• droans@lemmy.world
    331·
    6 months ago

    I knew Google started ignoring double quotes for required text years ago, but I found out yesterday that it doesn’t even think “site:xyz.com” needs to be followed.

    I was researching something and saw some Reddit posts. Clicked below it to view results from Reddit and a third of them were other websites.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
      51·
      6 months ago

      Google has always respected my double quote and site: searches. Please share a screenshot of it borken, I looked online and don’t see examples. If you have the time for a silly little thing :)

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        6 months ago

        There are literally tens of thousands of examples of them ignoring any and all of their operators on Reddit and Google help. You can find them easily if you look.

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
          6·
          6 months ago

          The examples I’ve found fall into “caveat” territory.

          From the adware company blog:

          Fortunately, Google Search has a special operator for that: quotation marks. Put quotes around any word or phrase, such as [“wireless phone chargers”], and we’ll only show pages that contain those exact words or phrases.

          Caveats:

          Quoted searches may match content not readily visible on a page.

          Quoted terms may only appear in title links and URLs.

          Snippets might not show multiple quoted terms.

          Quoted searches don’t work for local results.

          I would be ticked if quotes didn’t work. My screenshots do show them working.

          An example of them appearing to ignore quotes came up. When they pull this, I can ignore the results below the error/red line:

          Further discussion:

          I can’t reproduce but I wanna! (Prolly not kids though)