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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience

The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared.

I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist

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> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.

I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)

Could you give an example of when it doesn't do what you ask? In my experience it always only makes it more specific when it's vague in the first place and never overrides what specificity you gave.

For example if I write `range`, it's extremely vague but one of the first results I get is Python. If I write range JavaScript obviously that'll be first.

You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`.

news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.

I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.)

When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share"

Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always

You have to click on the vertical ... button. It's a little hard to find on desktop, but on mobile it's very clear.

Okay, I worked it out – really confusing UI. The "Hide" option only appears on the vertical ... menu on certain screens, not others. The "Headlines" page displays it, so do "Sections" and "topic" pages, but not search results. I was trying to find it on a keyword search result page, which is why I couldn't find it anywhere.

Also, blocking a source hides it from "Headlines"/"Sections"/"Topic" pages, but not from keyword search results pages. You'll still get your blocked sources displayed in those. (Confusingly, when you search for "brexit", you can get back two different "Brexit" topic pages, which have the same title but different pictures, or you can get a keyword search results page, which behaves differently.)

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