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Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Search Engines Left That Don't Try To Think For Me?
An anonymous reader writes: As a programmer especially, I'm becoming increasingly unhappy with Google searches. They try very hard to present me with what they think I'm searching for instead of what I'm actually searching for. This issue mostly shows up when searching error messages, obscure type and function names and stuff like that. What I think though, is that I only notice the issue when searching for stuff I know a lot about, namely programming, but my queries get distorted when I'm searching for just about anything, I just don't know enough about the subject to notice. Are there any alternative search engines left that don't think they know better than me what I'm looking for and just search for my phrase, like in the 2000s?
Searching for exact strings is an option with Google, but what search engines are the most hands-off to start with?
I've had the very same problem for years now. I get exclusively results that other people got, who searched something vaguely similar.
First, you have to enclose every fucking word between quotes or you get only Taylor Swift and Kardashian search results.
Second, even _if_ you do that, it ignores all the punctuations I enter. I _really_ want only the results where there are exactly the period or comma on exactly the place where I put it, how hard can that be?
If I search for carbuncles, I don't need to see cars of somebody's uncle.
And don't even mention if you use a VPN, then you'll get Estonian or Russian results even when you enter only English words.
Google has become useless other than for clueless teens.
Why can't they just have a checkbox that you can select:
Check this box if you can spell and really mean what you type.
Try enclosing your error output in quotation marks. That tells Google that you're looking for that phrase, not just that combination of words.
Did you mean: "Are there any search engines left that try to think for me?" Try one of the following:
https://google.com
https://bing.com
https://duckduckgo.com
https://dogpile.com
When the results are displayed go to Search Tools and change All Results to Verbatim
If you're looking for a Linux command ... throw the word Linux in.
Sometimes it takes a little coaxing to tell Google what the hell you're searching for, that doesn't mean it's not there, it means you're not giving enough context.
And, sometimes, what you're looking for is so damned specific there's almost nothing on the internet for it.
I've always found a couple of keywords and some quoted strings can go a long way to coaxing out what you're looking for.
Maybe your problem isn't that the search engine is thinking too much, it's that you're not thinking enough and blaming it for trying to help. If it's just common words, you'll get the most common matches.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
startpage.com works reasonably well and doesn't try to outsmart you too much; I find it works well for error messages. They also don't track you, so that's nice.
http://www.atlasify.com/
Atlas at least thinks differently. As I understand it, rather than feed you a zillion links to the same data, it attempts to find your data, and related data. I'm not real sure how good, or how bad that is, but it's different.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Specifically for error messages, put double quotes around the string for more accurate results. Adjust to avoid including local information. Example: (a made up) error message "An application on your machine rudolph process number 28433 for user barbie_doll has caused an inexcusable memory management error." would be searched as:
"An application on your machine" "process number" "for user" "has caused an inexcusable memory management error".
As someone else said, if it's a linux machine, make the first word "linux". Or the flavor of linux, or if windows, include that and the version, or if appropriate the name of the application.
"Windows 2008" IIS "401 unauthorized" "access list"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you are a woman that wants to learn how to wrestle from other women, just forget about google. Not going to help.
I would love a search platform that categories searches as functionally identical. Similar to the Web vs Image vs News categories. I would love a search engine that can say, search for a picture of a man dodging a car but have the option of NOT showing any pictures of Dodge (as in Chrysler) cars.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No, results are still distorted due to geolocation, language and other unknown techniques. I encounter this issue in a very painful way when I travel.
At home I search for widgets and get a listing of widgets. Good or bad, it is a listing that I get every time I search for widgets when within my home town.
When I travel to a foreign country, I CANNOT reproduce those same results, even if I specify the location as being my home city. In some cases these searches will provide not a single similar widget link to those that appear on the first three pages at home. It's HUGELY frustrating.
But, it also gives me pause about what results I am missing out on when I'm at home. My results(incognito even) are so targeted that I don't see any results outside my sphere. I'm sure that there are probably significant developments in widgets in Brazil, or Italy, or Japan. But, even if I use google.jp to search when I am in my hometown, my results are still mostly the same as searching google.com, just in Kanji.
For a few years now, Google has been getting increasingly less useful due to its "increased intelligence". I want information on widgets. I don;t need that information curated because of where I am or because my neighbor searched for J-Lo.
Google (and all other search engines) try their best to return the results the user has asked for. It's never going to be perfect at doing this, if only because people use the same phrases in different ways from time to time. If Google (or the search engine of your choice) is returning results that aren't what you want, then your best option is to make the query more specific. Either add relevant keywords, search for a phrase instead of individual words (using quotes), or exclude some other keywords (in Google, prepend - to the beginning of the word you want to exclude...other search engines are probably similar).
Also, if Google is returning crappy results for some query or other, feel free to send feedback (link is at the bottom of the page). I'm sure other search engines have similar functionality.
Most people want search engines to understand synonyms, misspellings and contextual relevancy and return results that one had in mind rather than string matches. This only becomes more important with mobile/voice search.
You may have better luck with internal search of sites like stackoverflow.
The plus doesn't work very well anymore, half the result pages simply don't contain the word. They seem to use this as an indication that that word is slightly more important but not actually required. Which can be quite infuriating when you are searching for a specific site you know contains that word.
"The cutting edge technology that provides me free access to humanity's collected knowledge sometimes impudently brings me slightly different results than I demanded." I think we have reached the apex of first world problems.
Your google-fu is broken. /supported/ google-fu.
Google did away with the plus, in favour of doublequotes, long ago.
See https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433 for all the
if computers become self aware, maybe one benefit will be if enough people put a minus in front of a celebrity tart's name Skynet terminates them
This is a perfect example of the flawed interface design philosophy many tech giants fall prey to, and it boils down to "we know what you want better than you do".
To their credit, companies like Google and Microsoft and Facebook put their best minds behind these problems and come up with technically ingenious solutions. That's part of the problem. It must be correct and it must be better, because we worked so hard on it using proven methods. But people who know what they want find these products difficult to use, difficult to control, and even vaguely insulting.
The Facebook news feed is a triumph in machine learning, as is/was Microsoft's ribbon interface in UI, and Google's search in contextualized search... They're based on solid research, mass user polling, hard big data, and ambitious technical goals of competent engineers. Yet, they can't get it right because they continue to look at the problem and ignoring the people, often condescendingly so.
It takes understanding for users to have clear intentions. As others have said, if the user doesn't know anything about what they are searching for, Google does a good job of educating their guesses. And to their credit, these companies are successfully serving the inept majority. But anyone who continues to use their products inevitably will have clearer intentions, because with use, we naturally get smarter. That is why the more we use these tools, the more we have reasons to hate them. The more we find things we wish to do with these tools, the more we find they are less accommodating.
The technical solution is rather simple. Interfaces are intention driven, and if they're not driven by the intentions of the user, they are driven by the intentions of the developers. Hence, each feature can be tested for the intentions they serve, and those that serve the user must be added and made more prominent. An existing example in facebook is the "don't show me posts from ___" feature. But other's that don't exist would be listing entries in strict chronological order, or listing entries unfiltered. They could be simple checkboxes and implementation would be simple (boring almost).
The technical solution is far easier than what really needs to happen, and that is a change in attitude and philosophy of the people building these products. They need to be more embracing and less insistent on user behavior. They need to stop thinking they know better. They need to stop judging their own solutions by their technical prowess. People who know what they want need to be able to choose, and for the most part, intentions are simple. Simple intentions garner simple select-able features. If this is too boring, maybe they need to stop using users as guinea pigs, quit their insanely high paying job, and go back to academia where they could do some really interesting work.
http://symbolhound.com/
GoodGopher.com
I just read the about page. You're suggesting a search engine by a tin foil hat wearing anti-vaxxer that promotes "alternative" medicine? No wonder you're anonymous.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Average Slashdotter: Knows precisely what is being searched for, knows it's a bit obscure, knows how to spell, and knows that queries for such a thing are going to require the human to adapt to the technology - if required or possible, might be willing/able to provide an actual SQL query. More likely to run some form of ad blocker, and even if they don't, is much more likely to distinguish an ad for a search result, and not click on it.
Average User: Can't tell Google from Trivoli (or whatever flavor-of-the-week ad-serving Google clone is going around), can't tell an address bar from a search bar, can't tell a sponsored result from an organic listing, can't pass a seventh grade spelling test, asks Google questions as if it is a human and will provide human answers, and is probably looking for the same thing everyone else is looking for.
You're Google, and you're trying to make money. Who do you optimize for?
It's a pretty sucky time to be a techie. *toddles off to IRC and Usenet*
The same is said to be the case with clippy. The prototype version rarely appeared and when it did it was almost always correct and helpful. The shipping version was this animated character always sitting on the screen, raising the eyebrows in a distracting fashion, and obnoxiously autocorrecting a[i] into a[I].
Wow, you're right. They've co opted the + to search Google+ pages. WTF? From the page you linked to: "[+ symbol usage:] Search for Google+ pages or blood types Examples: +Chrome or AB+"
You are attacking a person's search engine based on something that has nothing to do with their search engine.
From the site's front page:
Submit your site to the world's first search engine that filters out corporate propaganda and government disinfo!
With your help, we are building the internet's largest search engine for those searching for information and news on liberty, natural healing, central banks, food freedom, advanced science and a multitude of other topics no longer allowed in NSA-controlled search engines.
I don't know about being logged in, but my home page has Verbatim Google search rather than raw Google (and Verbatim set in my search prefs--which requires being logged in, for when I don't access it from my own page form). Quotes help too of course for specific purposes, and -uselessresultterm as well. I do wish for original Alta Vista back though.
Verbatim FTW.
It gets you *almost* back to the pre-Google+ days, when they took away the "+" sign as a search modifier.
The complaints about punctuation are relatively bogus, as that's not stored. It was never stored, even in Altavista.
On substitution of search terms, they always, if the give you substitute results based on a spelling correction, they give you the option of searching for what you asked for exactly, or you can force the issue up front with quotes.
I also miss Altavista, but you had to be something of a lexicographer (i.e. you effectively "think like a search engine" and do your own categorizations, rather than relying on the search engine) to get better results out of it than the average person, who is a relatively poor classifier, gets out of Google doing their classifying for them.
i.e. when searching for code-related stuff, use code.google.com
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Create a bookmarklet whose content is this:
javascript:location="https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q="+prompt("Search item - separate words with plus signs")+"&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tbs=li:1";
When you want to search for something, click on the bookmarklet. When the small prompt window appears, enter the search word(s). Separate multiple words with plus signs (ex: happy+days). At the top of the resulting Google web page, in the "All results / Verbatim" menu, you'll see that "Verbatim" is selected.
You might have to adjust the bookmarklet to work in your browser. In your web browser, do a Google search, and check to see what "https://www.google.com/search?..." url is created. Adjust the bookmarklet to fit the url that you got.