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Anyone fed up of google rewriting search terms?

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ToughDiamond
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11 Nov 2023, 5:12 pm

PhosphorusDecree wrote:
I also use DuckDuckGo for everything. No real issues with it, though I wish they had an "advanced search" system. Those seem to have died out everywhere. My problem with current search engines in general is that they don't understand the word "not." Often I'm trying to find something which is a bit of niche interest but has some keywords in common with something much more popular, and there is no reliable way to screen out the hundreds of wrong results.

You can precede a word in your search terms with a minus sign, which is supposed to de-prioritise results containing that word. Not quite the same as excluding it completely of course.



zacb
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11 Nov 2023, 8:16 pm

PhosphorusDecree wrote:
I also use DuckDuckGo for everything. No real issues with it, though I wish they had an "advanced search" system. Those seem to have died out everywhere. My problem with current search engines in general is that they don't understand the word "not." Often I'm trying to find something which is a bit of niche interest but has some keywords in common with something much more popular, and there is no reliable way to screen out the hundreds of wrong results.


My only issue with DuckDuck is they bent over and got scared. If I want to look for something that is not illegal but is censored, Yandex tends to do better without clouding with far out there stuff to muddy the waters.



GeekyFreak
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12 Nov 2023, 2:29 pm

sodepressed wrote:
How the hell did this insidious site ever become so monopolistic? Often I'm already looking through the results, and end up confused because they don't match what I searched for... before, as usual, realizing they've rewritten them, because hey, there's absolutely no reason anyone should search for anything different apart from what everyone already searches for! Ugh...


Could you elaborate?

Was it that you searched for dogs and it changed it to cats? Did it change it to hotdogs? Google uses cookies so if you frequently seach for dogs and click on Ballpark Franks, its going to assume you mean hotdogs.

Did it give you unspecified results? Quotations mean to include a specific word or string. "Dogs" will result only in C. lupis familiaris.



NibiruMul
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04 Dec 2023, 1:14 pm

I still use Google because it's better and more accurate than other search engines. I don't get why Bing is the default for Windows, especially because Google is much more popular.



ToughDiamond
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04 Dec 2023, 1:35 pm

NibiruMul wrote:
I still use Google because it's better and more accurate than other search engines. I don't get why Bing is the default for Windows, especially because Google is much more popular.

It's because Microsoft owns both Windows and Bing. Microsoft is always trying to nudge people into using their stuffy

As for Google, with me it's mostly their privacy and security problems, plus the fact that Google are IMO a bunch of rich greedy jerks and I try not to have anything to do with people like that, except to antagonise them. In my case an adequate search engine is all I want, so I use Duck until something more suitable turns up. But it's horses for courses.