# Google Shot-for-Shit Advanced Search **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 20, 2020, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061 "2020-09-20T04:52:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/1 "2020-09-20T04:52:52Z")
You can do an Advanced Search for the verbatim interpretation of what you typed in the box. Which ought to be the goddam default, yeesh, I meant what I said and all that. You can also constrain your search results so as to fall within a specified time frame, like the last 24 hours or last month or whatever. But you can’t ^@W&#&%\*E@ do both at the same time. I still miss Alta Vista. :mad: ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/2 "2020-09-20T12:53:03Z")
also Alta Vista let you use the \* as a wild card. Typing diab\* gave you hits for both diabetes and diabetic. Very useful. Alta Vista could do it in 1995. I wonder what they would have accomplished if they had survived till the twenty first century. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/3 "2020-09-20T13:20:53Z")
Altavista was great, but Google is much, much better. With Altavista, if you were skilled at constructing an advanced search, then you could bring up exactly the set of webpages that exactly met your search pattern. All of them. In no particular order. And if you weren’t skilled at constructing your search patterns, it was garbage. Google, meanwhile, is very good at figuring out what the user wants, even if the user themself isn’t quite sure. Which can happen even with a skilled user. Suppose, for instance, that you’re trying to find the origin of a phrase, or quote, or song lyric, that you remember but can’t remember where from. If you accidentally replaced one word with a synonym or sound-alike, or swapped the order of a few words, a search like Altavista’s will be useless. But Google will usually find it anyway. And what results Google gives, it’ll give in order of how useful it thinks they’ll be. With the result that you can usually get what you want in the first hit, and almost always in the first few. Yes, there will still be some searches for which Altavista’s method would be better. But there will be many, many more for which Google’s will be better. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/4 "2020-09-20T16:43:20Z")
The big idea is that Google is no longer a _word search_ tool. It’s an _idea search_ tool. So stop trying to find verbatim words; that’s not what it’s for. It’s far better, now, at answering complete sentences than it is at finding pages with these 5 words but not those 4 that you _hope_ will give you articles about whatever you want while filtering out most of the irrelevant dross. It’d be sorta nice if there was some alternative that still did word search and only word search; it’d be useful for re-finding things you (me really) should have bookmarked last time. But that’s about it. The thing I’d like most to see added to Google is a magic keyword that means: “Return nothing related to selling me what I asked about.” So I could query for e.g. “trombone lessons” and learn all about how lessons are structured, some examples of them, some standard pedagogy for trombonists, etc., without the first 100K results being somebody selling trombone lessons, trombones, or lessons for anything / everythng else under the Sun. Sadly, since the real function of Google is to connect you-as-buyer with their true customer, the website-as-seller, we’re not going to see that feature until mandated by law. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/5 "2020-09-20T16:52:32Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Google, meanwhile, is very good at figuring out what the user wants Might depend on the user. They’re often very bad at figuring out what I want; but they insist on trying anyway. There ought to be some way of definitively answering ‘no’ to that ‘did you mean’ question that would get rid of all the results using their guess at interpretation. Is there one that I’m somehow missing? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2020, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/6 "2020-09-20T17:02:26Z")
Most often when I’m doing a search, I’m not looking for the kind of thing where Google knows better than I do what I might be searching for. My problem usually isn’t “please see if you can find something that is at least sort of like this”, but instead “please don’t bring me 1,726,405 results, dammit, let me specify what I’m looking for and you bring me that and only that!” ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2020, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/7 "2020-10-09T02:36:56Z")
Bloody fucking hell. Trying to search for a colleage of my Dad’s. He fortunately has a somewhat rare last name: Berlijn. And worked in a small town: Los Alamos. Google Useless-Assvanced Search gives me hits for freaking BERLIN even with verbatim selected as a tool. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/8 "2020-10-10T21:56:49Z")
“Verbatim” doesn’t even mean verbatim. I, personally, sometimes need to search for punctuation. And google can’t do that. Not just won’t, can’t. They don’t index punctuation, and have no method of filtering other than using the index. It’s willing to do a verbatim search on the index, but that’s as far as it goes. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/9 "2020-10-10T23:15:20Z")
You don’t know fun until you try searching for Maine Coon breeders from Maine. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2020, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/10 "2020-10-10T23:18:41Z")
Once I was looking for information about the television series called “United States” > [@Things that are tricky to Google](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-that-are-tricky-to-google/824272): > > The other day, I was thinking about an obscure short-lived comedy series called “United States” and wanted to learn more about it. Googling " ‘United States’ television series" was not helpful. Eventually, I used the IMDB search which gave me the name of the star (Beau Bridges) and I was able to use that information to find articles about what I was actually looking for [United States (TV series) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_(TV_series)) Today, I wanted to learn a little more about the USENET slang term “AOL” (which I know… ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/11 "2020-10-12T10:57:29Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > You can do an Advanced Search for the verbatim interpretation of what you typed in the box. Which ought to be the goddam default, yeesh, I meant what I said and all that. > > You can also constrain your search results so as to fall within a specified time frame, like the last 24 hours or last month or whatever. > > But you can’t ^@W&#&%\*E@ do both at the same time. How do you mean? I find I can type some exact word query, and then add a filter for ‘[last update](https://1drv.ms/u/s!AohFcFgF_nhOsRdI5eCa73sEzeVH)’. Or are you looking for a more specific method of setting a time window? ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/12 "2020-10-12T12:12:07Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Trying to search for a colleage of my Dad’s. He fortunately has a somewhat rare last name: Berlijn. And worked in a small town: Los Alamos. Try ``` "berlijn" "los alamos" -berlin ``` Quotes will return an exact match, a minus sign will exclude all results with that word. ‘Berlijn’ is the Dutch name for Berlin, so it will include Berlin unless you specifically exclude it. Google search operators can be very useful: > **[Google Search Operators: The Complete List (44 Advanced Operators)](https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/)** > > They're super powerful. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/13 "2020-10-12T12:18:53Z")
Google is crap compared to what it used to be. Its predictive algorithms have improved immensely - it can take your user activity and figure out what you’re thinking as you type. I won’t debate that aspect of their search. But it’s gotten a bit Yahoo-ish when it comes to not overwhelming me with irrelevant results when I do a search of random topics. ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Cad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saint_cad/32/18907_2.png) [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)\ **Post date:** [October 12, 2020, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/14 "2020-10-12T12:24:44Z")
I started a thread on this a few years ago. I think DuckDuckGo still assumes you know what you’re looking for. I tested it out with a few searches that Google has said in the past, “You don’t want to use THOSE words. You want to use THESE words.” and sure enough DDG gave me what I wanted (not what it wanted). ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2020, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/google-shot-for-shit-advanced-search/921061/15 "2020-10-15T01:25:52Z")
their voice to text got a lot worse the last few months for some reason