful:
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
but those more advanced abilities don't seem to mesh so well with the automagic aspect of Google.

The reason we all started using Google in the first place was that we found it was the only way we could find things without all the spam. We were able to find the results we were looking for.
Google is catering better to beginners and that is good. This is a good example of that.
Unfortunately it seems the core demographic of the nerd who knows what they are doing is being misserved. Also I think, possibly a bit sidetracked from the core ability of Google as a search company. Sidetracked?

What is the alternative? I use DuckDuckGo regularly but often fall back to Google. I think the edge there could be PageRank and manual result checking.

Any stock investors out there? Is a company sidetracked from it's core abilities often a sign of a company about to take a plunge? I've seen it before but Amazon did well.

I work on web search at Google, and I can assure you that there is no such -req operator. All that you're doing is filtering out results that match the word "req". :-)

When you find a query where you think you need lots of quotes, you might be interested in Verbatim mode, which can be enabled in the left-hand search tools:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1734130&topic=1221265&ctx=topic

Here's the official list of supported search operators:
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861

There are also some legacy operators like [inurl:foo], [intitle:foo], and [allintitle: foo bar baz]. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

awkwardly enough the "intext" operator restricts results to documents containing the term now: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#intext

Google search has a long list of command line switches.

There are 24 unique search operators for Google let alone setting them up for multiple search engines/site searches.

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

CTRL+T or ALT+Enter may open in a new tab but it can't distinguish between I'm feeling lucky and full search as it does in 3.x

You need to learn your google hacking syntax so as not to include blog types in your search.
doing something like "site:msdn.com vb.net " would limit all your searches to vb.net for only the msdn website.
There are many keywords that can be used of which you can apply the not operator "-" the minus sign...so as to say inurl:-blog
although it is not an exact science, you can refine the searches too....you just have to be creative...

here is a quick link http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html

Well... yes, why not? Anyone can easily opt-out. I don't see why this wouldn't fall under the same "fair use" as Google cache or Internet Archive. First of all, this is news and links in summaries are the source of the news; citing the sources wouldn't be wrong, as long as you make it clear that it's a copy of the web page, for the sole purpose of citation. Mirrordot would actually protect other peoples' servers load and bandwidth costs.

You need to give the help to the people who ask, "hey, last week the doohickey worked with the internets thing, but now the button doesn't go anywhere and the doohickey disappeared!" That's a substantially harder problem, and if you could solve it you'd have one-up on Microsoft and Apple.

Yes, it's called the Cupholder Problem, and it's been haunting tech support workers for decades.

How exactly do you plan to help someone who can't even tell you what distro they run? The only thing you can do with them is to point them to the Smart Questions Howto and some generic information collecting howtos so they can choose the right place to look for help. Maybe something like this, too.

• If the consultant says "You should really just RTFM, but if you're not technical enough to do that, or don't know if the web page design tools you're using implemented it correctly, you can hire me to do an audit", that's reasonable. It's probably not worth paying much money for, and the consultant shouldn't be charging you very much, and there are a number of web sites and books that'll help you get up to speed; it's really not very hard.

  
  

• If the consultant says "Search Engines try to find pages that are interesting and useful for people who read them, and if you want people to read your web pages more than once you need interesting and useful content.", it's a good start. Usually, consultants who say that call themselves "web designers" or "editors" if they're white-hat, and if they call themselves SEOs it's usually because they're trying to sell you prefab robo-generated "content" that'll pump up the advertising revenue on your ad-banner page, and they're probably at least sleazy if not outright black-hat.

  
  

• If the consultant says "There are billions and billions of web pages out there, and one way for people to find the interesting content on your web site is to advertise on other relevant web pages, and we can help you with that", they'll probably call themselves something like "advertisers" or "marketers" if they're legit, and only call themselves SEOs if they're not, but of course the guys who are not legit sometimes pretend that they are.

  
  

• If the consultant says "We can help you drive traffic to your site and TRIPLE your advertising revenue", then you know what business they're in, and if you hire them, you know what business you're in. Just make sure your accountant isn't also wearing a black hat.

  
  

• If the consultant says "You're trying to provide legitimate content about a topic where 99.99% of the web pages are run by scammers who hire SEOs, and you need to find a way to not get lost in all that noise", then you've got an interesting edge case, and you might want to compare the consultant's hat with a Pantone chart to see exactly what color of gray it is. Sometimes that's a non-trivial problem; if you're trying to provide a legitimate online pharmacy or drug information, for instance, there are very few sites above the noise level, and I usually ignore Google and either start with Wikipedia or go to the manufacturer's web page.
  

RPN is hard.

I still use my 48sx from the early 90s. And I have a 15C somewhere that still kicks butt.

HPs are tools, the TIs feel like toys.

These days, for simple stuff I use google as a calculator (and unit converter). http://www.googleguide.com/calculator.html

Some more examples.

I'd rather use the Google Calculator

http://www.googleguide.com/calculator.html/

There's more information about Google Quotes here.

Google's new currency converter would've been more "news" in this sense.

You can remove your phone number from that feature.

"If you wish to remove your listing from Google's PhoneBook, complete the name removal form, which you can find at Name Removal or by searching for [ remove phone number Google ].

Take the time to read the google guide and your searches wlil be a lot more effective in the future.

I really like the google guide.
http://www.googleguide.com/
I used it a few times to teach some classes on how to search the internet.

Instead of searching with site=microsoft for Windows fixes, you can get a search of many many things related to MS by using http://google.com/microsoft which turns up a ton more answers than the MS KB or any other search I've found.

Also works with /linux and Macintosh...

Turns out they're on the instruction pages, more's the pity. I thought they were unpublished.

Here is a page that lists a bunch of features. Handy dandy.

Well I know for that google uses thousands of linuxs machines for cost and reliability reasons. I would suspect that yahoo does the same but I can't say for sure.

I wouldn't think that they would have to replace the hardware but you never know. With the power of todays even bargain machines, I suspect that the bottleneck would be the bandwidth. I could be mistaken though.

I sat in on a short talk by a guy from google. From what I remember, google has several starting pages for their crawlers. They just travel though all the links of the pages and every subsequent link, recording how many links go to a particular site to use in configuring the sites page rank. This continues until they have a full cached copy of most of the web.

I haven't checked this site but I found it by googling "how google works". http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html