allintext:
I know that the small net isn't really
a place that's friendly to big tech,
but this is a post about Google. We
all have to use it sometimes.
It seems that search efficacy has
degraded dramatically over the past 20
years. I find it more and more
difficult to locate sites on the
internet. Google seems to ignore the
focus of my searches in order to
provide me with advertising. I
frequently try several search
engines[1], often just to avoid
Google, and still don't find the
material for which I've been
searching. Personal, non-commercial
sites are especially difficult to
find.
Then, this morning, as a result of a
post on the Hacker News[2], I went
looking for search operators that
still work. I found this page:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
Buried well down the page is the
operator "allintext:" (without the
quotation marks). It's a piece of
search magic that forces Google to
comb the body text of a page (and
nothing else, apparently) for all of
your terms, as if you put AND between
each term and added, "and I mean it
this time!"
Preface your searches with it and
you'll suddenly find that Google works
again, returning results that come a
lot closer to what you hoped to find.
[1] duckduckstart.com provides
duckduckgo and startpage
functionality. It's worth a look.
[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083783
