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Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature? (derp.foo)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren't any exact matches, which is the whole point.

Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Duckduckgo for the win

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use ddg and I find it endlessly frustrating. Am I doing something wrong or is there a privacy/quality tradeoff?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

There's definitely a quality trade off. DDG uses bing for search results (which, at one point they were letting bing keep tracking data on you so it's debatable if they're much better than google), and bing's results are definitely inferior to google's. I don't really notice a difference unless I'm trying to find hard to find info, but it's very obvious on searches for things like troubleshooting a problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Duckduckgo is probably even worse for this. For example, you can't filter words with by putting "-" before it. You can find years worth of forum posts begging for the feature.

I committed to using ddg for a few years, but after realizing that I was using bangs for anything but the most trivial searches, I had to be honest with myself and just give up on it.

Oh shit... After looking it up it's gotten worse since I quit: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04/24/duckduckgo-disables-most-search-filters-from-search/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dang I did notice it was pretty flakey with the "-"

What's not Google and better than ddg?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I wish I knew