Comment by JetSetWilly
2 years ago
> A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has an area known as ‘Saint Helena Island’. For this reason it is best when using Google™ to append to your search ‘-napa -carolina -california’, which will remove many of these irrelevant results.
Not any more! Since google "enhanced" their search to remove such operators. I just tried searching in this way for eg some restaurants and there was indeed a bunch of irrelevant results even with the exclusions. I wonder what they do now.
The operators work for me. I get different results with and without '-napa -carolina -california'.
Truly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"
Yeah they're not actually parsing your operators anymore. They're feeding the whole query to some machine learning model they trained and pulling "what you really meant" out of that.
It seems to me the map at the top ignores the minuses.
Do any regular web results show your - terms? I'm not seeing any in my testing.
Disclosure, I work at Google but not on anything related to this.
I also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.
I switched to Kagi and never looked back, it's like Google was before a decade of enshittification.
How curated and censored are the search results with Kagi? As someone involved with Tantra, for example, I rely on sites that are niche and not always SFW.
You can raise/pin the NSFW domains to curate the results yourself to what you'd generally prefer to see.
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Kagi uses the Google Search API. Its results are largely Google results.
Sure, but without the ad and SEO spam, it's a totally different experience. It's really a testament to how much damage Google has done to its own product in the name of monetization.
Depends where you live, for me in UK it brings up a) a location in uk, then the rest are about the island.
[Saint Helena Island] brings up only results about the island
When did Google do this?
At least five years ago. Drives me crazy.
It’s their M.O. Relentlessly cut “power user” features. Relentlessly undermine the user’s wishes and redirect the user to Google’s preferred results.
I don’t know why we continue to put up with it. Boiling frogs I guess.
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I typed St Helena island which worked grest
[flagged]
Not sure what I’m missing but your link does not appear to support your claim?
“For example is a common phrase used to indicate an example or illustration to support a statement. In writing, it is often abbreviated as e.g. and used to introduce an example or series of examples.” (emphasis added)
If you're going to be overly pedandic please at least double check that you are correct