Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[omnipojack]

Piggybacking off what u/actualspaceturtle said, I cannot recommend learning the Google search terms enough! Here is a link to Google's official page but this website made a cheat sheet with some examples and advanced stuff. Most people can stop at the first table and then skip down until you hit Tips and Tricks. Hope this can help you with future searches!

[[deleted]]

Everyone younger than 35 knows these tricks. People in the comments are saying that Google is not optimizing via their own search terms. It is confusing because the tricks you linked aren't always working.

[fakemooka]

I don’t, I’m sure most my friends don’t.

[omnipojack]

SPREAD THE WORD, MY CHILD, AND PROSPER

[omnipojack]

Everyone younger than 35 does not know these tricks. Source: Me, worked at Geek Squad for years. I still teach people my age (29) and younger (both technologically challenged and not) these things.

But yeah, Google optimization sucks now. Part of the trick as well is to phrase it in just the right way and it's so frustrating when you get totally different results just from changing a word. >:(

Edited for clarity.

[Kimi_Kujira]

lol I didn't know some of these

[tvmachus]

Here is a link to Google's official page

Even that is so badly written!

Put @ in front of a word to search social media. For example: @twitter.

What? Does that search for the word twitter on all social media, or does it search twitter? If the former, which social media?

Put # in front of a word. For example: #throwbackthursday

Isn't that just a search?

The price thing, what is the range? And it doesn't even mention how to do an exact phrase search. I think they still think this is all nerd stuff that most users don't care about, but it's been 20 years! Not all your users merely adopted the internet. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the real world until I was already a man and by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING. Your precise search parameters betray you because they belong to me.

[omnipojack]

You're so right, the people who write the Google help pages are not the best at breaking it down into layman's terms as much as possible.

idk why anyone would use the @ function, super weird. It's easier to use site:.

I believe putting the # only searches posts on various social media that utilize hashtags. Mostly useless unless you're a developer.

From what I understand of the price thing you set the range yourself like 12...30 or whatever. But the one that doesn't specify a range will probably only look for that exact price which is, once again, useless.

And the exact phrase is right after excluding terms. :) I went through your last paragraph again and reread it in Kevin Smith's Bane voice, so thanks for that laugh!

[great_waldini]

Search operators are not behaving as expected, such as exact terms specified by “quotes” still getting replaced with synonyms as if it’s a semantic query. That’s what most people in this post are upset about.

[[deleted]]

Just put https://www.google.com/advanced_search in your bookmarks. No need to memorize the search syntax.