[DoingIsLearning]

> Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL

There used to be a 'verbatim' mode that would do exactly that. The quotes symbol were also a way to enforce verbatim mode.

Sadly this behaviour of "let me assume what you want" is not exclusive of google as I also now experience this on ddg.

[freediver]

As an anecdote, we have implemented a really strict exact match at Kagi (meaning quotes do exactly what they are supposed to do). We did receive some feedback that we should relax it a bit mostly because non-alphanum character matching (some users wanted them ignored) and occasional empty results page (some users were not used to getting an empty result page as Google almost always returns something, even if it is not what they searched for).

[brimwats]

how capable is your Boolean searching? could I do `(catalog* OR classif*) AND (archiv* OR librar* OR museum*)`? does it support AND/OR booleans?

[DoingIsLearning]

I would also be curious if you're able to filter results by site or country domain? (similar to now depricated google keywords with "site:foo.com" or "domain:.bar")

[freediver]

We could build this feature, you can suggest at https://kagifeedback.org

[freediver]

Yes you can. Star will work too.

[twofornone]

What I don't understand is that the verbatim option still exists, it just doesn't seem to do anything. And quotes don't seem to work anymore either. It's all very insulting.

[swat535]

Regarding the quotes, I actually notice they do work. However the difference is that it doesn't highlight where the string was matched in the search result index page.

So for example if you google "Food", all the results _will_ contain the string "Food" somewhere in the page (if you don't believe me, try it). It can also match somewhere in the comments or metadata which is useless..

So the feature is still there but it's nowhere as useful as it once was.

I recall a Google engineer who confirmed this once but maybe one of them lurking in the thread can clarify it?

[nabakin]

In my case quotes still work but they aren't as good as they once were

[monkpit]

Quotes haven’t worked for about 10 years now. For my job in 2012 I very often had to google obscure part numbers to find documentation.

Even if you added quotes to the part number (such as “foo123-x”, google would return results for “foo234-x” or “foo123-y” and bold them as if they had matched. The real part numbers could be 10-20 characters long, so it was more difficult to spot discrepancies.

I learned very quickly not to trust the results even when adding quotes. If I had assumed the quotes had worked, I would have grabbed bad documentation without even realizing it.

[Melatonic]

You have to both quote the term(s) and then check the box for "verbatim". Then it should generally work. Have you all tried doing both at once?

edit: It is a pain in the ass though

[nabakin]

What I mean is that quotes still improve looking up specific strings, but yeah, not as good as they once were and getting progressively worse.