Beyond the search results, it's becoming unusable in various other ways:
- Exact token searches (quoting, + prefix) are completely gone.
- Doesn't work properly until JS loads, leading to false starts.
- Screws with browser history so that often I cannot hit back to go to the results again, I land on the previous page before the search, and going forward goes to the result I clicked.
- 80% of the time I can't copy or save images on mobile. (This one is especially irksome).
- Shows nearly a full page grid of shopping results I don't care about if I search for any product. If I wanted shopping results I would use the shopping tab!
- Adds :~:#text= to URLs I click into, making sharing links I search up obnoxious.
It just goes on and on. These days I use Kagi, despite the friction/flakiness of the plugin on iOS.
Edit: looks like the newer 2.0 plugin just got updated a couple days ago to supposedly fix the lack of redirects. Seems to work so far! And now it redirects on any search engine site you allow the extension on, and doesn't on ones you don't, which is a fair bit nicer if a bit confusing to configure.
I didn't know they officially got rid of quoting for exact token searches. I was trying this the other day and i felt like it wasn't working but there was no way to know other than the fact I still wasn't getting results I wanted/expected.
I have also had the problem with my browser history and always blamed my device.
Maybe I was giving Google too much benefit-of-the-doubt.
exact token searches aren't gone? what are you talking about, I use them all the time and the results are clearly different than just putting a bunch of terms on their own
Comments
Beyond the search results, it's becoming unusable in various other ways:
- Exact token searches (quoting, + prefix) are completely gone.
- Doesn't work properly until JS loads, leading to false starts.
- Screws with browser history so that often I cannot hit back to go to the results again, I land on the previous page before the search, and going forward goes to the result I clicked.
- 80% of the time I can't copy or save images on mobile. (This one is especially irksome).
- Shows nearly a full page grid of shopping results I don't care about if I search for any product. If I wanted shopping results I would use the shopping tab!
- Adds :~:#text= to URLs I click into, making sharing links I search up obnoxious.
It just goes on and on. These days I use Kagi, despite the friction/flakiness of the plugin on iOS.
Edit: looks like the newer 2.0 plugin just got updated a couple days ago to supposedly fix the lack of redirects. Seems to work so far! And now it redirects on any search engine site you allow the extension on, and doesn't on ones you don't, which is a fair bit nicer if a bit confusing to configure.
I didn't know they officially got rid of quoting for exact token searches. I was trying this the other day and i felt like it wasn't working but there was no way to know other than the fact I still wasn't getting results I wanted/expected.
I have also had the problem with my browser history and always blamed my device.
Maybe I was giving Google too much benefit-of-the-doubt.
exact token searches aren't gone? what are you talking about, I use them all the time and the results are clearly different than just putting a bunch of terms on their own
Sure, they're different. But they aren't results that strictly only include the exact token or phrase.
I have many times searched for an exact phrase I know is in a result and could not find it on the first two pages of results.