Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algorithm, “Hummingbird”

Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by porso9 on Thursday September 26, 2013 @03:07PM (#6452910)

Yeah, people really need to know how to google effectively. You can also add "-" before a word to cut out results with that word. (example: "cats -dogs" will return searches with cats but take out ones that also include dogs.)

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.)

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Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by cynwoody on Thursday September 26, 2013 @03:27PM (#6453034)

In my experience, as a rule, site search engines generally suck. And the exceptions to the rule often turn out to be farming the search out to Google one way or another.[1][2]

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

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Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by the_watcher on Thursday September 26, 2013 @03:11PM (#6452936)

site: is one of the more useful search operators I've discovered. It's almost always better than a site search button for me.

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Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by ivanbrussik on Thursday September 26, 2013 @05:02PM (#6453627)

is file: different than filetype:

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Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by eieio on Thursday September 26, 2013 @06:00PM (#6453906)

file: doesn't appear to be a documented command, while filetype is [1]

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

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Re:Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algor... by James_Duval on Friday September 27, 2013 @06:16AM (#6456230)

For me, "file:pdf" returns .pdfs, .pdf documentation, .pdf information...all kinds of things which aren't .pdf.

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

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

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