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Comment by pushingbits | Hacker News Reader

I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.

I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.

Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search recently, but have yet to start using it.

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Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)

Here's one: python list popleft

Third result is: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html

6th result is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4426663/how-do-i-remove-t...

Neither one of those contains "popleft".

I don't know - if I had to guess what the query 'python list popleft' meant, it would be 'how to pop the leftmost element from a list', even though the answer does not contain the word 'popleft'.

Try putting quotes around popleft in your query. That works in this case to get rid of the results that don't specifically include the word.

In this case it does, but very often doesn't. It seems to me that this happens mostly with rapidly changing websites, as if the cache showed a somewhat later state than when it was indexed.

And this has been an annoyance since years.

I know what you mean.

These days, I've been searching for things about Flask with Heroku. So I tend to search for something like "python flask heroku sqlite", and often times, I get results that are not specific to Flask. (NB: I don't know if this example works but you get the idea)

I hear a lot of people say that google search results are worse than they used to be - personally I have a hard time telling. What's interesting, though, is that nobody is doing search better, which suggests that it a very tough problem to solve, and even with all the resources Google has, they aren't doing it as good as it could be.

So my question is - what is google doing wrong?

Has their search algorithm become worse?

Has the web become more complex?

Have people just become lazy and feel like they should never have to dig beyond the first 10 results to find what they're looking for?

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