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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

I felt really weird the day I realized I don't use Google to "google" anymore.

I use DuckDuckGo, when it fails I'll fall back to Google, but even then it's getting to be pretty useless compared to how it was.

For example, I recently wanted to find a reference for an obscure quote that included the word "squaring" but all the search results from Google were for "square". So frustrating.

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You can put "squaring" in quotations and then google will search exactly for "squaring".

I've had mixed results using their modifiers. Remember when you used to be able to do something like -something and it would filter those out? Hasn't worked for me in months.

DDG failed every single technical search for me. I was putting !g to get google every time. It was at that point I realized Google really still doesn't have competitors in this field. Any search engine can bring up common stuff, say articles about the current election or celebrities, but all the others I've tried with technical content (not just software based) bring up pretty bad results.

Yeah that matches my experience, but Google's gotten much worse in the last 3~5 years in my experience, while DDG has slightly improved.

can you remember the query you tried?

No, but "squaring bucky fuller quote" just now showed the problem.

and what is the correct answer?

Never did find it. In one of his books he points out that associating the second power with the area of a square (as opposed to some other base shape, like a triangle or circle) is a choice we make.

Consider triangles (hallucinate the bases):

    Side  Area

     1 /\ 1


       /\
    2 /\/\ 4


       /\
    3 /\/\ 9
     /\/\/\

it wasn't hard to find once i read your explanation

https://books.google.com/books?id=03fSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=bu...

First of all: THANK YOU THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! It's been years, over a decade. This is awesome. Thank you.

What did you do to find it? (Is Google "punishing" me? My Google-fu used to be strong but I could not find this.)

Sure :) You mentioned it was in a book, so the first thing I did was go to books.google.com; after that, I just typed in some keywords that seemed right - you can see them at the top, I searched for [buckminster fuller triangle squaring power]

Thank you. :)

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