I'm gonna walk right down that street just like a Bulldog Drummond

[venta]

Can anyone recommend a good search engine?

It's kind of fashionable these days to despise Google, the massive global megacorp which is trying to suck us all into some homogenous G-World. But of late, I've hit a more immediate problem. I don't like Google's search engine any more.

Only a few weeks ago I was blogging about being bowled over by Google when I first met it. It just, like, returned results relevant to what you searched for. No unrelated pages, no false positives, no spurious porn. It was fantastic.

Earlier today, I searched[*] for:

doxygen don't link

Here's the top of my search results:



What's it found me? Oh yes, pages which contain the words "doxygen", "don't" and "like". It hasn't bothered to put a message up saying "Did you mean to search for..." it's just silently decided to look for what I obviously meant.

In fairness, further down the page there are also results which contain the word "link". Y'know, like I asked for.

A while back I was looking for a video clip of an illusion in which Franz Harary makes the J-pop star Tackey disappear (by driving a Hummer at him, if you're curious). So I searched for:

franz harary tackey

There aren't a huge number of decent hits... so Google pops some pages with high page rank in slots 3 and 4. Of course, those hits don't actually contain all my search terms (such as Franz Harary's Wikipedia page, which doesn't mention Tackey anywhere). And hence they don't contain the thing I was looking for.

Also, Tackey being a nickname derived from a Japanese name, Google switches in different spellings. Fair enough, some people call him Tacky, or Takki. And of course, I find lots of hits for Franz Harary which contain the word "tacky". Trust me, people say "tacky" about stage illusionists. A lot. I'd really rather you just searched for what I asked for.

The "+" syntax doesn't work any more. Yes, I know you can quote words to say "search for this exactly". When you've just typed 15 search terms into Google, going back and quoting each one individually is a whole bag of laughs. Of course, if you search for:

franz harary "tackey"

it still turns up quite a lot of pages which don't contain the word "tackey", but it cuts down on the dross a little.

I've put up with a lot from Google. I've tolerated them dicking with the links on the search page, so I can't do "Copy Link Location" without copying the messed-up Analytics URLs. I've only grumbled a little about the way they screw up the focus so I can't use backspace to go back from a page of search terms (hitting back deletes a character from the last search term. OK, click on the page to take the focus from the textbox... oh, look, it still deletes a character from the last search term.) The search-as-you-type which incrementally adds search terms seems to me useless, but on a decent connection it's not a problem per se.

But, Google, enough already! I didn't mind when you included results for "acommodation" when I searched for "accommodation". When I searched for "marmelade" and you popped in a message saying "Did you mean: marmalade" that was helpful. But now, you've piled heuristics on heuristics, with the net result that you're now emulating the crap search engines of the late 90s. Y'know, the things which you blew out the water when you just bloody did the bloody searching. Correctly.


[*] If anyone knows how to prevent doxygen from turning things that begin "http://" automatically into clickable links, do let me know. (It's a URI, but not a URL - so doesn't actually respresent a page on the web and shouldn't be clickable.)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Whilst I endorse your rant completely, a workaround for this specific search is: doxygen "don't link"

This works because the engine doesn't seem to carry out substitutions within exact match strings.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, and is in fact what I did - in fact, doxygen don't "link" was sufficient for me to establish that it wasn't going to find what I wanted. (Although I don't blame that on Google - looks like there is no way to persuade doxygen not to do the auto-linking.)

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

It's really annoying that Google removed the + syntax.

I'm afraid I'm about 6 years out of date when it comes to search engines; I did cover quite a few of them in my library degree, but the field has changed so much! I can't even remember which ones are powered by Google any more!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
I recognise only 5 of the general and metasearch engines listed there, and I'm sure I wrote about ones that don't exist any more.

I'm sure I had a point when I started this comment, but I seem to have misplaced it.

[dave [earth.li] (from livejournal.com)]

I assume putting a '%' before the link doesn't work? I'm not really up on doxygen, though maybe I should start writing documentation :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Someone give that man a coconut - that does indeed work. Thank you very much! (On what basis did you guess that? I couldn't find any vestige of hint in the doxygen docs.)

maybe I should start writing documentation

Speaking as a technical author, I encourage you not to bother - virtually no one reads the damn stuff, anyway!

[lnr]

Speaking as a technical author, I encourage you not to bother - virtually no one reads the damn stuff, anyway!

*snort*

[venta.livejournal.com]

Contrariwise, when I've got my programmer hat on, I quite appreciate the stuff. I read it, dammit!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

They mention it for words that doxygen makes into links (e.g. class names), in several places (e.g. the FAQ), but I can't see an explicit mention of it applying to URLs as well.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Once I was armed with the knowledge that the answer was "%", I found it pretty quickly (% basically seems to leave whatever follows it unchanged).

Before I knew what I was looking for, I didn't manage to find it (though I was trying the online docs rather than the FAQ).

[metame.livejournal.com]

"On what basis did you guess that?"

He is very wise.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Imagine my astonishment when I discovered "Ask Jeeves" still exists. Sad! that! altavista! is! now! Yahoo!, though!

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Ask Jeeves did those stupid "Is it right for one company to control all the Web's information" ads a few years back - be less shit and we'll use you, Ask, never mind what's right. They also push their browser toolbar junkware pretty hard, but if we're selecting on evil business practices Google don't come out any better.

I also am vexed by Google's propensity for second-guessing me. I hate to say it, but Bing? Speaking of evil business practices.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Last time I looked, Bing seemed to do a fairly poor job of finding stuff. I'll give it another whirl.

Inspired by nalsa's Ask-related comments above, I've just discovered that Lycos still exists. Who knew? For my current favourite test string (franz harary tackey) it produces results considerably more shite than Google's. Oh, many of which are also produced by Bing (eg http://top-products-services.com/articles/babies.html, which seems to have a text box full of random words at the bottom, ensuring hits for almost anything).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Knowing Google, there's likely a backdoor undocumented syntax option to 'turn off all the clever stuff'.

Although a GreaseMonkey script that automatically wrapped your search terms in double quotes would be a good start. And might exist already?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yes, the GreaseMonkey idea would be a step forward - but still wouldn't, I don't think, be as good as Google used to be (see comments about searching for 'franz harary "tackey"' above).

One of my colleagues did think there was a "just bloody look for it" button, but then couldn't find it. "I feel retro", perhaps :)

[shui-long.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Google when they decided that it would be so much better (for Google) if there was no such thing as privacy. As a result I now use Starting Page (https://startingpage.com/), which uses Google search but doesn't track you, or DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I just found a 'was this search helpful' feedback page and ranted at them.

NO, Google, when I am searching for RSCP (a mobile network technology thing) I do NOT want you to search for RSVP - and not even offer me a 'no, I didn't misspell it, just search for what I typed please' option.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh, there is a page for that, isn't there!

I think I'll submit feedback every time this happens. Every time...