If you set your search to “past year” (or any other timeframe restrictions) you can’t also restrict your search to “verbatim” meaning it will bring you any loosely incidentally associated crappe that just might be somewhat sort of relevant to your search terms.
Hate it. Really hate it.
Waking this sleeping thread up to complain about Google search.
Those of us who started using Google when it was in it’s slow launch phase, remember how refreshing it was to have a search page that just said “Google” and had a text entry bar. The other search engines out at the time loved to fill their pages with ads, and other clutter. Google was proud of the simplicity of their search page.
It’s taken 20+ years, but Google has finally added enough junk to their search page that I don’t want to use it anymore. My tolerance for this stuff is low, so many people many not even have noticed the things that are driving me away.
The animated doodles are annoying, but their usually subtle enough I can manage to ignore them. Now I get a popup asking if I want to login. If I wanted to login, I’d click on the little icon up in the corner and login. That I could mostly ignore, as I’m generally logged into Google.
Then came the world cup. I now get a popup asking if I want to see soccer scores. If I wanted to see soccer scores…I’d search for “soccer scores”.
In a small enough window, aka a low res screen, these popups block the search box.
I know I could change how I do things: search from my browser’s address bar, or put a search box in my browsers toolbar, but if I have to change how I’ve done things for 20+ years, that change will involve less searching on Google.
My guess is I’ll be using “!g” on DuckDuckGo a lot. For all of the reasons in the rest of this thread, Google searches are getting worse, but they’re still better than the results I get from anyplace else.
I have to say, I do feel that way. I feel like everything is top-loaded with ads, shopping, twitter feeds, and crap I don’t usually want to see before I can scroll down far enough to get actual webpage text results – and even there, it feels curiously organized to me. And Boolean or literal operators (which I know didn’t always work very well) seem to be mostly ignored. Like I’ll type a search with “search_term1 +search_term2” and it will return results with search_term1, but have an option that says “must include +search_term2” I can click on. Well, yeah, that’s why I specificed “+search_term2”.
I dunno if reality bears out my gripes, but that sure seems my impression.
A few years ago Google altered their search syntax so “+whatever” no longer means that the word “whatever” is required. See here for more on that:
For most traditional sorts of searches you may have better luck here Google Advanced Search
Dammit. I don’t want to fill out a form. But I guess if I have to. Thanks for the link.
I just use the very first “all these words” slot as my general search input. I leave the rest blank about 90% of the time.
So once you’ve updated your [Seach] shortcut to point to that page, it’s barely any harder to use than the good old Google search box we all pine for.
Surrounding a word in double-quotes replaced the plus sign. It’s a pain, but easier than using the form.
You might see a hint when the search results have a button for ‘Must include ’
I could have sworn I’ve tried that, but I’ll have to try it going forward. So “searchterm” is equivalent to searching +searchterm? I though it was meant for literal matches of words or multiple word phrases, but not as a “must include” modifier. Ugh. I’m getting older. (So much so, that I didn’t even realized I groused a bit a few months earlier in this thread.) This feels so unintuitive to me.
I think it is both ‘must-include’ and ‘match-exactly’ although it isn’t spelled out in the help linked above.
I wish they would restore the plus sign now that Google Plus is long dead.
So it finally happened. I did a search for Hotels in Denver and the entire first page was Expedia, Booking, Hotels.com, etc.
Seems reasonable. Don’t you think that 99% of the users would be satisfied with such a search result? Why else do you think people are searching for hotels in Denver?
Maybe I don’t want to go through one of the hotel room aggregators. The problem is really that when you click on what you think is a hotel webpage and it turns out to be an aggregator. If a general search like I used then maybe it is reasonable but the whole first page of ad sites?! Worse yet is when you search for a specific hotel like “Marriot Hicksville” and all that is returned are the Bookings, Expedias, etc.
I’m not really sure what else you are expecting to see. I see results from Trip Advisor and various other sites listing “The top 10 hotels in Denver.” “Top 6 hotels.” “Top 20 hotels.” etc
If you don’t already have a specific hotel in mind, how would results just showing hotel websites be of any help?
I just searched for “marriot hotels denver” and the first thing shown is a Google map showing all the Marriots (helpful). The first actual search link is to the Marriot webpage with a list of Denver Marriots. Next link is to Tripadvisor (that seems helpful). Below that you start getting Expedia and the others.
I use Booking.
But - I wonder if there’s a location thing going on. I’m in Sweden and just did a search for Avatar 2. The top results are direct links to the local multiplexes showing it. I find that handy. The 2nd is for IMDB, the third is for reviews in the largest newspapers, After that are three links to trailers on YouTube, the next is for wiki.
Next search: LED Christmas lights. Top result is a row of pics to retailers, clearly labeled ad. No more sponsored link on the first page.
Next: JWST. First hit is for webb.nasa.gov. No ads.
Next: Rent a car Madrid. First hit is an ad for some site called rentalcars .com. The rest are to car rental companies in Madrid. Technically ads, I suppose, but it was what I was looking for.
What I do find annoying is that halfway down, there will always be a section: Others asking for [related]
All in all, it works about as well as ten years ago, albeit a bit more cluttered.
Is that what the hotels themselves want? Seems likely the hotels are content with using the aggregators, since the aggregators provide the infrastructure of allowing people to book hotels online. Minus aggregators the hotels have to do this themselves, spend more money on something that likely isn’t going to bring back the revenue they are spending.
Google Maps is actually how I look for hotels nowadays. I usually have a general idea of the part of town where I want to stay, or a location I want to be near. So I zoom in on that area, put “hotels” in the search box, and Google shows me the locations of all the hotels in that area, along with their prices. So I can decide where I want to stay based on a combination of location and price. Clicking on the hotel brings up a bunch of links to book a room, and yes, Hotels.com, Expedia, etc. are usually among them, but so is the hotel’s official website.
The issue I see is that search is not optimized for the user. There is another, more important, customer. It’s not a brand new issue, but it keeps getting worse. SEOs find new scams and Google is no longer keeping up with them.
For example I just searched for ‘hampton inn and suites sherman oaks’ and the first hit is for a sponsored link from a hotel aggregator, guestreservations_com. It looks like the real hotel, but has a quite a lot of customer complaints online. I can’t comment if this is aggregator is legit.
A friend recently fell into this trap with the same search, but a different aggregator. The aggregator charged for the same room multiple times. The hotel was unable to help because they didn’t take the booking. The aggregator was hard to contact and not inclined to help. It was clearly a scam. A legit company would have fixed the reservation right away.
This is why I recommend an adblocker like uBlock Origin. With it running, the first link is to that hotel’s website and the second is to Tripadvisor.
I just ran the same search without it and, yeah, it sucks. The first three results are labeled as ads. uBlock makes them disappear.
Nope, search is optimized to drive ad dollars to the search engine. I do believe Google when they say that only the results labeled “Ad” have been paid for, but I also think that Google is disincentivized to list actual hotels in Denver as early results. If any particular hotel wants to be early, they should buy an ad.
On my search, the first actual hotel is ninth, with the first eight results being aggregators. Google doesn’t actually want you to click on any of those, though. They want you to use the thing at the very top of the page, which is the form to enter the exact days you want to stay, and find specific rooms. If I put days into that, then I get a list of actual Denver hotels.
DuckDuckGo and Bing are similar. They each show an actual hotel a bit higher in the top 10 results, but still just return a few pages of aggregators first.
It’s my understanding that hotels do want people to book directly, not through an aggregator. Generally that is the cheapest option, though not always. In some cases it’s even better to call the front desk of the actual location, instead of using the chain’s reservation system.