Anima Mundi felled by Google Search

July 16, 2024 3:49 AM

What are your hacks, habits, tricks, or spells to conquer the fact that Google search is garbage?

Consider these as generally known:

-adding Reddit, Metafilter, any Metafilter subdomain, major news source e.g. WaPo

-selecting 'forums' or 'all' or 'images' (etc) from results

-removing (-) company names, other nouns, or products from results

-adding +".edu"

Context/example: I was trying to search on anima mundi; I'd never heard the term, and then sat there picking my way through garbage.

What else you got? What are you go-tos? I must know.

posted by A Terrible Llama to Computers & Internet (21 answers total)

Honestly, for a simple search like this ("simple" in the sense that you just want to read the definition) I would go straight to Wikipedia. Here's the Wikipedia entry for anima mundi.

Also: if you look at a list of Google search results, look just under the search bar and you see a row of words: "All", "Images", "Shopping", "Videos".... find the one for "Web" and click on that, and it will give you search results just found on the web, which will cut out a good deal of the cruft.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:01 AM on July 16 [4 favorites]

the real answer is to not just rely on google and try other engines, but a couple of things on google:

1) double quote your search term, then after the page of results is presented, to the right of "All" "Images" etc. there is link for "Tools", hit that and there is an "all results" link which is a dropdown which has an option for "verbatim" select that.

2) in the vein of "-removing (-) company names, other nouns, or products from results" start your search broad with as few search terms as you think will reasonably get you where you want to go and then just progressively whittle down by removing not just nouns but entire sites using the "-site:" operator, note you can also use * to wildcard for sites like, say pinterest which have different urls for different countries. An example image search.
posted by juv3nal at 4:09 AM on July 16 [5 favorites]

Context/example: I was trying to search on anima mundi; I'd never heard the term, and then sat there picking my way through garbage.

Double quote the phrase, as mentioned above. And then take a quick look at the initial results and add more targeted keywords. For example if you're looking for the original concept of "world's soul" but notice a lot of results about brand names using the term, then add relevant words like "soul", "world", "philosophy", and so on.

And yes, for just looking up a concept wikipedia is often the best place to start. If you're on desktop Firefox you can even define a search keyword so you can just go there straight from the address bar. (Go to Wikipedia, right click in the "Search Wikipedia" field, hit "Add a keyword for this search" and type something in the Keyword field. For example, if you pick "w" as a keyword, then from now on you can just go to the address bar and type "w anima mundi" to go straight to the wikipedia article about that.)

there is link for "Tools", hit that and there is an "all results" link which is a dropdown which has an option for "verbatim" .

Wow, I never noticed that! Thank you!
posted by trig at 4:25 AM on July 16

Response by poster: ("simple" in the sense that you just want to read the definition) I would go straight to Wikipedia. Here's the Wikipedia entry for anima mundi.

Oh, sorry, should have said consider that one given too. I did; it's not long, and wikipedia is so wikipedia. I wanted a deeper dive from someone who just thought it was interesting, not trying to sell me something or give the definition.

So Wikipedia and online dictionaries: those are 'given' already also.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 4:46 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Gotcha. For the deeper-dive stuff - I'd actually still suggest Wikipedia, but use the "Bibliography" and "Further reading" sections. You may not get direct links from Wikipedia (the "Further reading" link goes to an "unauthorized" page), but if you use the title of that link as a search term on Google, then that brings you to some other options for accessing that PDF, or reviews of that PDF; one of them is here.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:00 AM on July 16

In this particular case, my first thought is

(1) What's at the public library?
(2) What's at the university library?

Searching the relevant library catalogs (admittedly, the public library doesn't turn up much) leaves me thinking: this might be an area where if I want a deep dive, I'm actually going to have to get into the scholarly literature.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is my go-to for quick intros to philosophical topics, and it looks like a good starting point, although there's no entry for anima mundi.

At this point, I'm thinking I might just need a book. WorldCat is a good option, if a little fiddly, but any good university catalog is likely to be a good resource. (Even if you don't have access to a university library, you should be able to get an interlibrary loan if you have access to a public library.) And WorldCat gets me to World soul - anima mundi : on the origins and fortunes of a fundamental idea.
posted by Jeanne at 5:40 AM on July 16 [3 favorites]

Maybe go straight to Google Books or Google Scholar for snippets and sometimes whole sources that can orient you to the kinds of deep dives that might be available. Or add site:wordpress.com or site:blogspot.com if you're looking for things people have written up as a personal passion or hobby or something. I wouldn't pin this one on Google though, because the deep dives mentioned at Books / Scholar seem pretty open to let's say subjective mythologization the relevance of which I'm not able to judge either.
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:46 AM on July 16 [2 favorites]

I tried searching "anima mundi" and, yeah, the initial search brought up the Wikipedia article and a bunch of products and businesses. Not super helpful. So I tried "anima mundi world soul" and the results were better. Then I tried "anima mundi jung," "anima mundi scholarly articles," "anima mundi journal articles," "anima mundi essays," and "anima mundi encyclopedia" and got a variety of helpful looking results. I expect any of those searches would give you some reasonable starting points for a deeper dive.
posted by Redstart at 5:47 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

Similarly to what Redstart suggested, I try to imagine what type of source will contain the type of information I'm looking for and tailor my search to bring up results from that type of source.

If I just want a quick introduction to something, then Wikipedia is usually my first stop - unless I'm already aware of a reputable specialty encyclopedia for the topic. The Wikipedia article for "anima mundi" is enough to give me a basic definition, and although the article is noted as having a lot of issues, the notes themselves are helpful because it tells me some of what's missing.

My next stop would be a specialty encyclopedia, though for this concept that doesn't turn up an easy result; the impression I get from what I've seen so far is that this is a very broad, sprawling topic that covers many different traditions or beliefs--so not necessarily something that can necessarily be distilled down into a single story.

Still, someone may have tried, so my next stop would be Google Scholar. I'm not particularly interested in a deeper dive on this topic by some random blogger; I'd like to hear from someone who actually has some expertise in history, philosophy, etc. Searching "anima mundi" there, I bring up a lot of works that connect this idea to particular times or historical figures--particularly ancient Greece and Jung.

So that tells me that a "deeper dive" might have to get more specific, and from there I would narrow down what I want. I'm more interested in Greece, so I changed my search terms to "anima mundi greek philosophy" and got a slightly different list of results.

Note that this method does miss the book that Jeanne found. It might have shown up on the results eventually, but it didn't for me. If I was working on an academic project, or thought I was interested enough that I wanted to order books, I would also be looking at WorldCat.

Anyway, now I'm going to be reading "Anima Mundi: Or, An Historical Narration of the Heathens Opinion of Man's Soul after this Life" which is a deep dive by an interested person...
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:15 AM on July 16

I would go to Claude.ai. When I typed in the following prompt, I actually got a pretty decent, coherent summary. I know we're not supposed to put too much trust in AI, but I find that it can be useful.

"Tell me about the term 'anima mundi'. What does it mean, and what is its origin?"
posted by akk2014 at 6:30 AM on July 16

Use a university library website, search the term in their journals/articles database. Although you often won’t have access to the full materials, an abstract can give you ideas for additional search terms.

Here, for example, are the results from Rutgers
posted by CMcG at 6:31 AM on July 16

And furthermore, if you select an interesting article and it’s “open access,” navigate to that journal’s site and read the full article there. Here’s an example i selected from the results I linked to above.
posted by CMcG at 6:36 AM on July 16

I searched on "what is anima mundi" and got much better results than using only the term itself. So that's one more thing to try.
posted by Umami Dearest at 7:24 AM on July 16

I am surprised people are recommending using double-quoted search terms since that hasn’t worked on Google for some time (at least for me). The solution I found was a subscription to kagi.com, but paying for something that’s available, albeit in tattered and moldy form, is not something everyone is interested in. It does work the way Google used to back before it was ruined, though.

I tried your search, unquoted, in kagi and got a page of pretty useful results with only a couple of organizations. I think they have a free tier you can sign up for if you’d like to give it a spin.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 7:37 AM on July 16 [2 favorites]

Honestly, for a simple search like this ("simple" in the sense that you just want to read the definition) I would go straight to Wikipedia. Here's the Wikipedia entry for anima mundi.

Further to this, you can set up your browser to make this trivial from your address / search bar. In Firefox, I have the keyword "wp" set up to search for the following term within Wikipedia, and WP's search is pretty good for basic things like this. The feature is called smart keywords, and I think there are other ways to do this kind of targeted search from the address bar.

So, to be clear, you would have just typed "wp anima mundi" into your address bar, and that would have gone straight to Wikipedia search for that term. In this case, it goes to the actual WP page since one exists with that exact title.
posted by intermod at 8:32 AM on July 16

I have bookmarked udm14 and use that for search. Its a tool that strips out AI and other paid search results from Google, and just gives you what's left. Works surprisingly well.
posted by anastasiav at 8:44 AM on July 16 [5 favorites]

FWIW double-quoted searches do have an impact on Google that can be demonstrated by searching for anima blah mundi, "anima blah" mundi, and "anima blah" jung and finding there are plenty of results for anima blah mundi, 'No results found for "anima blah" mundi,' and two results for "anima blah" jung, illustrating both why it's worth quoting specific phrases and useful to add other terms that give Google a hint about a more specific topic.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:13 AM on July 16

Don't use Google for searching anymore, switched to DuckDuckGo which is generally better. However, sometimes the Duck gets weirdly hung up, only serving up the same money-grubbing SEO crap as Google. That's when I try that old stand-by, which sometimes works surprisingly well, these days: Lycos!

And these aren't the only options, there's many alternatives to Google out there now, for searching the web.
posted by Rash at 10:41 AM on July 16

Context/example: I was trying to search on anima mundi; I'd never heard the term, and then sat there picking my way through garbage.


Just tried this myself, first search result was a company with that name, tried again with "anima mundi definition" which brings up the Wikipedia page as the first result.

But I see from your update that isn't what you were looking for, it seems like you were seeking some sort of longer form writing from someone who had come across the topic and found it interesting? The sort of thing that used to be found on blogs, but is now all over from reddit to facebook to x? But you are probably wanting something that spends some time examining the concept like an essay, not just a quick mention of it, and if on a blog you are probably looking for something like blogs used to be, rather than the cut and paste SEO that a lot of blogs have these days, unless you are already looking for a specific person known for writing interesting blog posts.

The idea of how would you find this thing, but in a simple way that you can use with any given search term, this is a hard problem. As someone mentioned, the citations on wikipedia can be useful but for your particular example most of those citations are works by Plato. You are probably looking for something more recent I imagine.

It sounds like you aren't wanting serious academic analysis but instead the musings of an "ordinary person" who came across the idea and found it interesting, and maybe made a few observations or comments about it??? I guess you could use duckduckgo to search for the term with the word essay after it, but that is such a simple answer it is probably covered under your "givens". So it seems like an essay isn't what you are looking for either.

I kind of hate to suggest it because it seems on the surface like such a poor answer, but I think you might be looking for tumblr.
posted by yohko at 2:37 PM on July 16

The sort of thing that used to be found on blogs, but is now all over from reddit to facebook to x?

That's an interesting point that brings up another thing to play around with: using Google's custom date range selection (available from the Tools menu). I tried restricting search to results from 2005-2015 and got fewer hits about brand names and more about films, music, and books with that title. Adding "essay" did get more longform writing results.

Really, it turns out "anima mundi" is such a widely used phrase that it's not exactly wrong or bad that google returns results of all sorts, instead of 90% random musings from some blogger who thought it was interesting. Presumably a lot of people also search for the phrase looking for that thing they want to buy, or that movie or song they remember. It's true that there's a lot more SEO garbage these days, but there's just also a lot more content online in general, so the idea that a search will often take a few rounds of refinement - not to mention looking at results past the first page, or searching within some specific sites e.g. youtube or tumblr - is probably a good default expectation.

That said, Kagi apparently has "discussions" and "noncommercial" as search categories ("lens"), so if that's something you're frequently looking for then it might be worth trying out.
posted by trig at 3:05 PM on July 16

I've been creating web tools to get around Google's increasing issues for the last couple of years and making them freely available (no cost, no ads.) You might find my site SearchTweaks.com useful. It's a collection of 18 tools for better Google search, divided up into four categories: Query Builders (100% AI-Free), News-Related Search Tools, Time-Related Search Tools, and Search Utilities.

In the case of your search, "anima mundi", I would have started with the tool Wiki-Guided Google Search. WGGS takes your Wikipedia topic search and builds a set of Google / Google News queries around related topics. It does this by counting topic mentions across Wikipedia pages. Choosing "anima mundi" and setting my mention count to 3, I get the suggestion to add "Panpsychism"to my search, which does seem to lead me to more information-rich, less-crappy results.

If you're searching for something that doesn't have a Wikipedia page, you could try No Shop Sherlock, which simply tries to get rid of as much search crud as possible. So many businesses have adopted "Anima Mundi" as part of their name it's not very useful in this case, unfortunately.

I hope this is useful to you.
posted by ResearchBuzz at 4:54 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]