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Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by threeseed on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @09:37PM (#8732898)
Isn't my issue obvious ? I wanted search results that contained the search terms. Otherwise I wouldn't have entered them in the first place.

I understand Google is trying to be clever here and appealing to novices who don't really understand what they want.

But my point is that for those of us that do it is an incredibly annoying "feature". Feature is in quotes because in the specific case above they didn't find semantic equivalents. They just dropped the "webhcat" term entirely.

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by jobposter1234 on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @10:56PM (#8733110)
>Isn't my issue obvious ?

Not touching that with a 10 foot pole... (just teasing, just teasing...)

But seriously, it sounds like what you want is a keyword matching engine. Google, for better or worse, has decided they know enough about their user's searches that they don't mind modifying the query parameter in an attempt to retrieve what people want rather than what they literally say they want.

I understand that you don't feel they're serving your needs any longer, and that can be frustrating. I think, however, that you can preceded mandatory terms with a + sign to require it to be present on page.

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by ahpeeyem on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @11:22PM (#8733177)
After Google Plus was released, Google changed its search syntax slightly so that you now need to "quote" mandatory terms instead of prefixing them with a + symbol.

http://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/3oI...

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by cogburnd02 on Thursday December 11, 2014 @06:06AM (#8734160)
This is really weird, because now I have to enter this:

"singer" "song" -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" "last modified" "parent directory" "description" "size" "m4a"|"mp3"|"ogg"|"flac"

to search for songs. Too many quotation marks!

original, unmodified: http://lifehacker.com/207672/turn-google-into-your-own-perso...

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by desdiv on Thursday December 11, 2014 @05:28AM (#8734072)
I think, however, that you can preceded mandatory terms with a + sign to require it to be present on page.

That was my first reaction too, but I tried it out and it still doesn't work. In fact, the result is kinda funny:

Googling "webhcat primary key" got me 3 results with "webhcat" on the first page.

Googling "+webhcat primary key" got me 5 results in total, none of which contains the word "webhcat".

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by nostrademons on Thursday December 11, 2014 @01:11AM (#8733444)
There's a feature for that: Verbatim mode.

https://www.google.com/search?q=webhcat+primary+key&tbs=li:1

Re:Wouldn't it be fun to build your own Google? by kissickas on Thursday December 11, 2014 @06:16AM (#8734190)
Wow, great to know. I'm sick up putting quotes around half of my keywords.

Unfortunately, now when I search <webhcat primary key> in verbatim mode, the top three results are some dude complaining about Google on HN. :D