Ask HN: Has Google killed the site: search operator? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has Google killed the site: search operator?

23 pointsTomte21 comments

Google seems to ignore (for example) site:ycombinator.com since today. Is that a common experience or just me?

My search quality went down hill over years and now I just pay for Kagi. It’s honestly a breath of fresh air.

Why do you like it more? I looked it up and it seems nice, but it's full of sales pitches and your comment could honestly be taken as viral marketing. Are there downsides? I'm willing to pay if it is legitimately that much better of a service but I'm not sure the example results are that great compared to Google and just checking sources and skipping ads

I paid for it for a month or so but thinking of going back now that Google is getting increasingly shittier.

I'll put it this way: It's not a lot better than 2013 Google, but it's looking a lot better than 2023 google. And this removal (just an A/B test for now, since it works fine in incognito mode) would make Google pretty much useless for me. I guess I didn't realize how bad the results have become until this option was taken from me.

Kagi is expensive for something that used to be free, but I wouldn't have to worry about core functionality being taken away to optimize their search results for ads, since there aren't any.

Sorry for the late reply! I am probably not the best to talk about all of Kagis features but the ability to customize search results and blocking domains has been amazing (Pinterest ugh). The lens feature is also great. During product research I toggle the builtin “forums” lens and exclusively get suggestions from forums which tend to be better than the abundance of paid marketing websites and much harder to find on regular search engines.

I am curious what sales ptiches is it full of?

My experience is that Google search is best effort with a priority on latency. Lots of changes in quality, but never a significant delay in getting something back (internet infrastructure issues aside).

So sometimes site: gets dropped on the floor for me and sometimes "no I really want this" does.

These days everything in Google search is sharded, cached, and partitioned (remember when a page full of results in another language was not uncommon?).

Good luck.

Another data point for the operator being ignored. Probably an unfortunate participant of an A/B experiment. But my search quality is close to the point of searching for alternatives.

Works for me using that exact same search param site:ycombinator.com

Did you try the subdomain “news”?

site:news.ycombinator.com

Also hn has search here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=search

Interestingly that works. Until the day before yesterday plain site:ycombinator.com also worked, but it stopped.

this works perfectly, thanks! this works for other websites as well. ie, it will ignore site:reddit.com for me but work fine with site:www.reddit.com. kind of an annoying A/B test, i'm not sure I see the point

It works for me at the first sight (I'm in central Europe).

I noticed it yesterday when I used it in conjunction with other terms, but when I removed the other terms it worked okay.

I wonder if the Verbatim option would help here.

I've had no luck with the verbatim option.

I tried it and it seemed to help.

It happened to me but only on mobile. And then it was restored.

I think they are A/B testing.

yeah, I use site: every day and this is the first day it is not working for me.

Seems to work just fine for me

I noticed this also.

Same here

where do you live?

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