RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
Is there any way to make Google return results for what I actually typed into the search box, rather than "improving" my query? I'm seriously sick of Google "correcting," "suggesting," "improving," and otherwise modifying my searches.
Verbatim Search doesn't cut it. It still does some stemming and seems to ignore punctuation. I want results for exactly what I typed into the search box -- misspellings, punctuation, and so forth included.
For example, I was just searching for a specific file named "brooklyn.php" for an old client. The "why" is a long story, but long story short, "brooklyn.php" is the name of a publicly-available Web page, but we don't know the current domain.
No problem, right? Wrong.
Even using Google's "Verbatim Search," and further enclosing the search term in quotes, Google still returns pages and pages of results (screenshot below) that are pure garbage because they are not the results for my query, but the results for what Google decided I must have really meant.
I am sick and tired of Google's "helping" me, damn it. I just want it to return the results for the exact query that I type in the box -- even if it makes no sense and has Google's servers scratching their virtual beards in bewilderment. I'd rather have no results than 164,000 wrong ones.
Is there some trick to doing this that I don't know? Or is unreasonable to expect a search engine to simply return the results for exactly what a human searches on?
Unreasonable or not, it's really getting mighty annoying.
Verbatim Search doesn't cut it. It still does some stemming and seems to ignore punctuation. I want results for exactly what I typed into the search box -- misspellings, punctuation, and so forth included.
For example, I was just searching for a specific file named "brooklyn.php" for an old client. The "why" is a long story, but long story short, "brooklyn.php" is the name of a publicly-available Web page, but we don't know the current domain.
No problem, right? Wrong.
Even using Google's "Verbatim Search," and further enclosing the search term in quotes, Google still returns pages and pages of results (screenshot below) that are pure garbage because they are not the results for my query, but the results for what Google decided I must have really meant.
I am sick and tired of Google's "helping" me, damn it. I just want it to return the results for the exact query that I type in the box -- even if it makes no sense and has Google's servers scratching their virtual beards in bewilderment. I'd rather have no results than 164,000 wrong ones.
Is there some trick to doing this that I don't know? Or is unreasonable to expect a search engine to simply return the results for exactly what a human searches on?
Unreasonable or not, it's really getting mighty annoying.