[everdrive]

>It treats its power users like kids

It's worse than that: Google's power user features used to work reliably and repeatably. Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it.

I've recently noticed that Youtube has a similar feature. If you search for a video, you'll only get a small number of results before Youtube will start showing you "recommendations" which are only somewhat related to your original search. Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

It just seems that raw search is disappearing, and "recommendation engines" are appearing everywhere.

[mohanmcgeek]

> Somewhat ironically, the only way to avoid this is to query via Google (site:youtube.com [term]) where you will get a much larger set of results.

Even more ironically and many here would have experienced this themselves: the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

[erklik]

> the best way to find something on YouTube is to use Bing

Weirdly the same is the case for reddit.

What I really want I guess is, a search engine, where i can provide you sites to index, and when I am searching, I only search through those sites. That's it.

[etherealG]

What about discovery of sites you don’t know about. The whole purpose of he internet is that we’re all connected, but you seem to want only an extended private network.

[erklik]

A surprsingly large amounts of time I use Google, is to mainly to search on either reddit, stackoverflow, hackernews etc. Even searching for other sites is helpful using those sites i.e. searching for developer blogs gets far better results if I add reddit to it.

I think Google has it's place. However, I also think that an additional search engine like the one I described would be a very nice and useful tool. At least for me.

[mohanmcgeek]

Google fails miserably over there too.

First page is full of results from a handful of sites.

[JohnFen]

> Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you.

Google trying to interpret what you want is, in my opinion, the largest reason that the search has become so bad. It guesses very poorly, and I end up having to try to guess what the magic incantation is to get it to give the what I'm searching for.

[zeruch]

"Now Google tries even harder to figure out what you "want" and filters you results invisibly for you. You can't turn this feature off, and are are unable to easily or obviously avoid it."

This. So much this.

And it is so...bloody...annoying.