[I don’t know if this is the right place, so feel free to move this question if it isn’t.]
I noticed that Google has become more and more actively hostile to people trying to use the search engine.
- A search engine used to show results containing what was entered in the input field. That is long gone.
- A good search engine offered boolean syntax (AND, OR, NOT, plus grouping with brackets), among other features. A distant memory nowadays.
- It used to be possible to tell Google to disable its fuzzy search by quoting it, and to force the term to actually be in the results, by putting a
+in front of a term. This seems to be ignored now. (And the last remainder of boolean syntax,OR, was always almost useless without any ability to group terms.) - And I won’t even go into the entire first page being just disguised advertisement next to non-disguised advertisement. (Because first of all, according to Google’s recruiters they are an advertisement company and nothing else, and secondly, I use Startpage anyway, which proxies the search and saves me from much of that nonsense, and uBlock Origin on top, so I don’t see the ads anyway.)
So: How do I get “modern” Google to actually show me what I searched for, exactly what I searched for, and only what I searched for?
As an example, today I thought if anyone before me has come up with saying “a little pick-me-down” (instead of pick-me-up, for downers). But pick-me-down gave exclusively useless results. So did "pick-me-down" and +"pick-me-down". Leaving me with no option to find what I want. (If there are zero results, it should say so! I didn’t search for freaking bananas when I enter ”raspberry”, now did I!)
An alternative solution would of course be a different search engine. I haven’t found one that doesn’t do the same thing. (DuckDuckGo is essentially just a Bing proxy, which tries desperately to be like Google, and Startpage is essentially just a Google proxy. MetaGer and Qwant act like Google too, despite having their own index.) … So if you know a search engine that still works, it would be a welcome answer too.