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.
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 certainly do not want that! I want to search through the web as it is, not as some search engine imagines I would prefer it to be, based on its inevitably limited understanding of my preferences.
Smart systems which sometimes work and sometimes don't are vastly more frustrating than dumb systems which do exactly what they're told, every time.
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".
It gives me nausea. Anyway, it's not that helpful, either. I don't want to be distracted by "A", "Ar", "Arc*" etc. results when I search for "Archaeology" , because, supposedly, I know what I'm searching for.
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.
Unfortunately search engines have learned to, well, basically ignore user input.
Amazon is the worst.
I used "" and + and - for terms to get what I want, and its search engine still gives you the sponsored results and an endless list of matches based on what you might buy instead of what you searched for.
The results are so comically bad for anything that isn’t an exact match that I think they are just random.
It’s such a great site. I don’t know how its search is so awful. Letterboxd users joke about its search awfulness. I think the developers must just be punking us. Really.
I do like being able to search the web with regex.
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