[rsync]

""the magic is gone.""

Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone.

Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ?

I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key words ... and the resulting pages do not contain one or more of those words.

I know all about allinsite: and quotation marks and so on ... those are, as far as I can tell, randomly interpreted by google. Who knows if they even work, ever.

A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for ... I would pay that to have search with full control over search results with logical operators that actually worked.

[guycook]

I know exactly what you mean. "Half" "of" "my" "searches" "look" "like" "this" "these" "days". I can understand throwing out one of many keywords when I'm down on page 6, but when I search with only 4 terms and the very first result has 2 words s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ o̶u̶t̶ I start to wonder who exactly this search box is for.

[mojuba]

True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.

[gniv]

I wouldn't put too much stock on those numbers. They are probably statistical estimates, not actual counts.

[lobster_johnson]

Under "Search tools", click on "Verbatim". It will cause the query to actually honor the words you typed.

[swang]

does this honor typos? i like spellcorrect changes but i hate all the other assumptions they make about my search terms.

[lobster_johnson]

It will show a "Did you mean:", but doesn't automatically rewrite it. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gam+of+throes&tbs=li:1

[niels_olson]

I just searched for "Calcifying Fibrous Tumor", and got exactly what I wanted, the most recent review article on that tumor. What are you looking for?

[ChuckMcM]

"best free credit card" :-)

[paulcole]

> meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful

I would wager that this describes a shockingly high percentage of the average person's searches. I know it's true for me.

[l33tbro]

This was a decent thread lamenting Google of yore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565464

[patrickk]

> A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for

Somewhat meta, but I cannot find this item on https://hn.algolia.com or using a Google search ("site: news.ycombinator.com $1000 for") can you post a link if you have it?

[mkl]

I found it with Algolia using [ask hn pay]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13114954

[patrickk]

Thanks! I noticed it's "$1k/mo" so I suppose it's difficult to chalk this up to the google algorithm ;)

[AznHisoka]

i share the same experience. i have been using google to find articles that share a specific opinion so i do very specific searches in hopes of finding editorial opinion pieces. what i get back are lame how-to guides and wikipedia articles.

[knight17]

Earlier they had a blog search option which I used a lot to find pages written in a personalised style, but they shelved this. Now there is no way to find such pages under the current system other than trying yor luck with searching for site:blogspot.com and site:wordpress.com; but these two blog hosts are not even half the universe of all the blogs out there.

What I do now is to create a Google Custom Search Engine with all my RSS feed subscriptions; it resembles this earlier feature as I feed it lots of personal blogs that I read, but it is not even close to the earlier blogsearch.

Similarly there was a discussion/forum search which was also useful; that too was removed.