Google Search URL Request Parameters (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Google Search URL Request Parameters (2016)

stenevang.wordpress.com

79 pointslayer819 comments

It’s kind of sad to see all the crossed out items that no longer work. It’d be really nice if there was some sort of official interface to them besides trying to massage the natural language parser into what you want…

I can totally see why. It's a lot of work maintaining these sorts of features, and sometimes they're made irrelevant in one way or another by some other feature.

There's also a good reason not to document them too well, since documenting them is a weak promise that they'll stay around and keep working the same.

i mean, is it that much work for a Google with its 100k developers? its not about upkeeping features, which are still there, its just about not breaking routing

100k developers isn't near enough to simultaneously maintain these features while keeping up the rate of new messaging apps per year that need to be created.

These days, Google search makes me feel old and confused.

The default now seems to be to ignore any search term it deems irrelevant. Whatever process is used to drop words from the query almost always drops the most important and significant words I have entered. Then it returns results that have nothing to do with my search.

It's just baffling.

The problem with almost any smart computer system is that the smarter it gets, the harder it becomes to understand why it behaves as it does.

This in combination with the well-known design obstacle of having a text box as a the entire user interface making it so that you can't really communicate how to use it... well, it makes for a frustrating experience.

It's a pretty deep-seated UX problem I'm not sure if there are any good answers to.

Google still has an Advanced Search page [0]. It used to be linked from the main page until around 2018 [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/advanced_search

[1] https://uxdesign.cc/google-how-the-biggest-search-engines-ho...

Maybe you just notice the times where it doesn’t work well but it usually does work well but you don’t notice? Like bad CGI

And if you do need to re-add it back, you can just “quote” the word

That doesn’t always work, sometimes you need the verbatim option in addition.

I honestly haven’t ever had it not work for me

If I quote enough words I get the Internet’s garbage

>The default now seems to be to ignore any search term it deems irrelevant.

Could be worse, think of YouTube's search: ignores your query if it doesn't belong to the most popular videos on the platform, gives you irrelevant results from entirely unrelated videos with seldom any relation with what you were searching for, and goes as far as listing every few results 3-4 "you might also like" videos that have nothing to do with what you were looking for, at all, and are just whatever is trending (often actual scams usually related to crypto and unmoderated). I have no idea what twisted company culture fosters this sort of product development, but clearly search, what the company had become a synonymous for, has been tarnished beyond recognition.

The most useful one for me, that I use by default, is tbs=li:1 for verbatim search. (I suspect the "li" stands for "literal".)

Checking verbatim in the UI has done next to nothing for me for years.

One of the main reasons I don't use Google anymore.

Happened a couple of times on Kagi too (ok, they don't have verbatim I think but take doublequotes equally seriously), but when it happened, freediver personally showed up in the bug report and the name of the person who reported it got in the relevant release notes when it was fixed.

I wish google/YouTube would shut down all of their open redirects. The level abuse there is insane.

Why is this comment downvoted? This is a legit concern. I don't want to Google/Youtube to track anything I clicked upon.

I wrote a script to clean Google search url and keep only q param https://github.com/tandav/blog/blob/master/posts/clean_googl...

would have been better as a chrome extension

Or a bookmarklet!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/ This works well. Also working on Google searches.

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