You cant even avoid irrelevant results with "site:" anymore

I'd recommend avoiding Google for web searching. Duckduckgo has been a good alternate for me for about 5 years now. I've heard that Bing is a good alternate, even though its a Microsoft service. ChatGPT is also a good option to compliment web searches, though I'd recommend getting a second result from another service if looking up an answer to a question, but when doing general questions/suggestions it can outperform a web search in both detail and ability to refine/filter.

Google is just a ranked ad delivery service based on an abused and gamed SEO system, it's fucking awful for delivering useful links.

DuckDuckGo/Brave + Kagi.

Others, more specific uses:

• https://www.ecosia.org/ - search with praxis, kind of mixed results but non tracking and they do good things
• https://www.perplexity.ai/ - longform answers by ai with citations plus search
• https://search.marginalia.nu/ - anti corpo search
• https://www.wolframalpha.com/ - STEM
• https://www.phind.com/ - programming
• https://knaben.eu/ - torrents
• https://annas-archive.org/ - books

As anti-Google as I am, this just looks like a bug, honestly.

Search operators have been worthless on Google for many years now. it's extremely frustrating when you're trying to sift through the SEO hellscape

"it works on my machine"

I switched to duck duck go back in the day cause I felt like the quantity of bullshit (not the ads but the ones that are supposed to help you with your search) were detrimental to my "keyword picking ability"... now going back to Google feels unreal

I just tried searching the same thing and it works for me

Just tried it and it still works perfectly fine.

When using Google to search the internet, one needs to select tools > verbatim for the search operators to work as expected. Even for simple things like double quotes.

You can still.

Under the Tools dropdown you can change it from "All Results" to "Verbatim".

Try this: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=li:1&q=tacos site:reddit.com

Still works fine for me.

I can't reproduce this on desktop. can you try again in desktop mode

That's not that bad... Way worse is that Google will push your site to the 10th-or-so page abyss for minor problems yet they keep on showing more and more spammy sites (the ones which contain random sentences with your search term mysteriously embedded in the middle of them, without any kind of relevance, and with painfully obviously randomly generated domains... I still don't understand how do they manage to put the term you're searching right now into the search results.)

@rosenjcb I gave up on Google search a few months ago. It got to a point where it would consistently show me nonsense that was written to farm ad revenue. DuckDuckGo has been better for me (once you disable the ability to show ads in the search results), but I still get occurrences of it showing me nonsense. Like, I tried looking up information on the Super Smash Bros Brawl mod Project+, and it kept showing me information on some certification.

That is fake

Why people use google in this day and age? 🤷‍♂️

For those willing to pay. Kagi has been a total breath of fresh air.

I rarely have issues with content farms taking up the first page of results, all the Google search operators (at least the ones i relied on) with consistently again, you can block and/or weight results (no shitty pintrist results). It took me a while to come to grips with paying but so far it’s been very worth it.

Disclaimer: i have only been using it for about 2 or 3 months.

I always have used inurl: instead to great effect. For instance if I wanted just the technology subreddit it would be inurl:reddit.com/r/technology

It looks like you might be using the built-in Google app. Could that be a factor?

Bug or most likely faked. I'm selling to bet this is a15 year old with a chip on their shoulder photoshopping shit.

Tech hate, so hot right now.

Our cutting edge algorithm must feed you the content of whoever pays more. You don't choose anymore. and you have to accept it.

BR, Paid Search Engines after investments dries.

The enshittification continues.

Between this and Amazon it's almost completely useless to search anything through them. You just need to go to forums to get recommendations and reviews

maybe try the inurl operator

I recently switched my default search from Google to DuckDuckGo: Google has begun refusing to find anything while exact same search on DuckDuckGo just works. Google is slower because I have to think+ignore first half of the page due to Ads/SEO crud.

Wrong. I regularly use "site:" all the time.

I've been pretty happy with my selfhosted SearX. I think maybe I've used google for so long that I don't know how to properly use other search engines. Bing never seems to give me the results I want.

It is fake. Can't reproduce

Weird. I gotta check out that Cookie and Kate recipe, though!

Permanently Deleted

There's https://redditle.com/ if you just want reddit results. I've had it bookamrked and find it pretty useful.

Google is just working hard to become less useful every day. I tend to use ChatGPT a lot instead of Google.

Works fine for me.

What's the difference to domain:?

My search engine results have been so dogshit lately, this just makes it worse. Glad I don't use Google anymore (even though all of them are bad regardless).

This is a tragedy. I will have to see if this still works on Bing

Is there a way to to something like this for Lemmy? This is one thing that I used all the time for Reddit and found immensely useful.

Oh that stopped working a while ago. All site: will do now is put those results up top. It absolutely refuses not to also show you irrelevant results.

I am avoiding google search where ever I can. Google feels very slow compared to Bing search and does not nag me to accept their popup every time I use it from a private tab.

The google search tool is still a thing in 2023?! Maybe it's time to convert to other search engines.