What is a GOOD search engine?

In summary: I have an idea, a search engine that lets you specify the date or date range. Would that be useful to you?Thanks for the tip.In summary, the conversation discusses frustration with Google's search results and the desire for a search engine that doesn't manipulate or filter results based on personal search history. The suggestion of using quotes and other search operators is mentioned, as well as the use of alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo. The idea for a search engine with date screening is also mentioned.
  • #1
oneamp
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I'm fed up with google. It returns results that don't have all my keywords in it. Just now I searched for "Skyrim Playonlinux" and it returned several top results involving Skyrim Wine (wine as in drink, in the game), since Wine is related to playonlinux.

What is a good search engine that doesn't pull this crap?

Thanks
 
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  • #2
Use " " to your advantage.
 
  • #3
In the past, I still haven't found using quotes around terms to be fool-proof. For example, do I need to quote every phrase? "Skyrim" "Playonlinux" "add ons" ?
 
  • #6
Routaran said:
I just did a google search for "skyrim wine" without quotations. All i got was hits relating to running Skyrim on Linux using wine.

Skyrim wine -linux

seems the solution to that specific search problem.

Get the reference manuals for all your tools, digital or otherwise, and learn all the details and options and settings and knobs. This will repay your investment many fold.

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

If anyone is aware of even better then please share.

Routaran said:
Perhaps google has made a good enough profile on me to know when i say wine i mean WINdows Emulator and not the drink.

If you are interested in improving the quality of the profiles being kept on you then these folks
https://aboutthedata.com/
got some press in the magazines and news recently. In exchange for identifying yourself they will let you see and even correct what I suspect is a microscopic slice of the many profiles that are being constructed on you. But I sit here wondering if I can trust them if I do this. I guess I'm not telling them anything they don't already know.

If there were other better resources like that which we could trust then perhaps everyone could benefit.

More disturbing is when my metadata gets associated with all the many people from around the world that I've tried to help with little problems over the years. Then a few of them turned out to be (hopefully harmless) raving wingnuts and I'd dearly love to find a way to tell three letter agencies that I don't know this person, I've never met them, I never will and please don't raise my threat score that I know you are calculating on every one of us just because I helped them with a question once or twice.
 
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  • #7
@oneamp: I went back and re-read your OP and now I'm not sure if I actually answered the question you had. Are you looking for information on how to get Skyrim to work on Linux or does Playonlinux mean something else like an expansion or something?
P.S. I'm not a skyrim player and don't know details of the game.

@Bill Simpson: Thanks for the link, I'd be interested to see what exactly they have but like you said, the trade off is before, where you might just be an IP or an email addy, now they know even more.
 
  • #8
If a few supposedly intelligent human readers aren't sure what the actual desire of the OP search was then I hold no hope that a search engine, even if it does an adequate job for typical queries, will have any success. If the OP can clearly state what it was he actually wanted to find then I suspect the solution will be simple.

On the subject of privacy, again and again people have suggested using search engines that "don't keep records." But there was an article in the Guardian I think a number of years ago that roughly said "If you can get the people who don't want to be tracked to use a few specific service providers then it is much easier for three letter agencies to track them, by just sucking up every bite going in and out of those services, the users have done the hard work by identifying themselves as people who are trying to hide."
 
  • #9
oneamp said:
I'm fed up with google. It returns results that don't have all my keywords in it. Just now I searched for "Skyrim Playonlinux" and it returned several top results involving Skyrim Wine (wine as in drink, in the game), since Wine is related to playonlinux.

What is a good search engine that doesn't pull this crap?

Thanks

oneamp said:
In the past, I still haven't found using quotes around terms to be fool-proof. For example, do I need to quote every phrase? "Skyrim" "Playonlinux" "add ons" ?

I've had pretty good luck with Google, using a combination of " ", +, -, and often using Google Images to help me skim through lots of results faster. :smile:
 
  • #10
Greg Bernhardt said:

I second this one.

When I still want to use Google but don't want narrowed searches according to my search habits what I do is use another IP. Also, before performing the search I erase everything in the browser and when I open it, it opens as if I had just installed a new browser but with all my add ons (or extensions when using Chrome). I still have to configure all the add ons again but I do it in less than 30 seconds. I'm used to it.
 
  • #11
Greg Bernhardt said:

Psinter said:
I second this one.

I just tried it and it didn't take long to like it. Now I have the Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-ssl/?src=search search add-on. :thumbs:
 
  • #12
Greg Bernhardt said:

Does it have date screening? Google does and Bing doesn't (at least as far as I can acertain).
 
  • #13
berkeman said:
I've had pretty good luck with Google, using a combination of " ", +, -, and often using Google Images to help me skim through lots of results faster. :smile:

+ no longer works (It's now for google+). Do you know what they replaced it with?
 
  • #14
Psinter said:
Also, before performing the search I erase everything in the browser and when I open it, it opens as if I had just installed a new browser but with all my add ons (or extensions when using Chrome). I still have to configure all the add ons again but I do it in less than 30 seconds. I'm used to it.

So you are using Chrome, and you think Google doesn't know about every key that you press?

Dream on... why else would Google bother to make its own browser and give it away "free"?

I can't remember whether I saw the following comment in another PF thread or elsewhere, but people who use multiple IP addresses etc are self-selecting themselves to be monitored more closely that the average Joe, because they presumably have something to hide.
 
  • #15
AlephZero said:
So you are using Chrome, and you think Google doesn't know about every key that you press?

Dream on... why else would Google bother to make its own browser and give it away "free"?

Because they could tune it to better display their advertising?
Because everybody thinks they should create their own browser?
Because they have so much money they don't know what to do with it?

AlephZero said:
I can't remember whether I saw the following comment in another PF thread or elsewhere, but people who use multiple IP addresses etc are self-selecting themselves to be monitored more closely that the average Joe, because they presumably have something to hide.

I doubt anyone who actually knows will ever tell, but I did mention some things on this subject earlier in this particular thread which came from newspaper articles. I've been amused by the "privacy expert", the one who keeps warning the world about RFID, and who keeps promoting one search engine "because they don't keep records" and has promoted this for years, despite the evidence we have that the three letter agencies don't need records, they own the pipe in and out, if the public will just do the self selection for them.
 
  • #16
Pythagorean said:
+ no longer works (It's now for google+). Do you know what they replaced it with?

From http://www.googleguide.com/quote_operator.html

"Google elimiated the + operator in October 2011 and expanded the capabilities of the quotation marks (” ”) operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [ magazine +latina ], you should now search for [ magazine "latina" ]."

Whether, as some claim, quotes don't do what is claimed is another matter.
 
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  • #17
AlephZero said:
So you are using Chrome, and you think Google doesn't know about every key that you press?

Dream on... why else would Google bother to make its own browser and give it away "free"?

I can't remember whether I saw the following comment in another PF thread or elsewhere, but people who use multiple IP addresses etc are self-selecting themselves to be monitored more closely that the average Joe, because they presumably have something to hide.
AlephZero, my bad. I said Chrome but I'm actually using SRWare Iron.

They are both based on chromium so I used the word Chrome for shorts. Sorry for the misleading post.

About the IP... Bah, let them do what they want, they won't get much from me as I will always do everything in my power to protect my right to privacy. Meaning I won't make their monitoring easy. I only change occasionally to hide specific stuff from Google and other data gathering institutions because they use those specific stuff to bother me. It's only when I want those biased results away from my face and obtain real results when using Google. There are things I certainly wouldn't hide when talking face to face to another person, but there are things that I deem not necessary for Google to know if I want to not be hindranced' by their gain more capital methods. I recommend reading Debunking The Dangerous "If You Have Nothing To Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear". The subject grows really fast on complexity so I would also like to redirect you to Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier so I don't have to explain on this post the infinitude reasons of why I chose what I chose.

Once again, I'm sorry for the misleading post. I hate misinformation, yet there I was spreading it by being lazy and not writing things as they are supposed to be. But we are cool, right?
 
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  • #18
I would like to comment that DuckDuckGo works flawlessly in English, but in my language it doesn't return results as good as Google. I really hope they add more languages in the future.

To OP, I'm also getting fed up with Google, but I've realized that I can still use it if I manage to only extract the good parts of their service while blocking the bad ones. An analogy I would use is: "Like when we eat, we take what we need and remove the waste, I take what I need from Google and remove the waste". Of course always being careful of not violating their colossal always changing terms of service.
 
  • #19
Search engines now cater to morons at the expense of people who know how to spell.

Sure, there are tons of "switches and command lines" you can use with google but one would think it would retrieve results of a search in quotes first...before displaying results from words you did not type.
 
  • #20
I am getting sick of this. I started using duckduckgo according to the recommendations here. I searched:
how long logitech wireless mouse battery last switch

First result was here:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2499721

control-F search for switch, no results. Why did it return that result? I am not an idiot. I know what I want to look for. Is there a search engine that can return what I search for?

Thanks
 
  • #21
I recommend Google : )
 
  • #22
I had the same problem with google, even after using quotation marks. I think there is no hope.
 
  • #23
I've noticed that many people don't seem to realize how useful & time-saving it is to know how to use search engines effectively and how much it is *not* just typing what you're looking for in the search field.

This is actually a bit of a pet peeve of mine -- I always cringe when I see people browsing through 10+ pages of results and not even considering to change their query, which is usually the first thing that came to their mind about the topic. Same applies with people either searching for a phrase without quotation marks and not getting the correct results or not searching for an exact phrase and typing in ridiculously long sentences when a two-word search would do (words like what and how and most adjectives are usually completely useless -- nobody wants to cook food that tastes bad, there's no point in searching for delicious recipes or tasty recipes, for example).

Seriously, I know too many people who are frustrated by Google, even though if they just learned a few additional things like using OR, "", -, site:, filetype: etc. and the date filters and had a basic idea of how search engines work, they'd have nothing to complain about.

oneamp said:
control-F search for switch, no results. Why did it return that result?

The source contains the word switch (try ctrl+u), which is a very likely cause for the hit. You can see it on the page if you click the display modes button on the top right corner, but just using ctrl+f won't work since the word is not displayed by default.
 
  • #24
The HTML, Javascript, etc. is indexed by the search engine?
 
  • #25
I just searched 'puerto urraco' and duckduckgo and the first result was 'Puerto Hurraco', with nothing on the page or in the source (though I don't think they index the source) about 'urraco'. Does it not bother anyone else that search engines make assumptions about what we might really want?
 
  • #26
Use the site you hate the most. It gives results for Puerto Hurraco but also gives the option of searching for Puerto Urraco in lieu of Puerto Hurraco.

This thread is just a personal rant, something we do not like at this site. Thread closed.
 

What is a GOOD search engine?

A GOOD search engine is a tool that allows users to search for information on the internet by entering keywords or phrases. It uses complex algorithms to scan the internet and provide the most relevant results to the user's query.

What makes a search engine GOOD?

A GOOD search engine is one that is fast, accurate, and user-friendly. It should be able to provide relevant results quickly, without overwhelming the user with unnecessary information. It should also have a clean and simple interface that is easy to navigate.

How does a search engine determine the relevance of search results?

A search engine uses a variety of factors to determine the relevance of search results, including the number of times a keyword appears on a webpage, the quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, and the overall reputation of the website.

What are some features to look for in a GOOD search engine?

A GOOD search engine should have features such as advanced search options, filters, and the ability to refine search results. It should also have a large index of webpages and a robust algorithm to provide accurate and diverse results.

Are there any privacy concerns with using a search engine?

Yes, there can be privacy concerns when using a search engine, as it collects and stores user data, such as search history and IP addresses, for targeted advertising. It is important to read a search engine's privacy policy and use privacy-focused search engines if this is a concern.

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