I'm tired of google's stemmer getting in the way of doing specific searches. Even quotes won't keep it from showing results that are the same except for having an s dropped or added. It's frustrating at times.
It was bad enough not being able to search for strings.
What I'd really like is an uncrippled search engine that lets people be very specific in their searches. I'd really like support for simple regexes.
Thanks! I didn't know about that. It makes a difference, though I'm having trouble finding something that doesn't work even when it's in quotes right now.
Here's an example of how ridiculous Google has gotten about search queries:
Now who would search for "gaps" when they wanted to get to The Gap? And worse, if you add terms that are on the gap page when trying to look for, say, something about the income gaps between men and women (gaps men women), the store is the #1 hit.
> Now who would search for "gaps" when they wanted to get to The Gap?
Possibly someone searching for "Gaps summer range". There are a LOT more people who look for The Gap than for gaps.cgi, and it's quite likely some of them can't punctuate their sentences properly.
Very interesting. When I started using Google as an undergrad (circa 1999), I remember using the "+" character in searches, since that was standard procedure for searching linked strings before the age of Google Empire; I distinctly remember Google popping up warnings: "this '+' character is NOT necessary in searches" . . ..
I was just thinking about this the other day while trying to search for $HOME (impossible to get even ONE unix-related result, no matter how you quote it).
It was bad enough not being able to search for strings.
What I'd really like is an uncrippled search engine that lets people be very specific in their searches. I'd really like support for simple regexes.