I used this quite frequently but since Google “”““improved””“” it last year (there was a popular HN post complaining about this) it doesn’t work anymore. Search for a domain name with quotation marks for example just recombines the contents of the domain and returns a bunch of unrelated content completely cluttering what I am looking for. Until last year it used to return no search results if there weren’t any exact matches, which is the whole point.
Does someone have a work around for this phenomenal Google decision?
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Duckduckgo is probably even worse for this. For example, you can’t filter words with by putting “-” before it. You can find years worth of forum posts begging for the feature.
I committed to using ddg for a few years, but after realizing that I was using bangs for anything but the most trivial searches, I had to be honest with myself and just give up on it.
Oh shit… After looking it up it’s gotten worse since I quit: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/04/24/duckduckgo-disables-most-search-filters-from-search/
Dang I did notice it was pretty flakey with the “-”
What’s not Google and better than ddg?
I wish I knew