this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
37 points (100.0% liked)

Hacker News

4122 readers
2 users here now

This community serves to share top posts on Hacker News with the wider fediverse.

Rules0. Keep it legal

  1. Keep it civil and SFW
  2. Keep it safe for members of marginalised groups

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
37
Ask HN: How to do literal web searches after Google destroyed the “ ” feature? (derp.foo)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I used this quite frequently but since Google """"improved"""" it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn't work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren't any exact matches, which is the whole point.

Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?

There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

You could try kagi: https://kagi.com/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Erm, why is it so extremely expensive? $60 a year and I get 300 searches a month? If you are researching something for a project you might use 300 searches in a couple of days.

It’s a cool concept, but they charge a fortune and their privacy statements are basically, just trust us bro.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically search engines all cost money, but you paying with your personal data with Google vs dollars with Kagi. I've only been testing it a few weeks but I think it's worthwhile. Here's what they say about it: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I understand they cost money, but it really seems like an expensive service, I can understand high operating costs, but 1.5 cents a search is pretty high when you are searching stuff up like 25 times a day. It’s just so expensive when I can go with a non profit like ecosia and get a free search engine that also respects my privacy. And on top of that it plants trees. I imagine kagi has better results but I just can’t see it being worth it.