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by uxp100 2121 days ago
I think there are types of searches it does very poorly on, but also different people have different expectations. In my experience, if something is a product for sale, the first several pages are always places to buy it, which is never what I’m looking for, I already have online shops I like and saw the item there, or am searching from inside a store. I want reviews, forum experience, or even just pictures. for example, actual pictures of a bike rack installed on a bike like mine, not just the manufacturer’s steel floating in a white void pics.

In addition, google has become very aggressive with disregarding words. So a search like (a fake example, not tried the search, not a real place) Jim’s tasty pizza Albuquerque 90s where I’m searching for where a restaurant I remember as a child was located, and has maybe 5 real results from a local history Wordpress blog 15 years ago and Facebook posts, Google will just drop everything specific and give you results for Albuquerque pizza, and then mainly show ads for national chains up top. So I need quotes in the search pretty much always.

1 comments

If you go into the advanced search options you can tell Google to explicitly search on what you type. I use it so often for the reasons you point out (because nowadays in their infinite wisdom they will helpfully ignore quotes too) it occurs to me I should either find an extension or script to just have it enabled by default.