Its all nice for generic searches, but whenever I try to pin down something that I know exists but can't find anymore they start throwing captchas at me.
And I never find what I am looking for.
I still remember, around a decade or two ago, going through page after page of results to look for the exact page I wanted, and somewhat often getting that result. Now, if I'm very lucky, I'll find that result; otherwise, I'll probably get a CAPTCHA-hellban instead.
It's very ironic that a search engine, which is supposed to be helpful precisely for the things that are hard to find, seems to actively sabotage your efforts at such deep searching.
This is especially true on Android and other low bandwidth/hard to type devices, where I have time and again searched for the specific exact thing I am looking for only to have instant search and spelling correction help me find something I could not care less about.
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds.
Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all.
To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes, and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.
Don't forget their awful, automatic broadmatching for organic results.
Today I was searching for "(vendor name) promo code"
And back came results about programming. Because code, when not a noun, is a verb for "to program." It's just awful. Sometimes getting no results is more useful than getting broader results that I need to parse just to establish I'm not going to find what I'm searching for.
I mean most of my searches are probably pretty easy to find, I just don't want to go to the website I'm thinking of and click through 5 pages to get there.
I find their results pretty abysmal, like ALL modern search engines -- particularly in terms of returning irrelevant results that don't even contain my specific search terms, so you're definitely not the only one!
I think they're all scared of having to simply say "we couldn't find anything that matches what you specifically asked for... or was even close".
I agree. It seems that the problem is that they're trying to be too smart, and their heuristics are "fuzzing up" the search results.
If I'm searching for X, I generally want to search for X, and not things that may be vaguely related. I can't cull out unwanted results as easily by tweaking the keywords, I find.
I find Amazon really irritating for that. I do a search for a very specific thing, and a ton of results always come back, often having nothing to do with my search request. And sponsored results both at the top and scattered through the results.
For example, for google.com, you can typically make only around 300 requests per day, and if you reach this limit, you will see a CAPTCHA instead of search results.
300 is pretty easy to achieve if you're "Googling hard enough" (make 5 slightly different queries, go through the 20 pages of results it's willing to show you, repeat 3 times...), and I've seen it trigger far before that if you are searching for more obscure things. It seems almost hostile to those searching for IC part numbers, specific and very exact phrases, and just "non mainstream" content in general.
How sad it is then, that we are told and have internalised the notion that we should use search engines like Google to find things, and yet it prevents us from "trying too hard" to find what we're looking for...
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