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Comment by monkpit | Hacker News Reader

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years.

Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable.

I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.

Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.

Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).

Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.

I would agree with all of that.

Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.

reminds me of two things:

- the anthropic superbowl dig at chatgpt ads

"Anthropic's Super Bowl ad humorously criticized OpenAI's decision to introduce ads to ChatGPT, featuring a scenario where a man seeking advice is interrupted by an unexpected advertisement." - ddg search assist

- amish hackers: https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/

There's always this: https://kagi.com/

When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.

At least 2022, if not earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

The thread seems to be about the opposite problem. The OP can't find the page they're looking for because Google is too strict about whitespace, according to the top comment.

I think you missed "quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results."

2012-2014 ish. I had a job which often involved searching for specific part numbers, and at some point during that job quotes stopped giving me exact results. They’d give me something close but incorrect. Like “ABC123” would show me “ABC456”. The real part numbers in question were much longer, in the range of 20-30 chars, so sometimes it was hard to notice that the search had ignored my quotes at first.

They might have fixed it in more recent years, but to me that was when the tide started shifting in the mentality behind google search as a product/service

I tried to search right now "Xoodoo".

Google gave me more than 2 pages of results, while Bing gave me only 1 page.

After that, both Google and Bing provided countless pages full of results about Hoodoo, Voodoo, Zoodoo and the like.

The impossibility of making exact searches is what annoys me most in modern search engines.

I might make a typo sometimes, but I would prefer to correct myself when that happens, instead of the search engine always assuming that I am a moron that cannot type, thus offering every time "helpful" corrections.

I tried to repeat your experiment. I entered "xoodoo", surrounded by quotation marks into the Google search bar. I got 29 pages of results. From what I can tell by the previews, every result matches the string "xoodoo" and not any other similar string. Are you sure you are using the exact search functionality and not just typing the word into the search bar?

The turning point for me was when they changed the + sign first the "" because of their Google+ thing.

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