Except a blank page is exactly what I want to see if there are no results or if I mistyped my query. These shoehorned-in results throw me off every time because it takes extra mental effort to reinterpret them as "oh, google has no results for what I typed in past this point, so they're showing me random crap". I miss the old days when search was as precise as a scalpel.

Maybe I'm naive about the complexity of the problem (every article I read about the difficulty of what Google's doing certainly suggests so), but I honestly believe that we've reached the point where a talented and well-founded startup could outplay Google at their own game.

Exactly, it's very easy to see how Google doesn't leave the user unspammed. YouTube's search works the same way, and even if there are useful results on top, they quickly trail off into clickbait garbage. Plus the unrelated lists of ‘people also watch’, injected every few items. The search filters are barely enough to dial in when you want to skip obvious trash, but give up on anything slightly complicated. On Play Store, it's worse: you just get troves of what Google thinks you should be getting, with no control on your side—because if people could skip apps with payment inside, they would, and who in Google wants that.

I'd like to go a step further and hope for "dumb" search engines that are tailored towards indexing specific subsets of the internet as a whole. As an example, imagine a search engine that is specifically tailored towards programming questions. Or one that specifically omits some of the more annoying SEO optimized results, like Livestrong and USA Today.

I think so too. It'd really be nice to get a search capability that doesn't take my past searching into account. I want an unbiased search, and give me good tools to filter.

> DDG gets a honorable mention with its bangs and applets.

Yeah but it ignores most other operands. It's fairly frustrating to be unable to mandate a search term.

«I just want to grep the internet” +1

> Now I wonder, why did GOO break such a useful thing?

As far as I understand it, they want to catch synonyms and different tenses for the words.

But they do a remarkably shit job. nginx and apache2 aren't synonyms, but completely different tools for the same job. Yet apache2 instructions appeared as a match when I've used "nginx" in my query (the word apache2 was in bold in result snippet).

I guess it has something to do with Google Internal dynamics. But I'm not the one being paid big bucks to think about such stuff. Maybe they've done their due diligence and made their tradeoffs, but I'm clearly not the target of the search engine anymore.

I'm only a dumb nobody, so if this is a problem for me, I wonder how it is for all the smart people that hangs out here at HN.

It just feels very uphill to use Google right now. No matter how many flags or tricks.

The median Google search user probably never learned to use any of these "advanced" features in the first place. For them, having Google ignore the precise wording of their query and show results for more common related terms is almost certainly an improvement.