Wouldn’t it cut down on search queries (and thus save resources) if I could search for “this is my phrase” rather than rawdogging it as an unbound series of words, each of which seems to be pulling up results unconnected to the other words in the phrase?
There are only 2 reasons I can think of why a website’s search engine lacks this incredibly basic functionality:
- The site wants you to spend more time there, seeing more ads and padding out their engagement stats.
- They’re just too stupid to know that these sorts of bare-bones search engines are close to useless, or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Apathetic incompetence, basically.
Is there a sound financial or programmatic reason for running a search engine which has all the intelligence of a turnip?
Cheers!
EDIT: I should have been a bit more specific: I’m mainly talking about search engines within websites (rather than DDG or Google). One good example is BitTorrent sites; they rarely let you define exact phrases. Most shopping websites, even the behemoth Amazon, don’t seem to respect quotation marks around phrases.
The tragedy of the commons.
Enough people don’t understand or care to understand, so it gets cut out for the sake of improving the users experience.
Because search engines are much more complicated than you seem to think. The reason the operators worked back in the day (probably later than 1997 though), was because the search engines actually searched through the contents of the pages they indexed. They used a lot of tricks to make it work, but basically they were matching keywords directly to the index.
Modern search engines are much more complex than that, using a lot more abstraction and interesting techniques to both index and search. The amount of data being indexed has exploded since then, the number of users has exploded and the way people use the internet has changed. To keep costs down and search times low, search engines needed to change drastically. And because most people using search engines won’t know how to use those features, they didn’t get preserved.
I do wonder what kind of search engines you are talking about though. I assume you mean the big ones like Google and Bing (or sites using those engines) and not like a simple product search on a small webshop. Because as frustrating as using Google and Bing have gotten, they are still amazing tech and not bare-bones at all. The reasons for their failings are only partly in their control and not even really their fault. (Except for the AI thing Google tried, that was 100% their fault and just dumb).
Here’s the thing though. You absolutely could still use operators reasonably well even if the results are fuzzier.
You just use them to control how you leverage the algorithm. AND feeds the algorithm the two sides and filters to results that appear on both. OR joins the two result sets. “Filetype” filters the result set for results that are the relevant file type. Etc.
If they’re not that common they’re not going to have meaningful costs, especially when most power users don’t use them for most of their searches.
Most search engines have filters for stuff like filetype, limiting the search to a specific site and filters for time and location (when applicable).
Like I said, search engines are way more complicated than one might think. Doing the kinds of things you mention would be hard and only very few people would need something like that. There are tools out there that do meta searching for analysis though, so you can use search results as data in your analysis. Most of those are highly specialized and often paid, but when you need them it’s worth the price.
Remember companies like Google invest millions (if not billions) into their search engine and have huge teams working on them. Anytime someone says: “Why don’t they just…” the answer is probably very long and complicated.
No, it isn’t even a little hard. It’s super simple pre-parsing of the input that can trivially be done client side before the query even touches their server. Advanced users who use those tools are perfectly capable of taking the extra step to indicate to the engine that they’re doing a real search, and the worst case is still far less intensive per search than any of the LLM nonsense they added to every search and is almost never useful in any way.
They choose not to. It’s exactly that simple.
Bro, this is just a load of shit. Google removed them by choice, not because of some tech need. Better search engines still use them to great effect.
You just posted a very long rambling justification for injecting ads and other shit into the results instead of giving you what you asked for.
Because business majors decided a search engines primary job was actually to serve you ads rather than to help you search for things
Yeah, even fucking linkedin can’t make the difference between C, C++ and C#
Have you not had much luck using operators?
I’ve found them relatively reliable
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/4521473758228-Advanced-Search-on-Startpage
I looked over the links, and the ones listed for Google aren’t respected anymore (and haven’t been for a long time).
If you search for something specific using operators, Google will just ignore them and give you related (but irrelevant) results which is absolutely infuriating.
Instead of showing a low number of results it seems they’d rather try to be smarter than you just to show more results.
I know at least duckduckgo says on their syntax page that they’re aware that operator usage isn’t perfect on their site. Seems to come from the fact that they pull results from multiple sources
DDG, because they’re so heavily reliant on bing, has gone to absolute shit recently. I’m just about to quit them. Every link in the top ten goes to some M$N / microsoft-adjacent garbage.
Oh so its not just me who thinks its gotten worse then. I was starting to go a little crazy man. It seems like its slowly gottwn worse over time. I wonder if its due to the amount of ai content messing up seo ratings or something
Yeah, after some years of DDG getting worse I finally dropped them. I switched to Brave and it’s surprisingly decent for an independent search engine. If you search for something that they don’t have good results for they’ll ask you if you want to get anonymous results from google as well, which means I don’t usually have to switch search engines for harder results.
They do seem to have a much lower number of image results though.
every day it looks more and more clear that we’re gonna have no choice but pay for kagi if we want to find anything worth a fuck on the internet
Duckduckgo is awful at searching for specific memes I need. Sometimes I only remember the text and a rough description of the image, but DDG seems only to consider images with Impact TOP TEXT BOTTOM TEXT captions to be memes. I switch to Google and I find the one I want instantly. If there was a way to have the image results of Google with the web results of DDG my life would be complete
