Give me a fucking search engine

For those occasions there are a few little known tricks which come in handy. The simplest and most effective way to search for something specific is to use quote marks around a phrase or name to search for those exact words in that exact order. For instance, searching for Joe Bloggs will show results with both Joe and Bloggs but not necessarily placed sequentially. The exact or explicit phrase search is very useful for excluding more common but less relevant results. Default text searches find results with all the words of the query. By using the OR term you can search for one or another term, not just all the terms.

I didn't realize quite how bad it's become until I recently set up a small static site for a relatives two person business. They had no web presence and a very unique name. The site quickly became the first result for a search on the company name in Bing and DDG. On Google its on page 3, behind all the auto generated business directories filled with google ads. Google has picked up all the Schema. My conclusion is that Google now gathers information for internal use. But only wants to share that information when it gets paid for it with ad views.

Catch up on stories from the past week and beyond at the Slashdot story archive. It was only a couple days ago [archive. Use a web browser you have more control over, and which has more plug-ins that you can use for privacy, such as Firefox.

I love to test new web search engines. Every few months I try to use a new one for a few hours. Mostly just to check if finally someone made something that creates results that are equal or better than Google's. The first query I do is always my name. I know all pages I have written on and this is a nice hint on how the sites are rated on that engine.