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ventaCan 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:
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:
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:
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.)
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.)
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no subject
Date: 2013-01-29 04:59 pm (UTC)Although a GreaseMonkey script that automatically wrapped your search terms in double quotes would be a good start. And might exist already?
no subject
Date: 2013-01-29 05:01 pm (UTC)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 :)