Comments on: Did You Mean

Question: Did You Mean

parallax7d — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:35:34 -0800

Google search was great, until now. Now it asks you "Did you mean this" and then populates the first two results with the term you didn't type, but Google thinks you MUST have meant, because they are smarter than you. So, what's a good search engine for someone who loves the old google search simplicity? (P.S. Live and Yahoo are far worse)

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:41:21 -0800

Yeah I wish there was a way to turn that off.

For everyone, always.

By: doteatop

doteatop — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:43:43 -0800

You can use a search engine like Duck Duck Go that syndicates BOSS and Google search results without all the same presentation and feature set. Or you can use the Google API to make one yourself.

By: CRM114

CRM114 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:49:25 -0800

Hotbot is still around.

By: heliotrope

heliotrope — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:18:13 -0800

You might try Cuil.

By: Faint of Butt

Faint of Butt — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:36:07 -0800

Ninja will do the trick for you.

By: Zed

Zed — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:36:24 -0800

If a greasemonkey script in Firefox made the 'did you mean' go away, would you use it and stick with Google? Or is it the principle of the thing?

By: neckro23

neckro23 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:43:44 -0800

Scroogle (Google frontend) omits all the crap and just gives you the results. As a bonus, they kill the server logs too.

By: aquafortis

aquafortis — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:53:40 -0800

Use a plus symbol, and you get exactly what you asked for. Example:

+"vitamin B3"
+niacinamide

By: parallax7d

parallax7d — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:17:10 -0800

neckro23, that's great. Full old school Google Search minus the cruft. Maybe someday Google will release Google Search Classic and get my ad sensing eyes back.

By: adipocere

adipocere — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:01:49 -0800

Google has been making suggestions for a long time. Recently, however, it's gotten to a new level of "are you stupid? 'cause I think you're stupid. Here's what you really mean, stupidhead." They started rolling that out in August 2008 as Google Suggest left Labs, but it's been getting turned up a bit more.

It's at the point now where not even '"transformer"' (note the nested quotes) will stop generating results for "transforming."

The URL you're looking for, to turn that feature off for a given search, is http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0.

Bonus Old School Round: Don't forget the * operator (within a couple of words). They stack, too: A * * B is within a few more words. However, A * B isn't the same thing as B * A, so if you're looking for a NEAR operator like back in the AltaVista days, you'll have to do (A * B OR B * A). That's about as close as you can get.

By: sergeant sandwich

sergeant sandwich — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:02:36 -0800

i use aquafortis' thing of putting a + in front of whatever term is being unfortunately smartified, and it works great.

By: parallax7d

parallax7d — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:37:03 -0800

great tips adipocere, thanks!