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Comment by mirkules | Hacker News Reader

> search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter

To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?" The answer to such a simple question cannot be found in either DDG or Google because there are literally thousands of sites in this search that helpfully tell you how to grow tomatoes from seeds - the obvious search engine optimization to look for anything with "tomatoes", "seeds" and "grow" being definitely wrong in this case.

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What Google also loves to do is to show you results with a one term striked-out. The striked-out term happens to filter results the most so it's the most important one. Google decides to serve you more popular (and useless) search results.

They (Google) have a feature built-in to the search engine so that if you put all the terms you want to absolutely see in quotes, for example: "tomato seeds grow", it won't return results without any of those terms.

Note that it will only return results with pages that have those terms in that order.

if you wrap each word in quotes it works the intended way.

eg. "tomato" "seeds" "grow"

Another way to do this is start your search with "allintext:"

    allintext: tomato seeds grow

or +tomato +seeds +grow

There is the Verbatim search option for Google text search, which keeps me sane, but frustratingly there is no equivalent for Google Image search.

Quite often I'll search for an image of, say, a specific aircraft registration and be shown lots of other aeroplanes of the same type. Very clever, Google, but useless.

Unfortunately if you use verbatim you can't filter by date. That has been quite frustrating sometimes.

You might already be doing a lot of this, but using the special operators makes Google a lot more useful. Using quotes around text forces it to be included exactly as written and removes the "struck out words" issue the other comment on your post mentions. 'OR' logic is helpful as well, as is - (e.g. -Word) to exclude words.

The full list of operators is here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...

Or there's also advanced search: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890

DuckDuckGo has much the same set of operators.

In terms of how seeds end up inside fruits, Google found me this: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=640

To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?"

Does the query "seeds growing inside tomatoes" (without the quotes) give you any relevant results?

The quoted string returns just one unhelpful result for me.

Contrary to the GP comment, the unquoted string returns pretty much the exact answer to the 'question' as the top result:

https://uconnladybug.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/seeds-sproutin...

> hormone controlling the seed dormancy is exhausted or runs out, letting the seed grow in the moist environment inside the fruit. This warm, moist environment is perfect for germinating seed to grow. If the tomato was left uncut in the warm conditions, the new plant sprout would eventually poke through skin of the now decomposing tomato.

That link has nothing to do with the original question.

It's the answer

> the obvious search engine optimization to look for anything with "tomatoes", "seeds" and "grow" being definitely wrong in this case.

I'm going to side with google for once: you should be doing your search in multiple steps, acquiring more specialised vocabulary as you iterate on your searches. Starting from seed, you'll end up learning that they're fertilised eggs, which you'll use in your second query which'll start digging you into domain-specific academia where younll assimilate enough keywords to have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for in domain-appropriate terms

Just ask that exact question literally as if Google was a human being. That's the key to finding answers to more obscure questions. Use natural language.

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