Judith Butlerian Jihad: ME: So, you know what the quote marks mean? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: And you're going to search for all of these words? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: I don't want results on anything else. GOOGLE: Ok. ME: Good. What did you find? GOOGLE: lol i ignored all your words here's a fucking shower curtain lmao

ME: So, you know what the quote marks mean? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: And you're going to search for all of these words? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: I don't want results on anything else. GOOGLE: Ok. ME: Good. What did you find? GOOGLE: lol i ignored all your words here's a fucking shower curtain lmao

Basically, this!

As an information management graduate who likes Boolean searching and who used to love google for being good at it. It now winds me up daily.

Oh gods, that must be especially frustrating!

I miss the plus operator. It said "do not rephrase this, give me exactly that word."

And the minus. "Definitely not that."

Which they long ago decided shouldn't work on the shopping tab, because "screw what vendors you want to avoid; we're going to show them anyway."

"Do you like Temu? No? Well, how about you think about whether you'd like to like Temu."

And Pinterest. Getting Pinterest out of image searches is pulling teeth.

If you set the attributions to creative commons or any flavor of it, that usually gets rid of them. It also tanks most of your results though!

And being able to type a year and posts and articles from that year showed up.

Yessss.

@engnnglibrarian.bsky.social I don’t know what you’ve already got in your Google session, but this meme might be fun!

Oh - just realised this needs some Alt text - will write a bit later.

AltText added to this meme from The Good Place. It really is an excellent scene. In an all round excellent show.

Watching this show with my 13 and 20 year old. They love it so much. The other day, my youngest analyzed something from a deontological standpoint unprompted, and my jaw hit the floor.

Nothing strengthens my faith in a company like their own product making me feel like I leaned all their search operators for no fucking reason

TBH I'm still mad they nuked Boolean searches, and that happened ages ago now.

It was amazing when google was good

Real question but why is it doing this and ignoring quotation marks now????

I honestly have no idea, but it sucks. They genuinely decided to destroy their own basic functionality for no good reason.

Hey being able to show ads for some random product is an extremely good business reason. It's not like they can do that with your "extremely specific tech abbreviation", but if you ignore 4 out of 5 words in the request... voila!

Google Exec A: “I’m worried about products like ChatGPT eating into our core search business. What should we do?” Google Exec B: “Monetize the ever-living hell out of search to the extent that it becomes basically unusable!” Google Exec A: “I like the way you think…”

I used to have wicked google-fu. People would come to me to find stuff, just because I knew all the little tricks and junk for effective searching. And none of it works any more! They broke it all :(

SAME!! Argh, it’s so annoying!!

Ahhhh, so I'm not delusional, it really IS broken.

Both can be true. We all need a good delusion or two these days.

I’ve started using chat gtp as a search engine because Google has become a shopping app.

It's been doing ignoring them for YEARS with me. No matter how often I change settings. No matter how much I beg. I used to use my roommate's phone to do searches.

I searched yesterday for “harbor freight drawers” to find something that I’ve found before using those same terms. Only stuff from Uline showed up, so I added “-uline” and got… all uline still. Google has rendered itself useless now.

My favourite* thing about searches is when the first page is full of nothing but businesses trying to sell me tangentially related things. *may not actually be my favourite thing

It has been doing this for a while and I am infuriated every time!!

What was the point of learning all the shortcuts of you refuse to use them, Google?!?!

Exactly!! 🔥🔥🔥

Maybe -site:uline.com ...?

Also Google: I don't know if I have anything relating to that word you just googled, but here's a load of stuff relating to another word that has some of the same letters.

Just the other day I was trying to search and it force corrected a word even when I put quotes on it.

You can't search for anything any more. Yes, it insists on correcting whatever you're searching for to something more "popular".

You can type a website and search those still. Like Wikipedia.org then what you wanna find.

It's what you all get for having disrespected AltaVista.

Sponsored links are destroying the usability of the web. Jesus Christ it is impossible to find just about anything.

*6 months later* “Stop showing me ads for shower curtains!!!”

1. I remember when G accepted the boolean "+" instead of the wretched quote matks. 2. I remember, I think it was the old Yahoo search engine, which in advanced mode listed terms that showed up along with your search, and you could mark yes, no, or neutral and refine etc.

I miss yahoo.

OH MY GOD YES sorry not sorry for shouting because google is now failing to recognize my google-fu 😡

I remember when one could craft a perfect Google search. Oh, the year was 1778...

"I put quotes in quotation marks, as was the style at the time…"

One compound word: DuckDuckGo

Also ignores operators and is just Bing

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