I just came across blekko.com. Looks very interesting. They do address a lot of the problems with Google results.
Update: Google is offering the verbatim search again. You have to specifically select it, but nonetheless, it’s back. The consumer spoke!
Too bad you can’t set it as the default search mode.
[QUOTE=njtt]
For anyone deep-diving Google for the dark corners of the Internet, this change was hard to swallow.
[/QUOTE]
Possibly chilling hypothesis: As Google grew from a merely big company to a media titan, perhaps they began to lose sight of - or even deliberately ignore - the internet user whose interests are too divergent from the wants and needs of big business and big media.
In other words, maybe Google doesn’t want you to search for obscure bands, out-of-print books, forgotten this or esoteric that. What with their ongoing project to become a provider of content that otherwise would be unavailable, maybe that will amount to competing against Google, and they might not care to give you the tools to do so any longer.
Yes, I’m paranoid. I love music, and most of the recorded music of the 20th century is unavailable in any legal form and likely to remain so for most of the 21st. As a company like Google gets bigger and bigger, it has to, inevitably, find more common cause with the media industry powers that be than with the individual user - let alone any silly platitudes about the right to information that have less and less basis in law as time goes on.
And too bad it still ignores punctuation–even in quotes.
AFAIK Google always has ignored non-alphanumeric characters in searches, even in the good old days.
But all too frequently ignoring non-alphanumerics results in what I’m looking for not appearing in the search results.
I have switched to Bing because Google is not what it was. I can’t recall how many months ago I noticed it - for the most part it did what I needed, but I found too many hits that didn’t have all the words I was searching for and I now find Bing to be the better engine.
Somebody has just written a script that puts a “yes, really” button next to the search box for verbatim searches in one click.