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Comment by JetSetWilly | Hacker News Reader

> A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has an area known as ‘Saint Helena Island’. For this reason it is best when using Google™ to append to your search ‘-napa -carolina -california’, which will remove many of these irrelevant results.

Not any more! Since google "enhanced" their search to remove such operators. I just tried searching in this way for eg some restaurants and there was indeed a bunch of irrelevant results even with the exclusions. I wonder what they do now.

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The operators work for me. I get different results with and without '-napa -carolina -california'.

Truly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"

Yeah they're not actually parsing your operators anymore. They're feeding the whole query to some machine learning model they trained and pulling "what you really meant" out of that.

It seems to me the map at the top ignores the minuses.

Do any regular web results show your - terms? I'm not seeing any in my testing.

Disclosure, I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

I also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.

I switched to Kagi and never looked back, it's like Google was before a decade of enshittification.

How curated and censored are the search results with Kagi? As someone involved with Tantra, for example, I rely on sites that are niche and not always SFW.

You can raise/pin the NSFW domains to curate the results yourself to what you'd generally prefer to see.

You could also set up a seperate NSFW lens based on what style of results you want.

Kagi uses the Google Search API. Its results are largely Google results.

Sure, but without the ad and SEO spam, it's a totally different experience. It's really a testament to how much damage Google has done to its own product in the name of monetization.

Depends where you live, for me in UK it brings up a) a location in uk, then the rest are about the island.

[Saint Helena Island] brings up only results about the island

When did Google do this?

At least five years ago. Drives me crazy.

It’s their M.O. Relentlessly cut “power user” features. Relentlessly undermine the user’s wishes and redirect the user to Google’s preferred results.

I don’t know why we continue to put up with it. Boiling frogs I guess.

Google used to be the best site to find illegal content. Probably that's why they removed those "power user" features.

The more direct their search the less opporunity to data mine, upsell you, or otherwise abuse your experience.

Because changing habits and routines costs energy and we don't like that.

I typed St Helena island which worked grest

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