Temporary solution to Google Verbatim search | Hacker News Reader

Temporary solution to Google Verbatim search

codestruggle.blogspot.com

15 pointselectrichead10 comments

I wonder how well his site works in less-than-modern browsers - doing "curl http://codestruggle.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-verbatim-sea..., for instance, returns no actual readable content. (I wonder how well it would work with Instapaper?)

Works on links (you have to click through to non-js version); but links is a modern web browser.

I'm guessing he/his host is using mod-security and blocking curl; or something similar.

Nope, I grabbed the source and made sure all links pointed to http:// etc etc, and it loaded the page fine.

The dependence on javascript to load your resources seems dumb in this instance. Whatever happened to being able to degrade gracefully? With noscript, his page would be completely blank.

This is due to the latest iteration of Blogger. Newer and/or updated templates apparently (I haven't looked into the details) require Javascript.

Ironically, I first encountered this on an official Google (i.e. Google news/PR -- I forget which one) blog hosted on Blogger. At that time, the Blogger updates were just launching, and no one had included a "click for a non-dynamic version of this page" notification/alternative. So, you clicked on the link to the blog entry, and you got a white, "empty" view portal.

I viewed source and used that to hack around to the final destination address of the blog entry (which displayed fine, despite the supposed Javascript dependency). I even bitched about it on here -- the blog link, whatever it was, was posted on HN. Who knows, maybe someone from Google saw that and got a clue. (Yeah, a bit of sarcasm, there -- meant to be humorous; I'm not necessarily the sharpest tool in the shed, myself.)

Now if only verbatim search entirely worked. On a search of [["everything wrong" crossfade]] verbatim cuts the number of results somewhat but they're still mostly bogus results that only contain the phrase "everything's wrong".

Very helpful, thanks...

In Chrome I also have the language set to English with "hl=en" (since it always seems to want to hand me German results instaed). Adding the verbatim search flag resulted in the following search engine string for me, FWIW.

https://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSu...

something's screwy with blogger. in firefox 3.6.23, i get nothing at all on any of your pages--just blank white--unless i add `?v=0` to the URLs (something i figured out by trying in IE7, which advised me that

> Dynamic Views in Blogger require the use of a modern browser, and are not currently supported on mobile devices.

which is a dumb error message, as it looks at first glance like it's assuming i'm on a mobile.

Anyone know how to do this in Chrome? The field to alter the search parameters is disabled

Update: I just removed the old entry and added a new one.

I use gooverbatim, a userscript that adds a "Yes Really" button to search results. You don't get verbatim all the time, but have an easy way to get them if Google guesses wrong. It installs in Chrome like an extension. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/118203

Reply on news.ycombinator.com