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Re:Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse? by usr1106 on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @01:41PM (#25140594)
I recently wanted to search shops in a small French city while being in Finland. Unfortunately the name of the city happened to be very close to a rather common Finnish word (not even really identical). Google insisted to show me Finnish hits, I could not find a way by quoting and adding semi-common French search words to make their algorithms what I want. I could just not get up any reasonable French matches.

Just to demonstrate the effect to myself I took a VPN connnection to France and voilà, very useful hits.

That's the geographic dimension of the search bubble. I am sure there are more.

(I never use Google search when I am logged in to Google and I delete my cookies at least daily. So things should be pretty neutral for me. Someone might say, hah, your fault. If you hadn't subverted their profiling you'd get better results. I doubt that, I had not heard about that French city before and I certainly search more Finnish pages than French ones.)

Re:Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse? by guillaume8375 on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @03:09PM (#25141790)
You could have put a minus sign before the Finnish word; a minus sign before a word excludes this word from the results.
Re:Ask HN: Are Google products getting worse? by boredatworkme on Thursday November 19, 2020 @12:40AM (#25146591)
Tailoring Google search queries feels so much like writing Regular Expressions.