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0 pointsori_b5y ago0 comments

Google has gotten worse for me BECAUSE of the stuff you're talking about: It used to search everything and find the words that I cared about.

Today, it will silently guess at what I want, and rewrite the query. If they have indexed pages that contain the words I put in, but don't meet their freshness/recency/goodness criteria, they will return OTHER pages with content that contains vaguely related words. "Oh, he couldn't have meant that, it's from 6 months ago, and it's niche!"

They'll even show this off by bolding the words I didn't want to search for.

So, if I'm looking for something that isn't popular -- duckduckgo it is. It doesn't do this kind of rewriting, so my queries still work.

0 comments

Springtime5y ago

I'm not sure what has changed but I've experienced of late DDG participating in a similar style of result padding/query ignoring which has been publicly brought up in Reddit feedback (and I've certainly complained about using their own feedback form). Seemingly arbitrarily even double quoted strings I've observed being ignored which is not how it was even six months ago.

I still continue to use it though since as some here have already mentioned Google's results because worse a few years ago and DDG was lean and good enough to switch. I do hope they'd consider more such feedback.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsori_b5y ago0 comments

Google has gotten worse for me BECAUSE of the stuff you're talking about: It used to search everything and find the words that I cared about.

They'll even show this off by bolding the words I didn't want to search for.

So, if I'm looking for something that isn't popular -- duckduckgo it is. It doesn't do this kind of rewriting, so my queries still work.

0 comments

Springtime5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse