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[-] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 39 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I keep reading this, but Google still limits itself to your search terms 100% if you put them in quotation marks separately.
And you can exclude specific terms completely with a minus and quotation marks.

"searchterm1" "searchterm2" -"excluderesultswiththisterm"  

If you want results containing just one of your terms, put OR between them.

I haven't found another (free) search engine that respects these limits completely.
If your results still suck using this trick, it's because the internet as a whole sucks a lot more now. Forums are dead, blog posts are written by AI and heavily optimized to push them up in the search results, and all interesting info written by humans is in chat apps now.

[-] Bgugi@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago

The fact that I have to put every word in quotes feels like getting on my knees and pleading for the search I actually want.

[-] Kethal@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The fact that results are worse because the Internet is worse is certainly a talking point Google is currently pushing hard. It's nonsense of course. The Internet was absolute, abysmal garbage when Google was created, mostly filled with junk Web sites made by conmen, narcissists and high school kids. In short, it was no different from today. Google pulled up the tiny portion of value from the dredges, and it did so for years even as people kept churning out junk. The fact that they could filter through the immense pile of junk was, until recently, a key feature they marketed about themselves. What has changed recently isn't the proportion of junk on the Internet. It's how Google ranks its searches and the fact that now Google gets a large portion of its revenue selling ads on sites, sites it lists in its search results.

this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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