This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.

Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.

Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.

Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.

So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.

Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.

For example say my question is: "how to use rails with devise and omniauth", I break it down to the group in which I think nets the most results should be the first keyword and so on.

1. rails 2. devise 3. omniauth

rails+devise+omniauth: https://www.google.com/search?q=rails+devise+omniauth

rails+omniauth+devise: https://www.google.com/search?q=rails+omniauth+devise

omniauth+devise+rails: https://www.google.com/search?q=omniauth+devise+rails

how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+use+rails+with+devise...

The top results are normally similar. With exception to the "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" search, which is rather different.

From my standpoint the "rails+devise+omniauth" yields the best results as the source of truth is closer to the github documentation "OmniAuth: Overview · plataformatec/devise Wiki · GitHub", over third party information "#235 Devise and OmniAuth (revised) - RailsCasts".

Using "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" gets rather off topic after the 3 or so results.

Another tactic I use is searching like a command line. For instance: "wiki list breaking bad", or "imdb iron man". This don't work with smaller properties, so "site:example.com" is another awesome tool.

Just my two cents.

That's a really fantastic observation. I suspect that lots of these changes are meant for those kinds of people (who happen to make up the majority of the world) and not for tech folks at all.

But yeah, I notice that if I ask a question, quite often the results I get are on question asking sites like Stack Overflow -- it turns out I usually get very good results that way too ;)

However, I just tried a search for "anagram +python" and got 67 results vs 139,000 without the plus-sign. Does that mean they quietly restored the operator?

I always use it to filter out commercial or store results when a query triggers some over-zealous SEO and throws up pages of junk. A quick "-buy" or "-store" usually cleans the results up.

Google results are getting worse and worse IMO and there don't appear to be any tools left in the available query language to rectify it.

They're optimising for normal people who don't formulate query strings in Google, but they ask questions or just search.

I honestly suspect Google is A/B testing search results somehow.

†https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?hl=en

Apparently the double-quote still works. Well, that's good.

But it seems inevitable that as google targets what most people mean, they will target less what niche people mean (us). They could do both, with explicit operators etc, but would double their indices, and not worth it (for them). :( At least it creates opportunity for the google-usurper.

Then there's "file:" and a file extension name to find searches of that filetype. (example: "AP biology file:ppt" returns all ap biology related powerpoints.

Next there's "site:" and a website. (Example: "site:reddit.com fedoras" searches for fedoras on reddit, a very common thing. Useful if a site's search engine sucks.)

I often simply ignore site search boxes in favor of using the "site:" operator.

[1]https://www.google.com/cse/

[2]http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gsa.html

Searching for a few random queries with either "file:pdf" or "filetype:pdf" shows that both return pdfs, but the results that I get are different. Not sure what to make of that or which is better.

[1] http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html

"filetype:pdf" seems to be the only command which reliably returns just .pdfs.

I'm in the UK, your mileage may vary.

   Who said, "To hair is human?"

  exact: Who said, "To hair is human?"

@nimble: what about when you intentionally search for a misspelling?

Thanks for pointing that out.

"heir" is a much closer match for "hair" in terms of Levenshtein distance[1] (which indicates a typing error) and soundex[2] (misheard). But clearly "to err is human" should be offered as a possibility too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Usually you can click "search for {what I actually typed}" but it's still annoying. I liked it when +'s and double-quotes consistently did the same thing every time.

Maybe there is a setting that does this still? I've tried playing with a few settings but have had mixed results / consistency...

I would love an advanced search mode with some simple boolean logic, even if it took several seconds to return the result, for those times when you really need to sift through a lot of garbage to find the results you really want.

What is the point of Google returning results in 0.000000001 seconds if they aren't the results I wanted and I have very little means of refining the search. The moment a new search engine comes with this functionality and a decent indexed base, it's bye-bye Google for me.

It's worked out really well. That plus the !g operator in ddg means I get the best of both worlds, I'd suggest you try it for a day or so and see how it goes.

It is a boatload of extra typing, but the "allintext:" operator is your friend for those kinds of searches. I wish there was a URL modifier that could force google to assume allintext: on the search - that way I could have two different google search engines in firefox, one for literal and one for more "semiotic" searches. Maybe there is and I just don't know it?

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html...

[1] http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-...

EDIT: Looks like Chrome works in a similar manner: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95653

That being said machine learning is far from perfect. Allowing for user correction is still an immense must.

Let's hope basic search operators like quotes don't go away anytime soon.

I wish the 1998 Google page that made the front page on HN was real (with updated index of course).