Do people still upload /usr/share/dict/words?
Do search engines still index them?
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Amazon’s search engine barely gives me any results I want, even using delimiters, etc. Ebay’s search engine is notorious for optimizing for the sellers who pay them the most, even if the results are almost completely irrelevant, It’s elephants all the way down, folks.
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ebay’s search engine always asks me to identify the boats or the buses.
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I use a program called devonthink to search my archives-- it has neat operators like “near” which allow the user to search for keywords that appear in the same paragraph. There’s a version called DevonAgent that purports to apply this same kind of strategem to web searches, but it regularly gets flagged as a “bot” by google.
Duck-duck-go is pretty good.
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If using Duckduckgo for image searches, I’ve found that it frequently forgets whether you have Safe Search enabled/disabled. I have been, shocked, on occasion.
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There are precious few websites at which I will put up with that captcha. ebay is not one of them.
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Ebay US automatically translates stuff, so when I’m looking for a specific book, I go to Ebay France, or ebay Deutschland. Then when my money’s at risk, I go back to ebay us and bid or pay there. That’s probably why french ebay thinks I’m a bot-- even though I’m logged in
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Sorry, I think my post came across as judgy. I just despise that captcha and need a good incentive (like a required work function) to accept it. I didn’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t, or had lower standards, or anything like that.
Oh shit! We’re gonna have to start using browser bookmarks again!!!
Part of the problem is that these printers are very niche. Few manufactures make these printers anymore and reviews are thin on the ground. Going to a good seller like B&H gets you a list with some reviews.
Related. Almost all image searches go to Pinterest. I don’t want to sign into Pinterest to see an image. I also dont want to click on an image and be taken to a page where that image no longer exists. Google used to link directly to the image and you could grab it and drag to your desktop (on a mac) and now if you do that, most of the time you download some web page code.
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Thanks for DDG endorsements, friends. G is so frustrating.
Also, nice to see Adam Savage looking so fit healthy these days.
Related question.
How is Pinterest even legal? Most of its content are images that have been reused without attribution and by hiding them behind a log in, a Pinterest is claiming some level of curation.
You’d have thought content providers would have sued them out of existence by now.
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Hmmm… isn’t that a failure of Google rather than users? Google’s interface encourages them to just type simple queries which are easily sidetracked by bad actors - and Google’s advertising agents.
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To answer your question: No. Google’s interface doesn’t encourage one thing or another. There’s a space to type something, and if you want specific results, using quotes to get verbatim returns is the best way to do that. Sure, they could offer up a bunch of instructions on the main page, like “use quotes to get verbatim returns,” but that’s not how the interface is designed. If you want instructions, there’s a place to read those (this is what I meant by “Come on peoples!” - that is, come on, people, learn how to use the tools you have to work with).
But there are those of us who vaguely remember Google making a big thing about how you could use “natural language” to search.
If you have to use specific terms and techniques to get the results you’re actually after, Google’s vaunted advantage over competitors and any claim to innovation is dead in the water.
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It is natural langue to use quotes (natural written language, at least. Well, I guess even spoken, if you count air quotes (I’ve been trying to start the use of air parenthesis, to very little success)) - and I don’t know how you would make a very specific search without them. For instance, take these three searches:
- dave blair’s photography
- “dave blair’s photography”
- dave “blair’s phogography”
The first will return a bunch of results about Dave Blair and his photography, the second will return just one result - a specific mention of the sentence “David Blair’s photography” in a facebook post, and the third are a bunch of returns about “Blair’s photography” that have nothing to do with Dave Blair in most cases (this last one is clearly garbage).
I suppose that’s a consequence of the whole “not tracking you” thing
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Feature, not a bug
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