• Carnelian@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless

    • tool@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

      I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.

      • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?

        Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?

        Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.

      Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.