Trying to find a search engine that actually just searches for what I type, and respects the modifying operators I use. Need to do a lot of exact searches, but Google gives shopping and does not respect search terms.
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1What modifying operators & search terms?– TetsujinCommented Dec 6, 2021 at 8:11
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Do you want to (A) build your own corpus, and install your own customized text-mining software, and build+host your own local search-index or (B) find a search engine built by others, that tracks the entire internet, and has certain search operators?– knbCommented Dec 10, 2021 at 10:06
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What. I'm just trying to find a search service that looks for only what I type in, like Google and Yahoo and most search engines used to be, rather than try to predict what I didn't want, and give me that.– StevoCommented Dec 20, 2021 at 5:50
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I share this desire. Sometimes I am trying to find something very specific, and the most salient feature I can think of is that the page I want will contain some exact literal text that can be found with ctrl-F, and/or will definitely not contain some other text. Modern search engines simply refuse to take such criteria seriously.– Karl KnechtelCommented Oct 11, 2022 at 18:46
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Two+ years later I have the same question. One answer said "A search engine cannot be completely deterministic: web pages are continually indexed". I am specifically looking for a book reference from the 1980's. Current search methodologies are biased towards current events. Scholars need a research tool like we had in "the good old days" (in double quotes :). Has any progress been made?– David McGinnessCommented Nov 3 at 6:15
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1 Answer
If you need to do exact searches, almost all search engines will do so if you put your search terms within double quotes, e.g. "search engine". They become more deterministic (or at least less reliant on personal data) if you use a private browser window, and a VPN may help too.
Otherwise, I'd recommend DuckDuckGo:
because there is no search history on DuckDuckGo, you escape the filter bubble of manipulated results.
A search engine cannot be completely deterministic: web pages are continually indexed, so if a new page is created (or linked to more often), which fits your query better than older results, search results will change.
answered Dec 9, 2021 at 9:54
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2This is wrong. You will notice that even in quotes these days, Google based searches often land up ignoring what is in the quote, adding an AI suggested match or AI ignoring it's existence. You will find it even giving options to include the quoted text. I was using Google when the AI took over, and it was the most horrible experience.– StevoCommented Dec 20, 2021 at 6:05
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1Even with DuckDuckGo in an incognito window, I have found that it is common to search for
foo "bar", examine the first page of results, and find that I cannot ctrl-Fbarin most of them. Similarly,foo -barwill show me lots of results withbar, even in the page title. (Not for the same values offooandbar, of course.) Even the help page says that it will show less bar in the results, not exclude it. I get that the Internet isn't static, but it should be trivial to get search results that are more literal than what current search engines do. Commented Oct 11, 2022 at 18:42