Comment by rockskon
14 days ago
The primary source of frustration of Google being terrible at search these days is its penchant for ignoring search terms you use or giving you results for words that are spelled similar to what you searched for.
Google has an extreme bias towards giving you search results based on the most commonly available search results for a query that sorta-kinda-maybe sounds like yours.
That has nothing to so with personalization being turned on or off.
The case I recently ran into was trying to find information on the format of resource entries for New Executables (which is the executable file format for the Win16 era). Precious few of the results were even about NE in the first place; like half of them were on the ELF format (the Unixen file format), which doesn't even have a concept of a resource table, so you have to throw away most of the search string for the result to be even plausibly related.
Basically a common StackOverflow problem: "Well, you asked for X, but I don't know how to do X, so here's how to do Y instead."
Except more often then not the info I'm looking for does exist and is available with generous use of double quotes to direct Google to do literal string searches. Except yesterday I encountered Google refusing to honor even that for a search of a cultural event that sounded like "Dante's Inferno" but with a slight misspelling. Even encapsulating the phrase with the spelling I'm looking for in double quotes - Google still gave me matches for "Dante's Inferno" instead.
Oddly enough Google gave me what I was looking for with a literal string search on mobile (followed by a confirmation that I wanted what I typed in and not what Google autocorrected it to).
On the search results screen there's a "Tools" dropdown that lets you change "All results" to "Verbatim", sounds like that's what you actually wanted.
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