29 Mar
2004
29 Mar
'04
4:34 a.m.
On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 19:00, Patrick wrote:
I found that spending a little time learning
Google's advanced search and
figuring out some of the special features documented here
http://www.google.com/help/index.html was worth the investment and I get
good results most of the time. I love the thing. --Patrick
For the most part it does a good job, but it does seem to have become
far less reliable at ranking pages over the last year than it used to
be.
Google can't do case sensitive searches, as far as I can tell, which
annoys the hell out of me. Sometimes I've needed to search for something
that's an acronym, which just happens to be a legal word too. There's no
way that I know of filtering out the junk and just searching for the
acronym in capitals.
Similarly, Google trying to be "helpful" can be a real pain, when it
goes and tries to be clever about finding results (returning not only
matches to what you searched for, but other things it considers close).
"Stemming" they seem to call it. Trouble is there seems to be no way of
turning it off...
A search engine that just returns what you ask for from the web would be
nice - no indexing of news, mailing lists etc, no ads, and no trying to
be intelligent by stripping out words, modifying words, randomly
inserting or removing punctuation etc.
cheers
Jules