Imagine having a roommate who doesn't remember you want to avoid sugar and are allergic to nuts, yet keeps making PBJ sandwiches when it's his turn to make dinner. That and you're getting effin PBJ for dinner.
Web search: Don't show me anything from this domain again.
Google: You are so keen to remember things about me that I don't want you to remember. But you don't bother to remember what I reject? Of course, because I am the product, not the customer. This feature might run afoul of your relationship with advertisers, yeah?
Yelp search: You've suggested this place before, I spent the time to read the details and reviews and rejected it, but you keep showing it to me on future searches, and because as a human I can't remember all the stuff you've showed me before, I waste time considering it all over again. You even show me places I rated 1 star. STOP!
Maybe DuckDuckGo could add this feature? Please? Pretty Please?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
I find, when searching for info on a relatively uncommon bug DDG will give me a page that starts with a relevant stackoverflow answer then continues on to list a bunch of sites that scrape SO and repost the content. It's extremely annoying.
Google had this for a while. I think their customers complained.
And to reach such a page, you have to go through ads on the results page, then a newsletter popup (sometimes two, these days), then ads all around the content (which is still marketing, remember).
This is nuts.
So when a categorizing user does a search and clicks on a result that takes them to best-auto-parts.co.uk, they click "Shopping" on their categorization toolbar. After one or two matching categorizations, that site gets excluded from searches which have "shopping sites" turned off.
You could also turn the categorizing thing around and decide that you only want to search within web forums (phpBB systems and similar), where you'll often find people posting rather esoteric knowledge about whatever esoteric car you're searching for.
Honestly what I'd really like is a toggle that I can flip over to say "only show me sites that aren't trying to sell me shit", and then maybe I can read an honest review about the tent I'm interested in without 50 bullshit blog entries that just copy-pasted the manufacturer's copy and added an Amazon affiliate link.
If Facebook had an api, you could filter based on the tags just provided by your contacts or something like that.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
Try this one weird trick to get only what you searched for on Google:
Click on the "Tools" link (under the search box) and change "All results" to "Verbatim" and I think (I dont know for sure) that this will only search for exactly what you typed.
The amount you have to screw up the results to get people to prefer the real results is greater than the difference in performance of the major engines.
Conclusion? Search quality is a cost center at google at this point in the game — they have no economic incentive to improve it further.
Or maybe they figured that most people do very simple searches nearly all the time.
So we know embedded ads all around the internet aren't challenging it in any way.
That said I don't know what percentage of their "google property" ad revenue is youtube, gmail, etc. Maybe they're cash cows?
I'm inclined to think it's still mostly search though simply because it's the most valuable source of lead. One where the consumer has buying intent.
Searching for a new car Vs trying to watch a show and having a car shown to you before it.
https://gist.github.com/paulp/91d657489b617dbb7de6db8b7c4fe4...
If you think you were frustrated before, just wait: you get to issue about three searches before you have to solve captchas to see the results. Google thinks only bots want to use those features simultaneously.
what's wrong with !i
Even though I can’t set this for a default, I can at least choose it when necessary and it’s faster than quote escaping terms.
Another nice feature of DDG is that the '-' operator works very well.
Ddg has been slowly cranking up synonym search, but it’s much better executed (triggers less often) than google’s implementation.
It's a success if only a few power user nerds are the ones using extra syntax.
I used this as default before I switched to DuckDuckGo completely. For a software developer google.de results are pretty useless. Switching the language to English helps a bit, but ncr results are a lot better for software and tech topics.
Also, if you want to break out of your own bubble and get non-personalized results, Google is pretty useless, because of the annoying data protection pop up.
Pretty much the only times I use Goggle is for local search , otherwise I’m pretty happy with ddg.
However you can set the region you want results for in your preferences. https://www.blog.google/products/search/making-search-result...
In my experience Google is usually giving more relevant results to software development related searches, so I would like to retain that at least as an option.
Looking through too many search pages, or using queries containing quotes and other "advanced" things like site: or intext: or intitle: operators tends to get you blocked by Google pretty quickly, which is extremely infuriating --- and the point at which I switch to DDG or something else for a while.
Not even this works sometimes. Utterly infuriating. I'm still pissed about their removal of searching forums exclusively.
> Exclude words from your search
> Put - in front of a word you want to leave out. For example,
jaguar speed -car
roses -flowers
roses
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&filter=0&num=100
You could easily add the verbatim parameter as well.
Nothing similar for safari?
Sadly ddg doesn’g have a clear verbatim mode either, but it’s not as bad as google search yet.
I mean, in some ways, it's great. I can get a song lyric or a football score or a movie ticket very easily.
But research? Forget it.
Queried a one word string that is probably in hundreds of pages.
Got 5 bogus results.
On the plus side, I noticed ddg has apparently fixed an issue they used to have with prefixing result urls with a ddg proxy url, as other search engines are known to do.
To disable this, previously the user had to turn on Javascript. I never use Javascript, and I got the urls unprefixed, as they should be.
search: test2 (no quotes)
23 results
15 had test2 inurl
3 had test2 intitle
0 had test2 inpage
5 were not found inurl, intitle or elsewhere
see below
1. http://www.test.com/
2. https://dndprojects.anheuser-busch.com/mobile
3. https://www.icardnet.uillinois.edu/public/
4. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_content_en/dmv/pubs/interactive/tdrive/clc3written?lang=en
5. https://test.salesforce.com/
cname is "test.l2.salesforce.com"
"For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal.
"Our compact encoding uses two bytes for every hit. There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits. Fancy hits include hits occurring in a URL, title, anchor text, or meta tag. Plain hits include everything else."
"We chose a compromise between these options, keeping two sets of inverted barrels -- one set for hit lists which include title or anchor hits and another set for all hit lists. This way, we check the first set of barrels first and if there are not enough matches within those barrels we check the larger ones."
"Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight."
source: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Would the above one word search for text2 perform "admirably" if it only examined title, meta tags and url?
Popular searches, fancy hits, type-weight, ranking.
And then there is everything else.
I bet this is great for current events like “when is Star Wars 1 playing” when the person probably meant Star Wars 8. But sucks when researching items or searching for a paper or particular product.
I started using Duck Duck Go and it works great. The privacy is an added bonus.