Google's Advanced search used to be a great tool, until around 2007/08. For some reason it never received an upgrade and several things are broken or don't work any more or were removed (e.g. '+' which is now a keyword for Google+, the '"' does mean the same; e.g some filetypes are blocked, some show only a few results).
But then, so has the www that the original Google worked so well for.
I suspect original Google would be horrible on today's web.
I miss 1998 and I mourn for what could have been.
Certainly feels like content is migrating to the walled gardens and there are fewer and fewer personal websites injecting edges into the open graph.
“This is going to bite them big time in the end, because Google got large by indexing the Geocities-style web, where everybody did have their own web page on a very distributed set of web hosts. What Google is doing is only contributing to the centralization of the Web, the conversion of the Web into Facebook, which will, in turn, kill Google, since they then will have nothing to index.
They sort of saw this coming, but their idea of a fix was Google+ – trying to make sure that they were the ones on top. I think they are still hoping for this, which is why they won’t allow a decentralized web by using SRV records in HTTP/2.”
("term1" and "term2") not ("term3" or "term4")
and whatever tiny "power user" features that google had, like "allinsite:term term term" or '+' don't seem to work at all now.
Google is not optimized for finding things. Google is optimized for ad views and clicks.
I don't see how altavista is superior here
I think I know what they were talking about. A lot of times it appears that adding advanced terms to a query will change the estimated number of results yet all the top hits will be exactly the same. Also, punctuation seems to be largely ignored, e.g. searching "etc apt sources list" and "/etc/apt/sources.list" both give me the exact same results. Putting the filename in quotes also gives the same results as before.
Searching for specific error messages with more than a few key words or a filename is usually a nightmare.
So at least 11 years ago it was blocked.
(I didn't know about spoofing a user agent back then, so it might not have been as easy as that to get around it.)
Care to say more? I'm not asking about specifics (but won't mind reading about them either), I'm just curious about the type of information. Internal documents of corporations? .mil? Something else?
It's not rocket science - go to Google.com, type "[some keyword] filetype:doc" (or pds, or xls, whatever), skip to page 10 or so, then start looking. I had to click just twice before I found (5 minutes ago) meeting minutes from some British council meeting, marked 'confidential and not for distribution', complete with names and dates/times. Go to your 'private files' folder on your machine (you know, where you store your job applications, that invitation you made once for your sister's birthday party, that sort of junk), look at the documents you'd least want somebody else to see, identify some keywords that are in those documents but not usually in others, use those as keywords in Google.
Here's a fun one: "site:gallery.mailchimp.com filetype:pdf coupon". Nothing shocking, but I still don't think Mailchimp's customers expect their email list attachments to show up like this... (disclaimer: pure speculation, maybe these are meant to be publicly available, or maybe they're not even real customers and just test data, I read it for the articles, etc.)