The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.
Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~.
I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and haven't found it to work in any logical way.
Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
Just now I had to give up trying to look up "the term for fans that are paid actors" and variations.
Asking on Reddit or Stack Overflow would be faster than Google's search engine for some things now.
It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it to let users to force a specific word to be present in a search result.
So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing another character, and it it is still not always respected.
Deprecate: "express disapproval of."
Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time."
I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated".
Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be updated easily or at all. "Depreciated" is a far better word to use with a far better outcome. AWS versions their APIs, they don't remove old ones. "I disapprove of using this API and we're taking it away at some random date" vs "this isn't the latest API, use the current one for new development" seems like a pretty stark difference in thinking to me. YMMV.
Same browser, different overloads.
Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
One day I actually DID need to find something local and so I dutifully typed my search into the FF url bar and hit enter. My default search is DDG but my brain stroked off for a second because the results that came back were 100% what I was looking for and I thought I was on Google. Give it a shot again, they're getting better.
I’d love to see an “anti-seo search engine” that eschews all results that are oriented around selling a product, but I don’t think it’s feasible to bring back the joy of finding a new online community/forum every day.
Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage.
Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all.
I do miss some of Big G's cards, and their Maps is vastly superior to DDG's Apple Maps integration, even despite GMap's advertising. DDG's solution is wild, really: they use Apple for static-image-only maps with no real contextual interface, only a sidebar for search results. If you want directions, you must search for your destination by text alone, then in the sidebar choose to get directions from one of four providers (defaulting to Bing).
But when I just want an engine to match the text I give it (i.e. most of the time), DDG performs at least as well as Google's increasingly-fuzzy matching.
Remember Google Code Search, and Google (Usenet) Groups? Back then, Google cared about this stuff. Now they seem only to want to show you furniture ads, or get you to use their Zoom knockoff, etc.
These days Google substitutes the heck out of searches. Perhaps it's better if you've logged in, but I'd rather hack my leg off with a rusty saw than voluntarily log in to an account just to search the web.
1. the immense online/open-source nature of the profession: every blog/forum question and answer/documentation since the origin of the profession being in plain-text and mostly publicly accessible by default
2. and it all revolves around a precise, limited vocabulary.
github search has its own search operators:
https://docs.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-...
I've never wanted anything fancy:
- don't show me paid search results - show me a blank page if there are no results - make it easy to 'AND' terms (+include +search +terms) - most importantly: search for my damned search terms! If you want to "did you mean" my spelling, fine. I don't really care. But it's unacceptable to ever drop a search term.
I have plenty of other complaints about Google, but in terms of search quality, those are the relevant ones.
TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's has researched the origins of town names in England, and is considered [0] to be "the established national body on the subject".
My Dad worked for Mullard, which was renamed to Philips Electronics and relocated to Dorking.
Another local here; 20 years in Horsham now Haywards Heath
Perhaps a mini meet-up is in order? :)
Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
So a search including all sites related to an entity, say Munich or python along with the terms the user is searching because a page might then not specifically include the entity in its keywords or the text on the site or have a different language or use a synonym.
I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user.
Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search?
For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?
I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.
As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.
e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"
turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
For example, try searching the following string in quotes: "the SERP should stay the same".
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20sta...
Now, the logical presumption, assuming Google works as people say it does, is that each result will contain that exact string. If no results contain the string, then you should receive no results.
However, for me, results are returned. Did each of the results from that search contain this exact string? For me, they did not.
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity and a much better set of results...
I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.
The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too.
One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.)
Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML:
"Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent".If there is such a page, can you give an example query that would trigger it?
Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to use sites like alternativeto.net.
~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms by default
phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this way +compulsoryTerm
Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search engines would benefit.
In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are searching for people because it does some facial recognition.
Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
i highly doubt that's a concern. Google's competitive advantage will not be eroded if they did have operators clearly documented. Another search engine could not replicate google's index, even if they could replicate the operators.
And most people do want to just type human speak and have the machine magically interpret it correctly.
It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I find what I think I want to find. Google is much more interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable and 2) giving me results they think I want.
Ah, Google, always so reluctant to get rid of anything legacy because of their fanatical devotion to their existing user base.
The broader OSINT has used dorking for a decade plus (e.g. exploit-db.com goes back to 2003).
The goal in writing this was to democratize access beyond those who use it regularly for work
Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
Google should reinstate the + prefix operator. It was only taken out because it screwed up the search results for Google+, which is dead now.
You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.
Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't know why that would be called "dorking" either?
The web is slowly atrophying. Going back in time for originals makes a big difference.
Reverse is also true.
After a blow up the mass media will repeat the same thing on mass and swamp results.
Often an article in the last hour might have what you want, like the database link they are all talking about.
I sure do.
Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.
Now when you
a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that
b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it
Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.
You can more or less replicate the functionality with intext:specific.url/subsite
Will update and credit you.
1) Great information!
2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko's "SQL For Smarties", but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that.
3) "Dorking" (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! <g>
generally "phrase" works well too
The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't been posted anywhere indexed
Will update and credit
i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless
https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
(also: you'll want to remove the space between site: and news.ycombinator.com)