Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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"Programming became a lot easier when you could just type a question into Google and it would find that someone asked the same question in some forum or newsgroup."

Programming became easier with altavista, which was an excellent search engine that supported complex, boolean search operators and respected (((multiple) nested) "parens with quotes") ... and other such complexities.

Google dumbed this down and to this day is very difficult to accurately and precisely use.

There is no effective and consistent "expert mode" with google - even using the "expert" symbols and keys (like allinsite:) result in "related" and other useless results.

I miss altavista every single day.

> Google dumbed this down and to this day is very difficult to accurately and precisely use.

I'm not sure that this is so much AltaVista versus Google; I remember when Google first came on the scene (or when I first became aware of it?), I found its 'expert' options better than AltaVista's. They have, as you say, become much, much less effective over time, but it seems sadly plausible that the same would have happened to AltaVista. (It does seem that DDG is doing its best to fill in the "search for techies" gap that Google now leaves open, but I don't remember AV well enough to compare them.)

Of course google is trying to help ordinary perple - the sort who type a few words into the search box, get zero results, then add some more search terms assuming that being more specific will help the search engine find what they are looking for. So, default AND becomes default OR along with other 'improvements' but to the detriment of self-declared power users...

yep, google had a better indexing of the net and also had exact string search. Altavista only had exact string search (which was better than yahoo). Since then, google no longer reliably gives you exact string searches.

I've noticed Google is pretty good about finding exact matches when you put the search terms in quotes.

Used to be better.

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