• @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and “phrases”

    • @gibmiser
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      309 months ago

      So wait, the search operators don’t work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?

      • @Carnelian
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        649 months ago

        They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless

        • @[email protected]
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          159 months ago

          And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.

          Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.

        • @tool
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          49 months ago

          They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

          I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.

          • @Carnelian
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            09 months ago

            To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?

            Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?

            Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system

      • Atemu
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        9 months ago

        They still work but they search the entire page, not just what’s visible in your browser. A search for "term" does not implicate you being able to find term on the results’ rendered pages.

        • Neato
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          139 months ago

          So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?

          • @[email protected]
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            9 months ago

            A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it’s difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there’s likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.

            It’s far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.

      • @[email protected]
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        79 months ago

        I think you can still use the operators if you select “verbatim” under “search tools.” On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc