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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type.

And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.

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> I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.

Yup: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

> And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me.

It's often inaccurate too. I've had a lot of issues with menus, hours, and phone numbers being completely incorrect when searching for businesses.

The one that really bothered me was when I needed to change flights and the reported number for an airline was just some fake support line scam.

It's possible in Chrome and Firefox (and I assume other browsers, though can't say for sure) to add search shortcuts for other websites. If I know I want the wikipedia link, rather than searching google for the thing, I type "wp <thing>", and it takes me either directly to the wikipedia page, or to the search results. I think the default is the domain followed by a space, so "wikipedia.org <thing>", but that can be changed.

If you have DuckDuckGo in your browser search bar, then you get their bang functionality automatically, which replicates this. E.g. "bicycle !w" searches wikipedia. Includes !so (stackoverflow), !g (google), !yt (youtube), !a (amazon), !twitter, !reddit, many others.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

this has always befuddled me. why use google at all to search a specific site rather than searching on the site directly? why give google the traffic? because lazy/convenience of google being the default page for new browsers and/or google the default search associated with the location bar?

Most importantly, searching through Google generally gets me to my intended destination faster than loading some site and doing a search. Like you say, the URL bar in any browser I use also defaults to searching in the default search engine, so if it's Google, it's faster just to type it in there. So, from a new tab, I can just type in "wiki handball" to find the wikipedia page for handball and click to get what I want faster, instead of going to wikipedia.org, waiting for that page to load and then searching for handball and clicking.

DDG has the bang searches though, so typing in !wiki handball is faster still.

!w handball is enough (or !wde for the German version, !wes for Spanish, etc.)

Unfortunately on some sites even generic google search (not limited to that site) is better than on-site search...

Because search is hard. Most domain sites search titles and descriptions of articles for keywords. Google will index the entire page and be able to provide more and better ordered results.

Or use to. Now the quality and quantity of results forces site owners to implement their own search or use third parties.

This is still the case for plenty of websites. Searching google with "site:example.com search terms" often still gives better results than using a site's own search tool.

Mediawiki's search sucks.

For whatever reason, this feature is not actively promoted in Firefox (or Chrome). If you add a bookmark in Firefox, one of the fields that shows up is "Tags" which is sort of uninteresting. Then you have to go into your Bookmarks toolbar and find the bookmark you added to get to keywords so you can add a shortcut (my Wikipedia shortcut is just `w`). Then of course switch your search term with %s if you have a search shortcut vs just a shortcut to a particular page.

Chrome has an even more complicated way to hide this, although I don't regularly use it so I don't remember what the process was.

I agree that Firefox's method is a bit unintuitive, but Chrome's is dead simple. Settings > Manage Search Engines, and then just modify the ones it probably added automatically to have useful keywords.

Apparently it's bad UX to just tell you "we couldn't find any matches". You might leave the site and actually go elsewhere.

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