Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tehwalrus 3002 days ago
I've actually stopped trying to search google for things anymore, because it almost always tried to be clever and totally missed the point. Sounds like I should try "verbatim" too!
1 comments

Can you give some examples you fail to find with Google?
Not right now, I've just done it enough times. It's often when I want to do a search with 6+ words and all of them are important. But because some of them are e.g. "C++ default constructor" google just gives me C++ 101 answers and disregards the rest of my query.

The searches had to do with real things as well as programming.

Yea, this one happens a lot. I was getting scope 101 results for something I was searching yesterday. I've basically given up on mobile search, it feels worse there.
From this past weekend, I was trying to find a shirt I'd seen another student wear back when I was in highschool (~2004), with what I thought was the phrase "How many plants had to die for your stupid salad?"

Just about all the results were for vegan activism, without a hint of it being a joke/phrase.

The top result when switching to "verbatim" mode was the joke, standalone, correcting "plants" to "vegetables". (Searching for the correct phrase in either mode got me to a zazzle page with a shirt identical to what I remember, but that's not really relevant to "use verbatim search!")

When a framework you use

-has uses a weirdly named something

- and Google fuzzes it to something it has a million results for

I think this has happened twice, despite of me using both doublequotes and verbatim.

I've reported it and they've fixed it shortly afterwards but it is really annoying.