google provides qualitative answers. what would be really neat was a search engine that provides quantitative answers or raw data.

i'd like to be able to search google for "all the pages that contain a particular javascript snippet", for example. obviously, google has that data. obviously, they dont want to make it available.

there are services that offer such things but they suck because their datasets are way too small.

on google specifically: the results pages dont matter anymore. nobody clicks anything but the "#1 results" if they click even that. for questions, google very often responds with something like a quora question or some widget of its own, or something else that is really useful - and if its not useful, you try another query instead of clicking through the results pages.

results pages are mostly kept for nostalgia it seems.