> This is the thing people don't get about search. Not only is it incredibly difficult to accurately predict what content will give people exactly what they want, but there is an entire class of bad actors dedicated to making the results worse.
Most of my problems with Google isn't about spam sites.
Most of my problems with Google are because half the pages they show me doesn't include my search terms.
This isn't a hard problem and I'm tired of hearing people defend it.
Yes, years ago people would keyword stuff pages with white text on white background. I haven't seen this in years.
I hadn't realized it but I already do this for some things. I build things with Ruby on Rails infrequently enough that I need to reference docs a lot. I've been trained to not bother searching "the web", and instead go straight to the official guides[1]. I'm also Firefox user, so I've set up a dozen or so "keyword" searches[2]. "wiki " brings me to Wikipedia results for , similar for yf- yahoo finance, az- amazon, etc.. For me, this has been the killer feature for Firefox that would prevent me from using Chrome even if there weren't privacy/consolidation of power issues.
[1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/ [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
By all means continue to use your browser of choice, but Chrome does offer the same functionality for as many search engines as you'd like [1]. By default, the keyword for search engines you've used before is just the domain name of the website where the search engine is (which the omnibar is pretty good at filling in for you) but you can customize it to be whatever you want.
[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426?hl=en&co=GENI...
good to know!
I'm pretty sure that DDG also offers this type of filtering through their "bang" shortcuts. [0]
I think we need to stop using search so much. Curated indexes of information are often better for finding what you need. They organize bodies of knowledge that enable us to do more than just play detective and scavenger hunt.
Take a library for example. To find out how to repair a stuck brake caliper, you don't go to the library and tell the librarian "stuck caliper fix". You say "Can I have a book on auto repair, or on repairing car brakes?" You get the book, and it's an index of organized knowledge. In that book you'll learn how to fix the stuck caliper, but also see what causes stuck calipers and how to prevent them - because it's not blog spam designed to fix one error, it's organized knowledge.
Wikipedia is a great curated index. It is literally a giant list of links, with paragraphs summarizing what you can find in different pieces of the links. (it's also an entire semantic database, but ignore that) If you suggested starting Wikipedia to people today, they'd probably say it was crazy and nobody would use it because of how difficult it would be and that the results wouldn't be useful or accurate. And in spite of all that being true, people today probably can barely imagine life without Wikipedia.