[n_ary]

Off-topic: I am immensely happy with latest google update, because now if I search for something that is too obscure, google simply shows me an empty page with no results found, which tells me that I need to refine my search query. Previously, if such thing happened, I'd get a list of spam sites which does not include the query at all, or simply uses the query somewhere not visible on the page.

[michaeljhg]

Used to be able to just use quotes to find exact matches

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

[b112]

That was always a lie. Always. Exact quotes were often disregarded, and even sometimes still aliased. What exists for precision is "verbatim", which was added after some bonehead a Google decided that the + operator, such as +needthisprecisely, was conflicting with "Google Plus" searches.

So they deprecated the + operator, and started blathering on about how quotes did "the same thing", which it never did, and never has!

If you want terms to appear as typed, the closest thing to the old + is "verbatim" under "tools" after a search. Verbatim was added back in, after people howled at the loss of the + operator.

Note the + referenced:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021515/http://www.google...

You can see that in 2004, Google never aliased terms, the ~ operator was for that.

(Everyone used + for "always include this", for any needed word, for almost 15 years before Google removed it.)

[is_true]

now that google+ is long gone they could reinstate the + modifier

[logicchains]

I feel the opposite. Often I'm searching some obscure error message or function name from an open source project; I'd expect Google to at the very least provide a result linking to the Github page where the thing is defined, but nope, nothing. Bing on the other hand gives me exactly what I'm looking for in the first few results.

[stefan_]

This has been my experience. Google can now not even find substrings from source code found in thousands of GitHub repos. It's rapidly getting useless for programming.

[londons_explore]

Google doesn't seem to index all of github, which is very frustrating when looking for code strings or error messages that you know are included in some opensource project.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd be with you here, if not that I've long learned to associate an empty results page with the search engine timeouting or otherwise breaking. Refreshing the page would usually fix it.