generally "phrase" works well too
The permutation searches are tricky because you don't know if a lack of results means the email does not exist, or just hasn't been posted anywhere indexed
Will update and credit
i use to use these a lot but now it's just useless
https://www.google.nl/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...
(also: you'll want to remove the space between site: and news.ycombinator.com)
The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.
Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~.
I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and haven't found it to work in any logical way.
Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
Just now I had to give up trying to look up "the term for fans that are paid actors" and variations.
Asking on Reddit or Stack Overflow would be faster than Google's search engine for some things now.
It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it to let users to force a specific word to be present in a search result.
So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing another character, and it it is still not always respected.
Deprecate: "express disapproval of."
Depreciate: "diminish in value over a period of time."
I kind of cringe when other developers say "deprecated".
Edit: Versioning and not removing APIs is kind of the way to go, so you don't break client apps that possibly can't be updated easily or at all. "Depreciated" is a far better word to use with a far better outcome. AWS versions their APIs, they don't remove old ones. "I disapprove of using this API and we're taking it away at some random date" vs "this isn't the latest API, use the current one for new development" seems like a pretty stark difference in thinking to me. YMMV.
Same browser, different overloads.
Left the default search engine as Bing, but only because Duck Duck Go is useless for geographicly local search.
One day I actually DID need to find something local and so I dutifully typed my search into the FF url bar and hit enter. My default search is DDG but my brain stroked off for a second because the results that came back were 100% what I was looking for and I thought I was on Google. Give it a shot again, they're getting better.
I’d love to see an “anti-seo search engine” that eschews all results that are oriented around selling a product, but I don’t think it’s feasible to bring back the joy of finding a new online community/forum every day.
Google Search: (1) ask a natural language question (since actual search is hobbled) (2) get unrelated garbage and ads back (3) blame yourself for "not being technical enough" to understand why the results aren't actually garbage.
Google Search has deteriorated to the point that so far I haven't missed it at all.
TIL: No one knows why 'Dorking' is called 'Dorking', but there's a English Place Names Society which since the 1920's has researched the origins of town names in England, and is considered [0] to be "the established national body on the subject".
My Dad worked for Mullard, which was renamed to Philips Electronics and relocated to Dorking.
Another local here; 20 years in Horsham now Haywards Heath
Ahrefs has a pretty comprehensive list here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
So a search including all sites related to an entity, say Munich or python along with the terms the user is searching because a page might then not specifically include the entity in its keywords or the text on the site or have a different language or use a synonym.
I’m sure search engines consider this somewhat, but explicitly activating such a feature would be a great improvement for the user.
Stackexchange has this feature with tags (using []), with user curated tags. Would be nice to have in DDG or google.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
Do you believe you can get consistent results with any search?
For example, if we pick some uncommon search terms will we get the same results on the first search, the second search, the third, etc. Or will the results change?
I did a search with some terms from one of the comments in this thread, in quotes. The first search returned only one result: this thread.
As I searched the same quoted terms repeatedly along with additional terms, more results were returned that contained the exact string of original terms. Surprised by this, I tried a search with only the original terms, in quotes, once again. This time the search returned more than just the one result.
e.g. the search of another article "set up Google Sheets APIs (and treat Sheets like a database)"
turns up my site and a couple Twitter threads talking about it (plus a phishing site which has scraped and republished it). I presume that will stay the same b/c it's such a specific title phrase (but not because searches are necessarily deterministic)
For example, try searching the following string in quotes: "the SERP should stay the same".
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the%20SERP%20should%20sta...
Now, the logical presumption, assuming Google works as people say it does, is that each result will contain that exact string. If no results contain the string, then you should receive no results.
However, for me, results are returned. Did each of the results from that search contain this exact string? For me, they did not.
Even that list of search engines are reducing now.
The fact that they think you're "not human" when you use a search engine for its intended purpose and show how much you know how to use it is both disturbing and saddening. I wonder if Google's own employees run into it and/or the continuing degradation of results, or if they're somehow given immunity and a much better set of results...
I wonder how much of it is still valid after all this time.
Main reason being there's plenty data mining, e.g. looking for "powered by wordpress" and vulnerable versions, and generally all kinds of data mining that involve very specific requests for information, likely queries that aren't creating revenue, either.
Google should reinstate the + prefix operator. It was only taken out because it screwed up the search results for Google+, which is dead now.
You need to quote negative arithmetic values when searching, even if there are no other query parameters. It made me wonder if I was misremembering absolute zero.
Or it actually means using search operators beyond natural language entry? That's what this page seems to be about? I don't know why that would be called "dorking" either?
The web is slowly atrophying. Going back in time for originals makes a big difference.
Reverse is also true.
After a blow up the mass media will repeat the same thing on mass and swamp results.
Often an article in the last hour might have what you want, like the database link they are all talking about.
I sure do.
Then link to that index page somewhere where noone except web crawlers will notice it. Then wait a few weeks.
Now when you
a) sell something on eBay where you are not allowed to link to the product support page page or some other stupid restriction like that
b) want to promote something on Instagram where you can't link to it
Ask people to google for the search term. There will be only one result: Yours.
You can more or less replicate the functionality with intext:specific.url/subsite
Will update and credit you.
1) Great information!
2) It seems like the world could use a book like Joe Celko's "SQL For Smarties", but for search engines. Yes, there are such books already, most notably O'Reilly's "Google Hacks" by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch, Tara Calishain -- but I think the world could still use a book covering more search engines and search techniques. The above web page would be a great starting point to an endeavor like that.
3) "Dorking" (love that term!) -- is going into my 2020 vocabulary lexicon! <g>
I do miss some of Big G's cards, and their Maps is vastly superior to DDG's Apple Maps integration, even despite GMap's advertising. DDG's solution is wild, really: they use Apple for static-image-only maps with no real contextual interface, only a sidebar for search results. If you want directions, you must search for your destination by text alone, then in the sidebar choose to get directions from one of four providers (defaulting to Bing).
But when I just want an engine to match the text I give it (i.e. most of the time), DDG performs at least as well as Google's increasingly-fuzzy matching.
Remember Google Code Search, and Google (Usenet) Groups? Back then, Google cared about this stuff. Now they seem only to want to show you furniture ads, or get you to use their Zoom knockoff, etc.
These days Google substitutes the heck out of searches. Perhaps it's better if you've logged in, but I'd rather hack my leg off with a rusty saw than voluntarily log in to an account just to search the web.
1. the immense online/open-source nature of the profession: every blog/forum question and answer/documentation since the origin of the profession being in plain-text and mostly publicly accessible by default
2. and it all revolves around a precise, limited vocabulary.
github search has its own search operators:
https://docs.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-...
I've never wanted anything fancy:
- don't show me paid search results - show me a blank page if there are no results - make it easy to 'AND' terms (+include +search +terms) - most importantly: search for my damned search terms! If you want to "did you mean" my spelling, fine. I don't really care. But it's unacceptable to ever drop a search term.
I have plenty of other complaints about Google, but in terms of search quality, those are the relevant ones.
Perhaps a mini meet-up is in order? :)
The range operator also works great with years, dates, though the Tools menu with shortcuts for before: and after: operators can help there too.
One I haven't seen mentioned yet but used to be documented is that you can leave out words in a phrase by replacing them with an asterisk. I'm having trouble not italicizing text in this comment box, so pretend \* means a single asterisk: "Stocks rose today by \* percent" as a search matches the phrase "stocks rose today, led by a 4.4 percent". (Which until this post, had only one result on Google.)
Note that it's not 100% exact matching, because for actually exact matches you have to select "Verbatim" under Tools > All Results in the menu below the search box on the results page.
The only downside to using all these operators is that you'll get very familiar and frustrated with the Google reCAPTCHA prompts as your search is "too precise to be human". Even when signed in to Google, especially often in Safari on an iPhone. Sigh.
Oddly, this results in a non-italicized asterisk in the output, contrary to reports in earlier comments that the resulting asterisk would be in italics. There is, however, a zero-length italicized string right before the asterisk in the HTML:
"Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent".If there is such a page, can you give an example query that would trigger it?
Related:examplesite.com used to work well. Now, it's better to use sites like alternativeto.net.
~phrase is unnecessary because but google searches for synonyms by default
phrase1 + phrase2 - Google randomly ignores it. I use it this way +compulsoryTerm
Although rare, there are things I simply can't find using Google. But Bing would. If Google keeps it up, other search engines would benefit.
In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are searching for people because it does some facial recognition.
Google would rather people are trained to just type human speak into the search box.
i highly doubt that's a concern. Google's competitive advantage will not be eroded if they did have operators clearly documented. Another search engine could not replicate google's index, even if they could replicate the operators.
And most people do want to just type human speak and have the machine magically interpret it correctly.
It is quite obvious that google does not give a s&it whether I find what I think I want to find. Google is much more interested in 1) serving me ads they think are most profitable and 2) giving me results they think I want.
Ah, Google, always so reluctant to get rid of anything legacy because of their fanatical devotion to their existing user base.
The broader OSINT has used dorking for a decade plus (e.g. exploit-db.com goes back to 2003).
The goal in writing this was to democratize access beyond those who use it regularly for work
I'll try again though as your sibling comment suggests it's improved.
The ban seems to expire after a short time too.
Suppose I want to search for a textbook in an open directory. This query will get flagged almost immediately:
textbook -inurl:htm -inurl:html -inurl:asp intitle:"index of" +(epub|mobi|pdf|txt)
conspiracy related "terms" site:someforum.com before:2017-01-01
I got hit recently when the news about Tucker Carlson's racist writer came out. I set out to find the full threads in which the offending comments were made. Iterating through combinations of text, usernames, and urls like
"full text of offensive post" username before:date-news-broke -inurl:news
> a shitty search engine to the point of
> deserving being blocked is not one of them.
The reality is that all sorts of things are blocked now, including things that are perfectly legal.
> "Stocks rose today by <i></i>* percent".
Sounds like the matching is something like
/\<\*.*\*/
/\<\*[^*]*\*/
/\<\*.+*/Also interesting, related:bing.com gives me no results.
`No results found for "the SERP should stay the same".`
Then defaults to providing the SERP for the fallback query:
`Results for the SERP should stay the same (without quotes):`
That SERP should change when this HN thread is indexed though
But don't get too obscure. Otherwise, you'll discover that Google has dropped the information you require from its index because it's not new or trendy enough.
If we can get Taylor Swift interested in the old internet, then Google will suddenly snap back into usefulness.
I'm afraid it probably wouldn't be that interesting to HN'ers though, because this is where I found most of them.
Normal queries are tailored to your personal filter bubble. You can't see what other people see from same search, and if you're doing SEO or just trying to find who tends to come top in results for something you have a lot of history looking at, you can't tell who comes top for other people.
Verbatim searches are for those easy tasks when you know literally, exactly, what you’re looking for.
Something tells me that a lot of folks on HN are being let down by Google in this area. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I want to identify these issues to help everyone. I wish the UI of search wasn’t so textually-bound.
Is there such a thing as an augmented reality search engine? You search like you do at the library, or when you lost your keys. But for data and virtual objects, they lose out - their evanescence creates a perception gap. There is no correspondence with physical objects, etc. We are getting better with haptics, however.
Rainbows End[0] is a future society I’d choose to live in, especially right about now.
Anyone have any good book recommendations?
[0] Vernor Vinge
My earlier query triggered it. Without a query, I can make the following text show up by going to https://www.google.com/sorry/index which when a relevant query is attached to the URL, it shows a reCAPTCHA for the search query, and also shows your IP address, etc.
> About this page
> Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?
If you click the link "Why did this happen?" it says:
> This page appears when Google automatically detects requests coming from your computer network which appear to be in violation of the Terms of Service[1]. The block will expire shortly after those requests stop. In the meantime, solving the above CAPTCHA will let you continue to use our services.
> This traffic may have been sent by malicious software, a browser plug-in, or a script that sends automated requests. If you share your network connection, ask your administrator for help — a different computer using the same IP address may be responsible. Learn more[2]
> Sometimes you may be asked to solve the CAPTCHA if you are using advanced terms that robots are known to use, or sending requests very quickly.
[1]: https://www.google.com/policies/terms/ [2]: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640
The annoying part is that my account has never been whitelisted based on good behaviour. Instead, I end up seeing such reCAPTCHAs thousands of times a year, to the point where I stop counting them. Roughly half the time I'll answer the reCAPTCHA and the other half of the time, I'll close the tab and go do something else. Cloudflare site loading captchas are even worse, though. They delay the site by 5 seconds while they "check my browser", and then show an hCAPTCHA to solve, even when I'm already signed in with the first-party site. Very annoying, though the captcha is often easier to solve than Google's. The Cloudflare block often on streaming media websites. Ironically, Cloudflare's captchas have never prevented me from using commonly available Python scripts to watch streaming flash videos in VLC, they only block my web browsing...
I can only assume that Safari's excellent ad blocking and tracking prevention is causing my browsing traffic to stand out compared to others', enough that it prompts these CAPTCHAs more frequently.
But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
I just don't have a domain yet so I don't really want to go super public.
It is deprecated -- it's use is disapproved of, you should stop using it. In the future it will go away but for now it works, so you can use it, but its use is discouraged.
Depreciated doesn't make any sense -- the value of the deprecated API does not diminish over time. It works, until it stops working. It's on or off. It doesn't work less and less every month or anything. It currently still works completely, but is deprecated -- that is, discouraged. At some point in the future, it will stop working, completely.
the rest of us don't just kind of but REALLY cringe when people say "depreciate" when they mean "deprecate". They are different words, "deprecated" is the right one, it is intentional, it is the word.
Sorry, you are the one using the wrong word.
And that is absolutely the wrong way to approach API development. An API that is being sun-setted should never be removed, because older clients could still use it but sometimes can't be upgraded to newer clients. Removing a v1 API breaks those clients and it's a shitty thing to do to users. Yeah, people should be building NEW things with it, but there's no reason to look at the v1 API with "disgust" as "deprecated" implies - It's simply an older version that should remain functional, if your system is worth half a shit. AWS doesn't terminate older API versions, they just create new versions. Or you can be like Facebook and "deprecate" stuff and just shut it down before your official shutdown date, or not give any notice at all - that's REALLY a fun culture to work in, I guess, for them. "deprecated" is a really negative word, and doesn't even really translate to anything good in terms of software development. It's my opinion that "depreciated" is a far better word and far better outcome when used in software development instead of "deprecated". YMMV.
And I understand you disapprove of the word "deprecated" being used to refer to API that is discouraged, usually because it will be no longer supported/going away in the future.
But that doesn't change the history of the word. The word "deprecated" is what engineers have been using, intentionally, for several decades.
"Depreciated" is a mistaken variation. Even if you think "deprecated" has unfortunate connotations, it still doesn't make "depreciated" right. "Depreciated", as you said, means losing value over time. That is, 10% a year or something. Deprecated API does not "lose value over time".
The word "deprecated" has historically been used to mean that certain API (again, likely a method or function, I don't mean network api specifically) is now discouraged, it's use is disapproved of. Usually becuase it will be going away in the future. Arguments about whether this is the right way to do API change are entirely separate to this historical and current usage, where API change often IS done this way, and it's what the word is used for.
You can have opinions of how you'd like to people to handle API change over time, but that doesn't chagne the fact that "deprecated" is the word engineers have meant to use for decades. If you'd like to advocate for a differnet word and/or different practice you can -- but all "depreciated" has going for it is it sounds confusingly similar to "deprecated", it is not the word you are looking for.
> Not to be confused with Depreciation.
> In several fields, deprecation is the discouragement of use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice, typically because it has been superseded or is no longer considered efficient or safe, without completely removing it or prohibiting its use.
> It can also imply that a feature, design, or practice will be removed or discontinued entirely in the future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation
> In accountancy, depreciation refers to two aspects of the same concept: first, the actual decrease of fair value of an asset, such as the decrease in value of factory equipment each year as it is used and wears, and second, the allocation in accounting statements of the original cost of the assets to periods in which the assets are used (depreciation with the matching principle)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation
> In economics, depreciation is the gradual decrease in the economic value of the capital stock of a firm, nation or other entity, either through physical depreciation, obsolescence or changes in the demand for the services of the capital in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation_(economics)
Depreciation has nothing to do with what we're talking about, it's not the right word. Deprecation is the word that has been used for decades for API whose use is discouraged, often because it will not be supported in the future. You can argue that a new term is needed, but that's your argument not a historical usage, and there's no reason you need to limit yourselves to words that sound confusingly similar to "deprecation".
Typo corrected.
It means the feature still works, but will be removed in the future or is no longer supported. There also be may a new implementation of it that the developer would like you to use, hence the warning that it's deprecated.
Depreciation implies a rate of change over time, which isn't the case. Today we deprecate feature X, and in two years we plan remove it. It never depreciates.
Often though it’s used when the feature is already removed, i.e., it’s not only best practice not to use it, but also impossible with that version.
"Depreciated" is absolutely the wrong term, because it implies that the value is less, when the intent is to communicate "this is still fully functional, but you are warned away from it because it is targeted for future removal." Deprecated.
de == away
prek == ask
We tend to use the terms "déprécié" (~depreciated) or "déprécaté" (~deprecated but not valid French).
On the other hand, "deprecate" seems to also translate to "mark as obsolete" according to https://www.wordreference.com/enfr/deprecate
I guess both terms make sense but I would keep using "deprecated".
Technically, it doesn't have to be because it's going away, although that is common. I think it always means there's a better recommended way to do the thing, but sometimes the deprecated way doesn't go away.
2) If you were to always maintain backward compatibility, how is "depreciated" in any way an accurate term? If the old API continues to work indefinitely, its value stays the same.
If APIv3 has a `/foo` endpoint that is deprecated, usually I take that to mean that the developers discourage its use, and likely plan to remove it in a future version (say, APIv4 or APIv5). `/foo` will never be removed from APIv3, because that would be a breaking change, and so if I'm willing to stay on v3 forever, that's fine, but in the (likely) event I will want to take advantage of new features at some point in the future, I'm doing myself a disservice by using /foo because it will make the migration harder.
There is at least one case where I think "deprecated" is clearly, inarguably, the right word: when the developer wants to remove a part of an API (say, because it is a large maintenance burden), but it's also committed to stability, so they won't remove that api until some acceptably small number of users are using it.